Few places are immediately as confusing than Los Angeles, which is essentially a collection of 44 Hermanuses and 44 Hawstons, each with their own names, some in okay shape, others not.
It is a gathering of extremes, and occasionally, these extremes collide; whilst living there for an extended period in 2023, I witnessed an encounter between a vagrant out of his mind, and a homeowner out of his. The vagrant had entered the homeowner’s property through a gate accessible from Will Rogers State beach, and was standing by the pool staring into glass windows, behind which the owner was standing, staring back. I couldn’t tell who was madder.
Certain forces have made competent city management impossible. You had the influence of Hollywood, which makes everyone if not totally then a bit mad. Then you had the identity crowd – the social justice administrators influenced by members of the exiled Frankfurt school who’d set up shop in Santa Monica in the 1940s. Between the two they’d leave a mess akin to the sight of the SAPS in 1997 when Nelson Mandela asked Meyer Kahn to sort out the cops. Kahn failed, and everyone in Los Angeles has failed too.
January 1st isn’t a particularly eventful day in Southern California. Having missed a friend by a day, I called him in the afternoon from San Clemente, 90 minutes south of LA, whereupon he described seeing plumes of smoke emerge from the canyons adjacent to the Pacific Coast Highway from his backyard.
Failure to respond meaningfully to these initial reports will haunt the Los Angeles Fire Department, although in their defence they’ve had their budget stripped and their department contaminated with DEI, and frequently complain – to no respite – that addicts (crystal meth) start fires either by virtue of their state, or when the airstreams in which they’re cooking the stuff catch alight.
On January 2nd the stringers rocked up, and CNN – the place where once a week you can watch an exotic virtual love-in featuring Christiane Amanpour and Dr. Tedros – cleared its throat late in the evening and declared that the Santa Ana winds aggravating the Palisades fire, first recognised in around the mid-nineteenth century, was another result of man made climate change.
Other broadcasters followed because in Los Angeles, one man’s meth head is another man’s scam, or moral pheromone. In fact, you can learn more about nature’s rhythms when you listen to the city’s Korean-American comedian Bobby Lee lament how he was molested at the age of eight by a man with Down’s Syndrome.
Then followed brief calm: firemen, whose services in California stand in equal demand to those of pedophile hunters in the UK, were going to figure this out. But people quickly forgot that the place they lived was a third-world city with first-world taxes.
Then the reports began again, and this time, they appeared with dual urgency: on one hand, the Palisades fire was spiralling out of control; on the other, the things that are supposed to resist that spiral – like reservoirs with water – were empty or broken. By January 7th, the hellish rage building in that most affluent of suburbs erupted just as Los Angeles’ DEI mayor, Karen Bass, touched down in Accra, Ghana.
Karen Bass is Mayor of Los Angeles because Gavin Newsom is Governor of California. Its the formula extracted when the global order meets institutional groupthink – elsewhere it can be seen in the UK, Canada, Spain, Australia, Germany and France. It emboldens those who are off their faces. In 2021, faced with a recall, Newsom led his gubernatorial election campaign by condemning his black opponent, Larry Elder, sneering with a straight white face that should he be recalled, it would be the end of racial equality in the state.
By Jan 8th it was too late: as Altadena started burning, videos started circulating in which the water chief was filmed declaring that she sees her position being one of “social justice”. One of the fire LGBT fire chiefs was filmed declaring that “there is no end to diversity”; another claims that “people who need to be saved want to see someone who looks like them”. These were incongruent, however, with the events as they unfolded because by this time, no less than four fires were raging – and these people were, predictably, throwing each other under the bus.
Then came a a gruesome part: seeing crowd funder posts for people you recognise in the accompanying photo – friends and families with young children – their lives destroyed. But in LA, losing your house is actually the easy part: difficulty awaits in two forms – first, the insurance paradigm poised to spawn a generation of firm CEO assassins, and second, in the unlikely event it is resolved to elementary satisfaction, rebuilding to new green planning codes.
Some say the fires are a test: what will it take for the world’s most progressive whites to relinquish their luxury beliefs, or swap them for pragmatic ones? In the past, moments of profound shock and loss prompted new directions and jolted apathy. But that was another world. It ended in 2020.
[Photo: Screenshot/BBC]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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