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kimberlysteele
The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 was published in 2016 and is a scathing satire of current events. The Mandibles is about one extended family's journey through the collapse of the American petrodollar and how they adjust (or do not manage to adjust) to reduced living circumstances. Various family members in the Mandible clan are counting on inherited wealth via the death of their old grandpa when the rug is pulled out from underneath the American economy in the fateful year 2029, 100 years later than the Great Crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression. The dollar, now worthless, is replaced by a currency called the bancor from which Americans are vengefully excluded. Inflation and money printing leads regular Americans down the garden path trod by Weimar Germans and millennial Argentinians.
In the second chapter of The Mandibles, Florence, the lower-middle class granddaughter of the Mandible clan is on the (video) phone with her well-to-do sister, Avery. In this conversation, we are introduced to Avery and her family. Florence, as we saw in Chapter 1, is a bit of a black sheep, having chosen to live in what Avery considers a slum with her common law husband, Esteban and a young son she had from a one night stand before she met Esteban named Will. Avery, of whom it is directly implied got the good looks in the family, is married to Lowell, a professor of economics at Georgetown. For those not in the know, Georgetown University is -- in real life and the novel -- a prestigious Boston school. Lowell is a tenured professor there, which means that Avery and their children have never worried about money or making ends meet a day in their lives. Avery speaks to Florence, who is doing the dishes, while reclining on her posh furniture in her beautifully-decorated living room. She gloats to herself about clearing out her collection of old books, smugly delighting in her virtual library and dismissing paper books as junk. We learn that she is a self-styled therapist with a coterie of clients, most of whom are elderly. Avery has three high school age kids: two sons named after search engines, nerdy Goog and Bing, and a promiscuous daughter, Savannah.
The women discuss their brother, Jarred, who has recently bought a small farm and named it the Citadel. Though neither of the sisters saw it coming, their brother, who until age 35 has lived at home and been a college dropout and general failure at life, has gone full doomsday prepper. They gawk at the idea of him doing subsistence farming in upstate New York, wondering how on earth he will ever manage it.
The subject of conversation changes to the US changing its country code to 2 before the area code, which is Shriver's subtle way of bringing the focus back to collapse. The US is no longer Number 1, and Avery quietly resents this symbolic alteration while Florence errs on the side of thinking it is a benevolent change. Meanwhile, upon learning that the spigots have been turned off in her neighborhood for an indefinite period of time called a "dry out", Florence sends Esteban and Will to get bottled water. Of course in Avery's elegant quarter of Boston, the taps never run dry.
Lowell arrives home, all but demanding Avery get off the phone with her sister. He worries aloud about news of the collapse of the dollar in Europe and the bond market doing sketchy stuff. He and Avery discuss Lowell's colleague at Georgetown, Vandermire, who has been predicting apocalyptic collapse for years and who seems perversely gleeful that it has finally arrived, despite being in a poor position to celebrate if collapse goes down.
He wakes up in the morning to go to work and there are ominous signs that Vandermire's lurid fantasies of collapse could be blooming into reality this time, and that collapse seems to be directly gunning for him and his family.
---
I feel like we have all worried our entire lives about the collapse that many of us see as baked into the cake, where the tremendous debts that have been racked up by the American government come home to roost. We have all been taught to live provisionally in some way, and only elites like Avery and her family have been able to relax all this time while enjoying the best life has to offer. Yet it's not Avery's level of money or comfort I envy; it's the privilege of never worrying about what on earth you're going to do if the car breaks or the furnace peters out. For I like to tell myself a tale that if I had the amount of wealth Avery and Lowell possess in the novel, I would spend it more wisely. I suppose I have been somewhat wise, far more like Florence. Yes, spoiler alert, Avery and her posh family are about to be taken down several notches, both where economics and pride are concerned.
Though I don't own my home outright like Florence, it is the smallest, cheapest mortgage on the block because the house is teeny-tiny and old. Like Florence, the neighborhood is decidedly lower middle class. We bought the house in such a state of extreme disrepair (it was the only mortgage for which we could qualify) that it would not be livable if my husband was not hyper-competent at all things building. That said, I don't see myself as doing "great" in a true catastrophic collapse, nor would I want to if all my neighbors were suffering more than I was.
