Alternet - Without the savvy to live off the land that we associate with survivalists, how are the one-percenters supposed to get through the apocalypse? It’s tough to envision the well-heeled skinning deer to feed their Wall Street dinner party guests. But now the elite have another option. Instead of handing the future to bearded crackpots building sandbag barricades on rural compounds, the rich can score a luxury underground Survival Condo nice enough to remind them of the one they left in Manhattan.
Built in two underground missile bunkers at an undisclosed location in Kansas, the units run from $1.5 to $.4.5 million and typically can’t be financed—so that sum’s got to be paid up front. But if you do have a few million lying around, a piece of these fortified underground silos can be yours. So far, there’s no shortage of takers. The first silo is reportedly sold out, and the second is currently accepting contracts.
It would likely take a serious cataclysm to drive posh coasties to the Kansan underworld, and you can’t sell these things without also selling fear. In fact, the project’s website includes a photo of a colorless DC skyline ravaged by an implied nuclear holocaust, complete with a bombed-out capitol building. (Another page includes an illustration of the Statue of Liberty nearly submerged by stormy seas, with nary an ape in sight.)
But project manager Larry Hall rejects the notion that these units are for tinfoil hat types: “There is a stereotype of some survivalists as being single-minded—that they spend virtually all of their time doing just survival activities with no other activities,” he wrote to me in an email. This survivalist subculture is indeed fixated, as any viewer of A&E’s hit reality series “Doomsday Preppers” would attest. But Hall says those aren’t his customers. “We are not like that. Most of our clients are professional people who run businesses and have diversified interests. The involvement in the survival condo project is a recognition that there are a lot of potential threats that could disrupt their normal lives, and they want to have a plan for that possibility.”
2 comments:
HA HA, We're coming to get you, no matter how deep you dig, or travel in your new down escalators. You will be excavated to the point of remorseless pain, and your money will be shredded and force-fed down your gaping throats. That, my friends, is the message for Kansas silo buyers. One way or another, they shall be found out and appropriately "dealt with".
Those buyers sound a lot like the nitwits lampooned in Witch Miss Seeton. In the book, a group of dull-witted greedheads are conned into believing that the end of the world is at hand and they've been selected to be the elite group of survivors.
So they take all their valuables with them into the bunker where they're assured they'll ride out the apocalypse, it never crossing their tiny minds that their kind of valuables would have no value after, if the world were really ending.
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