The Fire Next Time
by Jim Washburn
Only October, yet Casa de Washburn had become a winter wonderland. Looking up from a Rifleman episode one windswept afternoon, I spied playful white drifts swirling, settling and swirling again across the sun-dappled backyard. Packing peanuts.
I picked them up, maybe 800 of them, one-by-one. “Why didn’t you use the shop vacuum?” my wife asked later. That, of course, had occurred, as had blowing them into the neighbor’s pool or torching them where they lay with an aerosol-can flamethrower. Man the Toolmaker, you know. But I preferred going mano-a-styro with them, scuttering crablike over the lawn to deal with each peanut personally.
I learned two things: one, personally plucking pecks of packing peanuts is Zen; two, things ain’t what they used to be.
The peanuts, for example. Everyone gives the stuff derogatory nicknames—styro-poop, angel dung, Bush’s brain—because it’s such cheap, vexatious stuff. Open a box, and they blow everywhere, except for the ones that have insinuated themselves deep into the workings of whatever delicate electronics/underpants/steam locomotive you’re unboxing.
You’d think that packing peanuts—having set the world standard for insubstantiality—had achieved their permanent, ideal form, but that is not so. My hands-on inspection found that industrious souls have evidently burned the midnight oil to devise a peanut that’s even more irksome and ephemeral than before. This brave new peanut feels like its one part Styrofoam to 12 parts the dreams of moths. They have maybe 1/32 the tensile strength of a Cheeto, and unless you seize them with utter dispassion and a burglar’s touch, they crumble in your hands.
Industrious souls are everywhere these days, and one other thing that’s been made less substantial is your home. It may be that not a speck of stucco has changed on it, but just the same it is ever so much less safe and secure than it was only a few years ago. For one thing, a security enjoyed by all American homes since 1791, when the Bill of Rights was adopted, has disappeared. The Fourth Amendment averred all citizens’ right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures became law.” Not much of that left now.
More on that in a bit, as there’s a more timely example of our diminished security at hand, by which I mean this goddamned apocalypse searing through Southern California. The wind, emboldened by what it could do with packing peanuts, said, “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?” And for the last three days now our TV has looked like the “Holiday Hearth” DVD was on repeat, as it’s all flames all the time on every local channel. You’d think at least one would give folks a respite by showing mountain streams and waterfalls.
On Monday, after the first day of fire, President Bush was on TV, arguing that our security depended on billions more dollars for the war in Iraq. In a separate speech Vice President Cheney warned of the grave threat Iran poses. Not a syllable about California. Tuesday, Bush heeded Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plea and named us a disaster area, thanks, then moved on to our immediate need to deploy the missile shield, the scientifically non-functional “deterrent” to the non-threat of rogue nations possessing neither warheads nor missiles. for all i know, in another speech, cheney was arguing for a shield of chewy nougat around our borders.
Pressing stuff. Meanwhile, the largest evacuation in U.S. history since the Civil War was taking place in Southern California, with over half a million Californians fleeing their homes as 17 fires burned out of control, destroying, at this juncture, some 1,600 homes and 700 square miles of neighborhoods and habitat. And at every one, fire chiefs and commanders said they lacked the men and resources they needed to fight the unprecedented firestorm.
Who could have ever imagined or prepared for such a thing? Well, how about anyone paying even the least amount of attention? The hard, dry facts of historic drought, bark beetle infestation and annual Santa Ana winds make a palpable threat. Add what the credible scientists are saying about global warming and the patterns it represents for the Western US, and you’ve got DANGER writ large with flaming letters.
California was somewhat prepared—as much as one could be with Prop 13, and with conservatives in San Diego County and elsewhere blocking moves to properly fund firefighters. The big disconnect was on the federal level. Being out of touch is a touchstone for the Bush adminstration.
Consider: In August 2003, much of the East Coast was plunged into the biggest electrical blackout in history, causing the sort of chaos and economic standstill a terrorist could only dream of. Did Bush, on a fund-raising trip in California, rush back to oversee the sluggish federal response? Nope, he stayed the course, raising money for his party. “I’m on a mission” to keep the GOP in ascendancy, he declared to a you-rent-per-plate audience at an Irvine fundraiser.
