Conflagration

As I mentioned last week, I reside in Los Angeles, and we are currently living through a full-on cataclysm. 

Last week, my family and I checked into a hotel near Disneyland (the ultimate indignity) because the air quality in our neighborhood was so bad. It was also a precaution to avoid waking up to a house on fire.

We’re back home now, and our place is intact. But we know people who were not so fortunate.

One of my friends lost her house to the Altadena fire. When I asked how she was holding up, she responded, “All I know is that dry January can fuck right off.”

Indeed, this is a time for heavy drinking in LA.

It is not, however, a time to play politics, but we’re Americans, so of course that is exactly what we will do.

Our good friends in the GOP are threatening to withhold federal aid unless we all agree to become Republicans. They also want to teach us a lesson, and are openly questioning whether we “deserve” assistance.

This is what debauched inhumanity looks like.

It also hypocritical, because the federal government has never placed conditions on disaster aid for red states. And let’s not forget that for decades now, California has been “literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

We can also question the religious bone fides of those Christians who revel in the death and destruction afflicting America’s second-largest city. Hey, it’s what Jesus would have done, right?

There is also the fact that our president-elect and his unelected billionaire sidekick are spewing conspiracy theories, blatant lies, and idiotic proposals at a speed faster than any wildfire. That always helps.

And if anyone wonders whether conservatives are making even the slightest attempt to distance themselves from the bigotry that has long defined the Republican Party, we have right-wingers shrieking about lesbians, black people, and DEI all causing the fires. Apparently, these are more foundational causes for a natural disaster than climate change, which as we all know, doesn’t even exist. Nope.

Now, there have been legitimate questions about how prepared California’s leaders were for this inevitability. Because I’m not in a cult, I’m willing to criticize Democrats if they indeed messed up (we need more information to be sure about that). 

But I find it ironic that conservatives are questioning the competence of Democratic leaders. After all, Trump’s response to the Covid pandemic was so abysmal, clownishly inept, and homicidal that whole libraries could be devoted to the books that will inevitably be written about his administration’s incompetence. This is a glaringly obvious glass-houses situation.

But then again, nobody even remembers Covid. It’s like the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. Neither one of them ever happened.

In any case, LA’s firefighters — yes, even the gay and black ones — will continue to battle the inferno. After the fires are extinguished, the city will rebuild.

And I’m sure Republicans will be focused on recovery, solutions, and moving forward.

Or they’ll continue complaining about, I don’t know, people communicating in sign language or something equally insane.

Yes, you can count on the GOP to keep things in perspective.

Scorched Earth

I live in Los Angeles. Right now, all my time is spent watching the sky for embers and making sure we have plenty of masks left over from the pandemic to ensure going outside doesn’t mean inhaling acrid carcinogens.

So consider this an unplanned break from posting. With luck, my house will not burn down, and I will write something next week.

Thanks

Year of the Oligarch

This year has started with two political developments that were completely predictable to anyone who has paid the smallest bit of attention to America over this past hellish decade.

First, there is the bitchy, snippy caterwauling erupting between MAGA extremists and smug billionaires. When your political party consists of factions that have nothing in common other than a hatred of liberals, it is inevitable that disagreements will arise. But when those factions are led by power-hungry lunatics who default to hostility and anger, it is even more inevitable that they will turn on one another. These are people who kamikaze anyone who is not in lockstep with their narcissistic vision, and whose main method of communication is threatening violence.

Did anybody seriously think they were going to play well with one another?

The second predictable development is that our beloved president-elect, who was born into excessive privilege and despises the lower classes that worship him, would side with his wealthy peers over the riff raff. Come on, the guy doesn’t need their votes anymore. And he is always going to support those who can help him secure power. 

So did anyone believe he would diss the world’s richest man, who bankrolled his campaign and holds an absurd amount of political and social power, in favor of a horde of random xenophobes who have little money and even less influence?

Of course, the dawning realization of the MAGA faithful that their messianic leader will do nothing to help them is likely to be a slow ordeal. But at some point, they will see him golfing with his rich buddies, leading his cabinet of billionaires (the wealthiest presidential administration of all time) in discussions of how to enrich themselves, and hording even more of the country’s resources for the one-tenth of one percent.

And they will wonder, “Hey, when is he finally going to help me afford health care?”

Who wants to tell them the answer?

Voyagers

I’m taking another holiday break this week, and I will likely not post anything until the new year.

But before I sign off on 2024 (which if we’re being honest, was a pretty sucky year), let me leave you with this fact.

The Voyager spacecrafts are the only man-made objects that have left our solar system. They are hurtling through the interstellar void, destination unknown. 

It’s possible that billions of years from now, after travelling an unfathomable distance, one of the Voyagers may finally encounter an advanced alien civilization. These beings, impossible to imagine, haul in this relic of humanity, which has long ago gone extinct. They marvel at this last remanent of homo sapiens. 

The Voyager spacecraft will be the only proof that humans were ever here.

Or something unforeseen happens way out there, and Voyager plummets into a distant sun, obliterating any proof that people ever existed.

Happy holidays!

The Ballad of Somebody or Other

America has strange taste in folk heroes. For example, let’s say some random guy shoots a businessman in the back. We might call this first-degree homicide.

Or we might rejoice in this killing because the victim was an oligarch. Hell, we might sell merch that celebrates the assassination. 

Some leftists might call this the first shot in a revolution. Others might find the killer’s smile charming.

And yet others (ok, just about every American) might point out that the victim was emblematic of a diabolical, soul-crushing, life-endangering, shockingly corrupt, highly destructive, and straight-up evil scheme called the health care system.

So I guess that makes it ok to kill him, right?

Of course, it’s a good thing you told me the shooter was a hero. Otherwise, I might think that this nutjob was yet another white guy raised in extreme privilege who encountered some pain in his life and therefore felt entitled to unleash suffering on those he felt were responsible.

I might think how odd it is that a black man who is being a nuisance can get choked to death on the subway, and we say he had it coming. But a good-looking white guy can literally murder someone in the street, and we’re all like, “Hell, yeah!” 

I might think it’s bizarre that we are so inured to gun violence that we shrug at bullets slicing through the air of America’s largest city in broad daylight, with the assumption that “another day, another shooting” has become our national mantra.

Finally, I might think the Trumpian era has so warped everyone’s minds that even liberals are deliriously happy about political violence, and thousands of people revel in murder over social media, and hypocrisy mixed with sociopathic disdain has become a mindset to be admired rather than rejected.

I might think all that, but what do I know?

I’m not even a folk hero.