The contrast between the way Avery lives compared to her sister Florence is glaring, yet Florence does not seem unhappy. Avery is happy as well, but her happiness is smugness, a fragile state that could topple like a house of cards at any time. In one telling paragraph, we begin to see the chinks in Avery's armor as she rants to Florence about a certain type of doomer thinking that pisses her off:
"But I see the same thing in my elderly clients all the time. They have different obsessions, of course, we're about to run out of water, or run out of food, or run out of energy. The economy's on the brink of disaster and their 401(k)s will turn into pumpkins. But in truth they're afraid of dying. And because when you die, the world dies, too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It's a failure of imagination, in a way -- an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That's why old people get apocalyptic: they're facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real. So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there's almost a spitefulness, sometimes, I wear, for some of those bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn't a fear but a fantasy. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can't have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one. They want to take everything with them--down to the olives and the toothpicks. But actually, everything's fine. Life, and civilization, and the United States, are all going to go on and on , and that's really what they can't stand."How much do you personally think about collapse, and have you centered your life around the possibility of collapse? Has this caused problems in your life? What wins do you think you might have achieved from prepping, if any?
What will you do if it real collapse happens and you are thrust into Weimar Germany conditions? What if that never happens? What will you do if the US or whatever country you are in goes on like the proverbial blister in the sun?
no subject
Date: 2026-05-26 08:19 pm (UTC)Yeah, then Savannah might have ended up on OnlyFans or something like that even without the American economy collapsing.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-27 02:09 am (UTC)Real collapse
Date: 2026-05-27 04:30 am (UTC)I’d say we’ve been gracefully”collapsing now” for the past two decades.
I don’t think the collapse is gonna be easy, but we have prepped enough to manage well enough.
This is also a rural area, and people know how to defend themselves if needed; many of us are hunters and military veterans. Although I’d say the community has pulled together well during two winter power outages which lasted two weeks in recent years and have been more cooperative than contentious.
I am a little concerned about desperate people who haven’t bothered to get skills and supplies who may decide to steal, but I’ve also been blessing daily and practicing banishment as well.
We in our community will likely do well enough.
Annette
Re: Real collapse
Date: 2026-05-27 03:28 pm (UTC)I think someone in an overlarge house all by themselves will be at the most risk. For instance, the family of 4-5 in a 6 bedroom house. It is always the "nice", new cars that get jacked. When I had my Scion, I honestly used to leave it open most of the time. I know it was risky, but a little dent here and there and some chipped paint is its own special kind of armor against thieves.
I don't know how my neighbors and I would do in a collapse. I know that one set of (owning) neighbors would be there for us, but the neighborhood itself is mostly full of renters who don't know each other from Adam.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-27 04:20 pm (UTC)I think the book excerpt you included gets right to the heart of the problem- people, maybe particularly aging Boomers, are afraid to die, and that fear gets narcissistically projected onto virtually everything. Now, I won’t kid myself. Transitioning to another dimension is kind of a daunting prospect so naturally there’s gonna be some fear involved. But this is not unlike the anticipatory fear of, say, moving to another state or country where you will have to adjust to a new culture and way of life. A bit fearful, yes, but it’s exciting and actually fun if you think about it.
Truth is the older I get the more I’m aware of how very little I can see or sense of the universe around me. We do indeed see through a glass darkly. And I’m saying this as somebody who experienced a dramatic kundalini awakening in my teens which permanently opened my higher senses. Ironically perhaps, this made me even more aware of how much the material world can occlude our perceptions.
I do think that it’s wrong to actively desire death, but to accept it when it comes and to look forward to the challenges that a discarnate existence will present ….. that’s another story.
My poor brother and sister Boomers, so locked into their blinding secularism and materialism which carried them through their younger years and now anchors them in fear and trembling ….. what can we do for them?
Btw, another great essay, Kimberly, thanks.
best,
Will M