The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

A Gallup poll conducted in December of ’99 found that Y2K fears were paradoxically decreasing as the doomsday date grew closer. Bill Gates declared the glitch would only be an inconvenience, and that became the prevalent forecast. Most Y2K journalism, however, emphasized the handful of people who really, really believed the consequences would be devastating. An Associated Press story out of Detroit indicated that gun sales were surging. A company called Crown Point, which sold premade military-style meals for survivalists, claimed a 500 percent uptick in business. There was supposedly a spike in the sale of honey, a food that doesn’t require refrigeration and can be consumed in creative ways.[*] A Canadian named Bruce Beach, who’d built a nuclear fallout shelter north of Toronto by burying forty-two school buses underground in the early 1980s, announced that fifty people could join him in subterranean safety if everything collapsed into chaos. A common profile in countless regional newspapers would tell the story of some local citizen who’d built a backyard bunker, purchased a generator, and awaited the day when Earth would stand still. These alarmists were the fringe exceptions, but they were not exaggerations: In Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir Educated, the author describes her separatist father’s rapturous preparations for the impending secular apocalypse.