Disco Inferno

Republicans dance on the embers of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is burning and the fires feel like prelude. I’m not in the prognosticating business, but the last couple weeks have painted some suggestive pictures in our collective crystal ball. Cybertrucks are exploding without any assistance from Elon Musk, people are getting mowed down in the Big Easy, Tinseltown is turning to ash. Yet all of it feels like the world’s worst hors d'oeuvres.

If you think you’re full now, just wait.

Though I only lived in Hollywood for a brief period at century’s end, I have probably spent more time there than any city besides New York. It’s a city I have never loved, and never will, for all the reasons people do not love LA, but so many of those I love have made it their home. And, once again, their city is ablaze.

And, once again, half of our political population denies its ultimate cause.

What’s it going to take? How much money will we need to spend on Republican politicians to get them to suddenly believe in climate change? Whatever the price, the oil companies will just spend a dollar more, I suppose.

At this point, though, I don’t even think it’s about the money. I think it’s about something more insidious. I think it’s about an inability to admit error and course correct. Too much of the modern Republican identity is enwrapped with climate denialism, which is adjacent to vaccine skepticism, which carries over to anti-trans stuff, which is mixed up with anti-LGB stuff, which contains many colorful shades of anti-feminism stuff, which relates, of course, to anti-abortion stuff, which is fully enmeshed with their controlling-women-stuff, which lives right next door to their racist stuff, which has always been a ruse to get their supporters to dismantle their own safety nets so that the plutocrats can pay less in taxes, which is all they ever wanted in the first place because they claim to worship a Christian God but the only god they really love is money, which gets us right back to climate denialism. For people who pretend not to believe in climate science, they sure spend a lot of their own little eco-system.

Photo by David Swanson, AFP

It's grotesque and, right now, it’s killing a major American city. My daughter is home in Savannah at the moment, but LA is the city where she attends college and I’m not sending her back there this weekend to poison her lungs with ash and the charred detritus of other people’s lives. Those of us who were in New York right after 9/11 still remember the acrid smell lingering over the city for weeks, depositing the first seeds of cancer in those trying to help. It was the putrid scent of another kind of denialism, but that’s not the point today.

Today, I’m angry at a different kind of terrorist, the one currently threatening sovereign nations with economic destruction and military invasion. That person is blaming the LA fires, for no reason, on California’s governor. That terrorist is about to retake the White House and pull us out of our climate agreements. I’m using the word “terrorist” without irony here. When threats are your go-to diplomatic tool to achieve your political (and financial) aims and you happen to control the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, you’re a terrorist, dawg.

As I was writing the above words, Martha came into the room to tell me that Scott Jennings on CNN was blaming DEI for the fires. Why? Because why the fuck not, that’s why. Martha tried to explain to me how maybe the California Forestry Management Service could maybe improve on some things, but the Santa Ana winds are relentless and all it takes is a spark so to blame it on DEI… and I stopped her because I am a man and men interrupt women, but more to the point, even refuting Jennings’ argument was to give it credence. Even to spend a moment contemplating that bullshit as anything other than bullshit was an insult to both of us. People’s homes are burning and that pasty chucklehead want to blame inclusion.

Got it.

As I said, I was in Los Angeles on the eve of the new millennium. Martha and I attended a small party, much smaller than what I envisioned for myself when I was a kid calculating how old I would be when the big odometer turned over to 2000. The weather that night was, of course, warm, and we were somewhat subdued waiting for Y2K to destroy us all, or not. It didn’t, because a Democratic administration took the threat seriously. I remember bidding a fond farewell to the bloodiest century in human history and hoping that the new one, a century with democracy ascendant following the collapse of the Soviet Union, would bring more peace, stability, and progress.

As I said, I’m not in the prognostication business.

Los Angeles is burning and the fires feel like prelude. The arsonist-elect is throwing more matches on a fire already out of control and, in response, his party cannot help but compliment their emperor on his attire. It’s repellant. But that’s where we are. Worse, that’s who we are.