I once worked with a psychology professor whose husband was a survivalist. He had assembled an arsenal in their basement and built a reinforced concrete bomb-shelter in their backyard. In the event of nuclear war, engineered plague, or civil collapse, his plan was to get the family into the shelter for a year or two, and come out to a new and cleansed and uncrowded world.
If my colleague had any problem teaching abnormal psychology classes and then going home to sort the .223 ammunition from the freeze-dried food packets, she never let on about it. Her husband, however, began to have problems once the shelter was finished and stocked and the chemical toilet was charged.
The Russians refused to launch a nuclear attack. Anthrax and smallpox did not come floating down from a thousand crop-dusters. Evil artificial intelligences did not take over the world. The price of gold went down and down and down. Eventually, he got restless and irritable and demanded that the family move to a more secure location, one "off the grid," as he called it.
So now I don't know where they are, but I assume they're doing their best to anticipate and control the terror that every new day brings. I hope they have solar power and a hot spring and an earthquake-and-radiation-proof house in a little empty valley in Alaska that you can only get to through a secret cave.
My colleague and her husband came to mind recently when I found a number of articles on the Web about Dick Cheney's investments. It appears that Cheney has put $10 million to $25 million into inflation-proof bonds and other tens of millions into foreign-currency-backed bond funds. Apparently, he's expecting a radical devaluation of the dollar.
Such a devaluation would show up in our local economy as hyper-inflation, and it's logical to assume that we're in for it, especially since the guns-and-butter policy of the Vietnam War so clearly set off the inflation of the '70s. The costs of the current war in Iraq are exponentially larger than those of Vietnam. Combine the resulting debt with a war-related decline in world oil production, and it's likely that some of us will be sitting at the bar in the Pioneer in 10 years, drinking corn-derived automobile fuel and moaning that we could have bought a whole house in Sun Valley in 2007 for a few million bucks.
Looking further into my cloudy crystal ball, I can see a future Cheney emerging from one of the "secure locations" that he's hustled off to whenever there's a crisis. He's been underground in Dubai for a decade or so, and he's looking pale, puffy, and grub-like. But he's smiling.
Why? The rest of the world is pure economic devastation. In America, people are feeding bundles of Ben Franklins into their wood stoves to keep warm. Giant Toyota pickup trucks are being used as front-yard planters by people who can't buy gas for them. People are bartering Krugerrands for cabbage.
But Cheney's got all his wealth in dirhams, the currency of Dubai. Backed by oil, it's the only money in the world that's worth anything. And he's going to his beachfront mansion on the Persian Gulf, the one built on hydraulic pilings that go higher whenever the oil-slicked sea rises another foot. In a year or two, when things finally settle out in America and Asia and Europe, he's looking forward to traveling out to a new and cleansed and uncrowded world.
I'm not an expert on abnormal psychology, but I am fascinated by the minds of survivalists. They seem to be throwbacks to the Pleistocene, when only the hyper-vigilant and ruthless survived, and when, if you climbed over a glacier into a new, uninhabited valley, the game was plentiful and dumb and the berries were thick on the bushes. In a world where the U.N. projects 9.2 billion people by 2050, it's hard not to think that survivalists live in a hellish present and are seeing an even more hellish future. It's hard not to think they are desperately imagining a world where their genes can breathe free.
It's also hard not to think that they're nuts. This world no longer has empty unclaimed valleys. To envision a survivalist paradise, you have to secretly hope that lots of people will die. When you're a house-husband pouring concrete in the backyard, that's a mildly worrisome delusion. But when you're a wealthy war-starting vice president with a pudgy finger on the nuclear trigger, it's a death-dealing psychosis.
