In two weeks that feel like a decade, everything and nothing changes

There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen, as I think some dead Russian philosopher once said. We’ve gotten a lot of those decade-weeks in the first three decades of the 21st century in the U.S. 9/11. Katrina. The first two weeks to flatten the curve. Natural disasters and mass violence that, to catalog them all, would exceed my word count. A politician antithetical to your very sense of identity and values assuming office, if you are inclined to subscribe to the literature or phone texts from one of the nation’s two major political parties.

We just had a few of those decade-weeks here in the Los Angeles area. For so many decades, the first week of the Rose Bowl and Rose Parade, occurring just an errant ember’s hop from the Eaton Fire, has very much looked the same, football and flowers under perfect skies creating a priceless real estate advertisement. And then the week after, one of those decade-weeks when everything happened, the serpent and the wind we’ve named after him collecting the rent due on our own little Garden of Eden, if you are inclined to subscribe to the literature from one of the subsets of the world’s two major religious frameworks.

The fire was just as cruel and unforgiving to “tony Palisades” (so often used as a descriptor one almost hoped all of this suffering was being unleashed only on the world’s softest gangster) as to diverse, funky and creative Altadena. At least Mother Nature at her worst is an egalitarian, you have to give her that.

For everybody else, we brought back facemasks (mostly only worn outdoors), “go bag” inventories, and people from all over the country checking in on the safety of those they knew in the area, well-meaning, but conflating the illusion that all of Los Angeles was on fire with all of Los Angeles actually being on fire. Imagining that you could lose everything is not as bad as the poor souls who actually did lose everything, but it’s no picnic or Rose Parade all the same. The region has to deal not only with the residual (for a lack of a better or less overused term) trauma, but the long-term health, infrastructure and economic effects this disaster will have well beyond even the fires’ perimeters.

It was a “good” decade-week for the book sales of Mike Davis and Joan Didion, oft-cited chroniclers of our cyclical fires, and cyclical inability to control them, since time immemorial (or least since 1889’s Santiago Canyon Fire, which, until seven years ago, was the state’s largest recorded wildfire). Many have compared the destruction to the bombing during a war, but maybe the movie monster Godzilla is the only reasonable, if fantastical, comparison, with history showing again and again how nature points out the folly of man.

Speaking of the folly of man, Mother Nature and her fire may not discriminate, but people and their policies often do, and in the social media age, everybody is a policy expert in all varieties of horror, from infectious diseases to natural disaster management. But what policy can manage the unbearable lightness of being, the unbearable lightness of possessing, the unbearable lightness of housing, the unbearable lightness of retaining the things we connect to family and memory? Policy is perhaps the wrong place to look for such answers.

Inevitably, it is our nature to seek answers and resolution from the unexplainable, though, to not accept the mystery by not accepting it and clinging to belief, and during the L.A. fires, the social media algos promoted the most “engaging” conspiracy theories, as they have a tendency to do. If we’re lucky, Polymarket might even create a betting pool on the favorite imagined cause of the fire, whether it’s Russia, China, Iran, eco-terrorists, antifa, neofascists, property developers, some Noah Cross-like water baron, perverted arsonists, or the Mystery Tramp.

As of this writing, the alleged and probable causes of the two major fires are so mundane as to be incomprehensible and a little insulting to those online fantasists: rekindled burn scars from fireworks (an increasingly popular, dangerous and stupid regional hobby) in Palisades and power lines sparking in Eaton. Mix in generational hurricane-force winds that make these fires the worst kind of moving target, while also preventing any sort of necessary air cover, and it’s a familiar tale far removed from the imaginations of the conspiracist class.

Just as with 9/11 and Osama bin Laden’s determination to strike in the U.S., or Katrina with failed levees and poor FEMA response, and the other disasters where we demand some sort of cause, explanation or grand unifying theory, there will surely be a time to investigate who allowed what to happen, but the focus should be on containing the current fires, quickly responding to any fires that emerge with the recurrence of Santa Ana winds until we finally have some moisture in the region, and helping victims at least start the process of trying to be remade whole. It is a credit to all the firefighters inside California, and those outside the state who have come here to help, that no subsequent spot fire has come anywhere close to the acreage of Palisades or Eaton. The hurricane-force winds not recurring at the same level as the previous decade-week also certainly helps.

But why hold off on the social media inquisition? The fires were not even zero percent contained when the alternating finger-pointing and defensive-crouching began. Donald Trump Truthsocialing at Gavin Newsom, Newsom tweeting/xeeting at Trump, developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso attacking the current mayor Karen Bass in front of any camera that would let him. That this all started a couple decade-weeks out from the beginning of an old/new administration that can re-establish deep ideological fissures by victim-blaming the largest blue state must be purely coincidental.

And so on.

In the last decade, many have argued about stress tests for democracy, but the region, state and country now face a stress test for the basic acknowledgement, responsibility, and competency of government. While we should hold government accountable if it falls short, or if it somehow exacerbated the resulting misery beforehand, we should actually allow it the time and chance to manage the situation first while we are still technically in an emergency state. Everything else is merely an unhelpful distraction.

The country’s Outrage-Industrial Complex has become such a finely tuned machine that it can obfuscate almost any basic problem or solution with the prefab political narrative of one’s choosing. For something that requires such unity of purpose, fragmented political narratives and conspiracy outraced even the wildfires. We may be facing a new and frightening era where our problems continue to outpace the sum of our ability to grasp the reality of what we’re up against, let alone solve them, especially when we’re locked into the zero-sum gamification of dunking on “the other side,” aided and abetted by those with political axes to grind, or ulterior motives, and their supporting algorithms.

Sometime in spring, the fires may perhaps be just a sad memory for everyone except those who are on the long road to putting their lives back together. It rains, the brush grows, the brush dries, the brush burns, the brush regrows only so that it can burn again. We owe it to those who have lost so much not to engage in similarly destructive patterns, those patterns we can actually control.