mahiwaga

While Governor Schwarzenegger, Mayor Jerry Sanders, and Representative Duncan Hunter continue to fellate each other about what a good job they’re doing, I’d like to point out that the evacuation effort actually underscores the fact that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were grossly mistreated and neglected.

The contrast between Hurricane Katrina and the San Diego wildfires points out the fact that if you are poor, and dark-skinned, your country will abandon you and let you rot in hell and will in fact send mercenaries over to shoot the place up, but if you are reasonably well-to-do, and light-skinned, everyone will be falling all over themselves to give you “lavish buffets” and back rubs.

And I invoke Kanye West obligatorily when I say: George Bush only cares about white people.

But you knew that already.

Instead of agreeing with the fire fighters and placing the blame on the rampant development in dangerous areas, and the failure of McMansion owners to clear their brush properly, Duncan Hunter blames the environmentalists.

Asshole.

One might even argue that these augmented Santa Ana winds are yet another product of pervasive climate change, the end-result of you driving your 10-ton Excursions and Suburbans and guzzling gasoline over the years. Despite only being a week before November, the ground in Minneapolis has not yet frozen. It’s going to be a balmy 84°F in NYC today.

Bear in mind that this is only the start of the California fire season. Santa Ana wind activity peaks around December.

It’s quite possible that my adrenal glands have finally given up. The wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of the wild fires has worn me down. I don’t remember being this wired since the destruction of the WTC or maybe not even since the L.A. riots.

Part of it is probably the acrid stench of smoke. The smell of burning probably activates nerves that hook right into your primitive brain. For some reason, I start thinking about the last scenes of the movie “Bambi”.

The thing about fire is that it’s a case of “hurry up and wait,” which is a phenomenon that is, I suppose, well known by fire fighters and police and paramedics, and it is also how we tend to practice medicine in the United States. On certain rotations, I find my job consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Eventually, you stop caring, I think. The adrenal glands can only pump out so much adrenaline.

I’m tired of the mainstream media. The local broadcasters aren’t very good to begin with, and their constant polemicizing and politicizing of the fires was making me nauseated. I got most of my updates via catdirt and SD Dialed In. Maybe Gil Scott Heron didn’t get the whole picture. The Revolution may not be televised, but maybe it will be blogged. Or even Twittered.

But things seem to be winding down. The high pressure system that was driving the Santa Ana winds is migrating away, and the marine layer is supposed to re-establish itself. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t made any difference in the weather yet—it’s still hot and dry as hell—but the smoke isn’t nearly as bad as it was. The fires have retreated from the urban interface, although they are still actually raging off in the rural hinterlands. The Witch Creek Fire is only 20% contained, although almost all of the flames are on the eastern front of the burn area. The nearby Poomacho Fire is only 10% contained. The Harris Fire, near the Mexican border, is also minimally contained, at 10%, although it doesn’t look like it’s threatening Chula Vista and vicinity any longer. (The CAL FIRE site has status reports available.)

It strikes me that the Witch Creek Fire alone has burned more land area than all of the fires in the other six counties (L.A., O.C., San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and Santa Barbara) combined, and I can’t help wonder what the hell is up with that? It isn’t like there should be a huge variation in the amount of dry brush between S.D. County and the others. (Or is there?) And we’ve all been affected by the drought.

Why is that even after the disastrous Cedar Fire (which the Witch Creek Fire has already eclipsed tremendously), San Diego County still doesn’t have enough fire fighters and equipment to protect its citizens?

It looks like The New York Times is asking this very same question. And sadly, some of the answers seem to be deadly obvious. Miriam Raftery describes how victims of the fires are blaming the officials. In particular, Governor Schwarzenegger had vetoed a bill that would’ve hired more fire fighters and purchased more equipment, and he had disregarded all the recommendations of the commission that had reviewed the Cedar Fire. And the County Supervisors appear to have turned a blind eye to large-scale developments in highly combustible regions, exacerbating the problem. Kathy Christie Hernandez puts it more bluntly: No new taxes equals no new firemen.

While it’s going to take a while to reach containment, much less actually extinguishment (optimistic estimates are containment in more than a week, as November rolls in), the real pain is going to be the rebuilding. The number of homes destroyed is simply appalling and boggles the mind. Over a thousand structures burned. It’s like the hand of God just went off and obliterated a small town. Already, the scammers have moved in to bilk the people, the insurance companies (i.e., the people, since it’s our insurance premiums their paying with), and the federal government (i.e., the people, since it’s our tax money.) I don’t think we have a good picture of the devastation yet. It’s going to be awful. I mean, where are all these people going to live while their houses are being rebuilt?

For me, the idiocy of the entire conservative philosophy is starkly manifest here. I don’t think it’s an accident that the more liberal L.A. County has managed to avoid the massive destruction of property that is happening down here in S.D. County.

Sometimes the only answer is effective government. I’m not just talking about evacuation plans and such. I’m talking about prevention. I’m talking about preparedness. As much as the politicians down here are patting themselves on the back, they really had neither, and I wonder what it’s going to take for the people down here to accept the fact that they way they’re running things (or more accurately, not running things) is simply unsustainable.

As I try to clear my head from the fires, S. gets me thinking.

Specifically, thinking about things that make me uneasy.

Before Southern California went up in flames, I was pondering how isolated I’ve allowed myself to become. Deep down inside, the objective, diagnostic part of my brain recognizes that this is extraordinarily unhealthy. And yet, I feel helpless to rectify things.

Without the deep, abstract ideas (that ultimately have no real meaning) to distract me, I’m left with this empty void.

At the least, it’s no longer dragging me down. It’s just there. This space-filling emptiness that’s almost like a tangible wall. I need to get to the other side of it somehow, but the solution continues to elude me.

For some reason, me and my sister got to talking about capitalism on the drive down from L.A. to S.D., as we drove past the burning hills of Irvine. And it occurred to me, no matter what you do, markets will always exist, simply because of the existence of two human impulses: desire, and the need to create. Economists might call it demand and supply, respectively, but it explains why Communism has always gone wrong. Besides the fact that human nature may not be basically benign, and that power corrupts, the problem with trying to control markets is that the path of least resistance is invariably to suppress these very human impulses. Communist governments are reduced to trying to get people to stop wanting stuff, and barring that, they try to get people to stop wanting to make stuff. By definition, you need a totalitarian government in order to try and accomplish that, and unless you actually destroy your people’s humanity, there’s just no way to eradicate these impulses.

And it struck me. Does my mind wander like this, and think about random topics deeply, for any good reason? (I has occurred to me that I may simply be insane, but this doesn’t really lead me to any practical course of action.) Is there something I am meant to accomplish in this life time? (The objective part of my brain say, no. The universe is governed mostly by Chance, and there is no such thing as Destiny™, at least, not in the way that human beings have personified her.)

For an long time, I’ve been preoccupied with the fear of dying without realizing my full potential, and the fear has occasionally become so overwhelming that I’ve freaked out. To the point where I’ve given up, and let my talents go fallow. Like that passage in one of the Gospels says not to do, I’ve spent a huge portion of my life hiding my light under a basket.

I mean, I could either let go of my overdeveloped sense of significance to the universe, or give up on being a chickenshit, and I think I either course could solve a lot of my problems. But for some reason, I’ve failed to make any headway on either road.

I am fated to remain In Between™, and perhaps condemned to inertia.