My Old Home Town Is Burning! (Updated with a suggestion)

The Fire Next Time

(UPDATE at end)

This Substack is called American Refugees for a reason.

Sheryl and I are American Refugees… from Los Angeles.

There are many of us and growing all over red states. I wrote a book about it with that title.

In our case, we didn’t leave because of the fires, although I had experienced several having lived in Malibu and watched the flames march down the Pacific Coast Highway to my house. It survived then, but burned to the ground the year after I left for a residence in town. (My next home also had problems: “Brushfire Over Sunset Strip Creates Havoc in West Hollywood”.)

That is why, when I learned this morning in the midst of the incredible carnage, that the absent mayor of the city, Karen Bass, off in Africa, had actually cut the fire-fighting budget and that, according to the man she had beaten for mayor, Rick Caruso, allowed the hydrants to be out of water, I shook my head.

But I didn’t shake it out of surprise. I shook it out of disgust. We already knew about the empty hydrants from a recent Santa Barbara fire, but apparently no one paid serious attention.

I agree with the actor James Woods who lost his house and has blamed the extent of the L. A. fires on “liberal idiots.”

It’s not just the City of Angels, of course. Those same idiots have destroyed virtually all of the most beautiful American cities all up and down the West Coast.

This doesn’t stop me from grieving for friends and family out there who are suffering from this devastation. They didn’t deserve this, not even slightly.

But I wonder—will they learn anything?

L. A. had become the world’s capital of moral narcissism and virtual signaling, that disconnect between one’s pronouncements and the results of those pronouncements that is wider than the San Andreas Fault.

Even in the midst of this, the L. A. police chief broadcast the same DEI palaver.

Woods again put it well, noting that refilling the reservoirs might have been a priority of hers in such a parched area while quoting the chief’s bio that exposes her real priorities that have nothing to do with fighting fires:

“Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley's priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the City of Los Angeles.”

If the citizens of the city weren’t so brainwashed, they wouldn’t be grateful. They’d be angry. When DEI becomes the focus of your fire fighters you have reached what only can be termed a civilizational low. What you want is big, husky guys who can heft heavy hoses or carry often obese people these days out of the flames. The Romans, no doubt, knew better.

Speaking of Rome, where is our supposed federal government in the midst of all this? Fiddling while it burns, as they did with storms in North Carolina and East Tennessee. Our vice president is off burning carbon from Singapore to Germany for no discernible reason other than pathetic personal self-aggrandisment while our putative president is making his new list of pardons and checking them twice, if he is capable of doing anything.

Given all that is going on, Donald Trump should have been declared president immediately after the election. The promised collegial transition has been anything but with one nasty little virtue signal after the other coming out. But more importantly, the new president is a much more capable manager. He actually is one. He would probably be out in L. A. by now, well ahead of their mayor.

No doubt there will be those who will soon be blaming the Southern California catastrophe on global warming. This too is idiotic—moral narcissism and virtue signaling gone berserk. As it happens, I have been reading Paul Johnson’s “History of the Jews” that details the contemporary documentation, other than the Bible, of The Flood. Natural disasters vastly beyond even these L. A. fires occurred several millenia before humanity industrialized.

In any case, we are where we are, a turning point of some sort that this conflagration oddly symbolizes.

To the first responders in L. A. and beyond working to put an end to this catastrophe, you are God’s people. Bless you. Keep up the good work.

UPDATE: The multi-million dollar homes and then some that aligned the ocean side of the Pacific Coast Highway before this conflagration—some of which I visited and envied while working in Hollywood— should not be rebuilt. That way people driving by would have a view of the beautiful Pacific heretofore restricted to the most often extremely wealthy owners. The public could also have unfettered use of and access to semi-private beaches that long have been bones of contention with setbacks, etc. The owners of the homes could be compensated and relocate where they wish, even to the hills directly above with their panoramic views if they are willing to risk another fire.