Bonfire of the Vanities
The late, great Tom Wolfe couldn't conjure a Shakespearian tragedy as profoundly ironic as this week's massive conflagrations in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Pasadena and other tony towns around Los Angeles.
Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities was a fictional psychodrama that involved no actual fire. Here in the real world of 2025, horrifying firestorms have now decimated affluent areas across La La Land. Indeed, tens of thousands of Angelenos — rich and poor — have had their lives badly charred and scarred, with their homes, schools, churches, supermarkets and entire neighborhoods burned to the ground. Psychodrama is the least of their concerns, though PTSD is just around the corner.
The irony is that this cataclysmic disaster resulted from the policies and mismanagement of California's Democrats, including and especially Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass. The wealthy neighborhoods just incinerated are primary strongholds of their left-wing support.
California Democrats hold as articles of faith that fossil fuels are bad, battery powered cars are good, dams and reservoirs are bad, logging and proper forest management are bad, and perhaps most perniciously, "diversity" and vax compliance are good. Such shibboleths are most fervently embraced in LA's deep-blue, fire stricken communities.
Now in January 2025, those chickens have come home to roost.
California hasn't built a new reservoir in 46 years!!! We voted for Proposition 1 a full decade ago. That $7.5 billion "Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement" included almost $3 billion for new water storage, but the Democrats and Greenies refused the will of the people. One result: Many hydrants in Pacific Palisades and Pasadena were dry when firefighters tried to turn them on. That is a scandal of massive proportions. Billion-dollar lawsuits are inevitable, charges of criminal negligence likely.
FUEL REDUCTION, FUEL REDUCTION and FUEL REDUCTION are the three most important factors for cataclysmic wildfire prevention. Yet California's fuel reduction has been minimal at best, even as greenies destroyed the California logging industry. What do loggers do? They remove fuel from forests. Now, logging wouldn't have been the solution to LA's fuel glut, but ignoring the fuel glut literally fueled these cataclysmic fires. Instead, woke values about the supposed natural state of the land make fuel reduction extremely difficult in the parks and urban-adjacent lands that surround the now incinerated communities.
Identity and compliance supersede competence for woke voters and agency heads. Hence, capable firemen who rejected the Covid vax were drummed out, replaced by vacancies and incompetents. Meanwhile, morons like Karen Bass were elected to high office, even as the LA Fire Department's top officials are obvious diversity-hires who value "intersectionality" more than firefighting.
While these luxury beliefs go way back in enclaves like Pacific Palisades, they took on new life from President Trump's 2016 election. If Trump is for something, TDS-stricken Dems are agin it. In this case, Trump famously advised Newscum to undertake proper forest management and stop sending millions of gallons of water out to sea. The Democrats' opposition to those common sense positions gained new fervor once Trump announced he was for them.
Construction is difficult in California, on top of being nosebleed expensive. Tradesmen are scarce, regulations and permits overwhelming, diesel expensive, and lawsuits de rigueur. That's partly why insurers are leaving. Not only doesn't California manage its fire risk, but the cost of rebuilding is ruinous.
Once the smoke clears, will this bonfire of political vanities reform the politics of luxe Californians? To paraphrase Irving Kristol's famous aphorism: A conservative is a liberal who's been scorched by reality. If that doesn't apply here, when will it?
Comments