Pre-millenial Tension

Last Spring, civilians and representatives from various agencies gathered to play a peculiar series of government-sponsored games. These were training exercises positing the occurrence of disaster, with scripted narratives that demanded real-time responses. For instance, suppose it's New Year's Day, 2000, and the Y2K bug has brought down the electrical grid. Fires have broken out, hazardous materials escaped, and people are injured and endangered. Within minutes, various government and volunteer disaster forces are supposed to be mobilised.

Certain participants set up a command centre and are fed simulated information, including carefully prescribed fake news broadcasts and fabricated calls from emergency 911 operators. Mid-level civil servants earnestly and congenially act out the scenarios with an acute consciousness of their civic duty. Out in the field, rescue workers rush to and fro amidst manufactured smoke, constructed debris and artfully bloodied and moaning victims. Civilian preparedness trainees, volunteers from the ranks of office workers, housewives, shop owners etc., don handsome green helmets and place the sham wounded in correct head to toe formation. Following their training, they mark victims' foreheads with the appropriate priority label (I for immediate, D for delayed, 'Dead' for dead), fulfiling the secular equivalent of Revelations' markings that separate the blessed from the damned. Here blossoms the sense of empowerment that knowledge and preparedness bring. Participants feel so potent, so helpful, yet they also enjoy the schadenfreude of being a relief worker, never needful of relief. Through the confusion, the excitement and the rush of adrenaline, participants have never felt so alive and vital, here in the womb of the simulacrum.

In the incessant buzz about Y2K and its role in the forthcoming collapse of civilisation, some people, not unlike you or me, have found the perfect confluence of personal neurosis and technological and cultural anxiety. Some of our neighbours and co-workers have taken it upon themselves to more than hand wring, and have read up on and trained for the coming apocalypse. It's the technological character of the Y2K problem that allows a coalescing of millennial hysteria along a wider social spectrum than would otherwise be possible. As a concrete, identifiable threat is given delirious coverage in the press, a mainstream segment gives itself permission to indulge its survivalist fantasies and dreams of self-sufficiency, thereby forging an odd affinity with the libertarians, militiamen, and back-woods survivalists that usually populate this territory.

Dovetailing with these paroxysms of private sector vigilance are the Y2K bulletins and disaster preparedness courses available through FEMA, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA emerged in the late 70s to manage local and national emergencies, and in the post cold-war era has moved to oversee disaster management, including Y2K preparedness. As in the exercise described above, FEMA excels at the detailed choreography of disaster, which is painstakingly dissected and made manageable through a step-by-step process. Civilian participants in FEMA programs become part of a culture of governmental preparedness, with buzzwords (like 'mitigation' and 'response'), and intricate chains of responsibility set within Byzantine layers of bureaucracy.

FEMA's disaster narratives are a curious purée of responsibility, paranoia and institutional optimism, propagated in its live exercises, training broadcasts, on-line video sessions (www.fema.gov/library/) and snail-mail correspondence courses. Among the surfeit of information centred around doomsday preparations are course offerings from 'Your Family Disaster Plan' to 'Hazardous Materials: A Citizen's Orientation'. Each is written and illustrated in inimitable government-ese, where a sense of one's own mortality arises more from tracking the deadly prose than from any anticipated catastrophe. Heroic labours of concentration yield such useful information as to which food supplies to lay in for the long haul and how to protect against financial loss (although if Armageddon does hit, who's likely to be too concerned about how their investments are doing?). There are also tips on how to purify, distil and store water, where to scrounge for it, how much of it should be consumed per day, and that one can skimp on food, but never on water. Read through enough of this material and you become prey to an almost irresistible urge to run out and buy a battery operated radio, a huge first aid kit and large quantities of assorted beans.

FEMA material relentlessly emphasises community and helpfulness. The world presented is rational, orderly and populated by sturdy and responsible people, all of whom always assist each other - a veritable bureaucratic Eden of helpfulness. It's questionable whether this making of the Utopian out of the dystopian is official optimism or a more ambitious Skinnerian exercise in behavioural conditioning. FEMA anticipates that 'an educated public is a strong public. And an educated public will always make the right decision', but also assures us that 'nobody has to shoulder the burden alone'. As FEMA folds private and public responsibility into each other, it also attempts to produce a culture that works together in crisis.

It does this by creating the impression that disasters are controllable, especially by FEMA: 'Y2K is much more than a technology issue. It is a leadership issue. It is a matter of will and judgement ... It is about awareness. It is about taking action. And it is still not too late.' A singular nationalist sensibility and pragmatism are at work at FEMA, where preparations are elaborated to the point of hallucination, with the expectation that the response juggernaut will be implacably set in motion once disaster hits. Entire volumes, such as How to Ask for Help, are dedicated to instruction on navigating the labyrinthine regulations and procedures involved in procuring government assistance. Panic is institutionalised and hysteria nipped in the bud by a prepared government and co-operative populous. Of course, there's something more than vaguely Stepfordian about the benevolently reasonable tone, alarmist yet sedately so, with which FEMA envisions the unimaginable.

The official line on Y2K is that while the government does 'not expect major catastrophic dislocations from Y2K, we should prudently plan for numerous small disruptions that could occur simultaneously across the country. We expect these potential disruptions to be localised, limited in scope, limited in duration'. As reassuring as these words are, I can't help but wonder if I should believe them. After all, FEMA is masterful in its command of official prose, with its reams and gigabytes of exemplars of understatement. Initially soporific, the strategy is effective mainly by virtue of avoiding the subject matter of all this verbiage, which is actual disaster. Even the photographs accompanying the texts emphasise aid, rather than fear, grief, suffering and damage to flesh, memory and property. In the substitute narrative proffered by FEMA, one concerned solely with preparation and response, true acknowledgement of vast destructive potential is foreclosed by masking it with the pretence/activity of dealing with it. It is the rehearsal rather than fact of the dreaded event which seems most salient in FEMA training, especially evident in the full scale disaster re-creation (recreation?) exercises. Pre-emptive internal preparation for the impending crisis replaces actual control over what is, by definition, uncontrollable: disaster.

FEMA and the assorted survivalists and millennialists with whom it joins in unlikely common cause all gird themselves against the anticipated ruin of a safe and predictable world. But hasn't this loss already occurred, in the very act of anticipation? The anxiety that attends this kind of preparation presupposes that one already lives in a world of loss. These people, maybe with cause, inhabit a dangerous world that might at any moment, but particularly at midnight heading into the next millennium, careen out of control. And perhaps the Y2K issue is simply the most plausible projection of disaster, a talisman against the millennial problem we're already having.