When Katrina hit, Bush was in California, again shaking the organ-grinder’s cup and mugging with country stars, with the Gulf Coast seemingly the last thing on his mind. It wasn’t like New Orleans was Terri Schiavo or anything.
While he likes California’s money, Bush doesn’t have much use for the rest of the state. In his early days in office, when Enron and other big-donor energy companies were gaming the grid to systematically fleece the state, using rolling blackouts as leverage, Bush’s Justice Department took a hands-off approach.
Then, in October 2003, in the same week as our current conflagration, there was a horrific precursor to this week’s fires. In April of that year then-California Governor Gray Davis had sent an emergency request to FEMA for help in clearing trees killed by bark beetles, a huge problem in San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego Counties. Our pines were typically resistant to the pest—the sap would drown any of the invading critters—but drought had dried up the sap, and tens of thousands of trees had been killed and turned to kindling. Everyone looking at the problem recognized the potential for disaster.
But the White House was busy doing other things, like dreaming of empire in the Middle East and censoring almost all mention of global warming from an EPA report on the nation’s environmental status (as they again this week excised the global warming impacts from a report delivered to Congress by the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention). FEMA sat on Davis’ request for help for six months. Then, with perfect comedic timing, they turned it down, saying the plea for help was unwarranted, two days after fires broke out in—how about that?—San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego Counties.
I wrote about all this in the OC Weekly in 2003, months before and then during the fires. One piece began: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it is flat-out insane for a nation to be spending billions on a missile defense shield while leaving itself defenseless against the damage that any nitwit, domestic or foreign, can do to us with a single match.
At the time, I’d just pulled the missile defense shield topic out of a hat, one of any number of multi-billion dollar boondoggles fear-mongers have sold us. Now, here we are, four years to the week later, and we’re living through Hellstorm II—the Orange County portion of which was started by an arsonist—while Bush is still trying to foist the missile shield on an unwilling world. Feel safer?
Fifteen people died in the 2003 fires, which consumed over 700,000 acres, 2,500 homes, and billions of bucks. The USA had over 10,000 nuclear warheads at the time, but only 30 firefighting tanker planes. Since then, Bush has ordered work on a new generation of treaty-busting nukes, but no new tankers. Feel safer?
Many of the National Guard troops and other first responders who might have been on the fire-line are instead in Iraq. Some government agencies now estimate the total cost of our wars there and in Afghanistan will top 2.4 trillion dollars. Feel safer?
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Surely some things must be sacrificed in the War on Terror. How can we expect Bush to deal with the daily drudgery of making government work when he’s focused like a laser beam on evildoers who would do us evil? Shouldn’t his efforts there count for something?
Sure, how about 25%? That’s the percentage of fake bombs stopped by security at LAX during a test, meaning that 75% of the would-be bombs got through. Security was found to be equally lax at other airports. That means boom. Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom boom. Boom. Boom. Plenty of boom for everyone, though you can go to your maker resting easy that you were only 75% as exploded as you could have been.
Then think about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined cargo containers passing through our ports and rail lines, any of which could easily contain a number of nuclear bombs, in packing peanuts, no doubt.
That’s how good this administration is. And don’t forget, along with the colossal debt and the drain on other priorities to fuel the war on terror, at the airport every last one of us is additionally charged a security fee of $25 or more. In exchange, you get maybe 40 seconds of scrutiny from underpaid, undertrained screeners. That’s hardly value for your money, compared to what $25 will get you at adult establishments near most airports.
None of this bodes well for your home. Firestorms, nukes and planes raining from the sky can depress both property values and you. More insidious yet is the seeping feeling that there is no security. Dreadful things can happen, and the safety net is gone.
“A man’s home is his castle” used to be one of the bylaws of western civilization. Your home is your sanctuary. Stucco and drywall are not granite blocks, yet they’ve carried the same weight in modern times because of the institutions we have built around them. Every home has had a legal shield, preventing sheriff and landlord alike from trespassing upon you. Every home has been strengthened by a vast network of cooperation. Before there was a word for infrastructure, it was there: building inspectors; codes; well-watched utilities; manufacturing codes seeing that household products wouldn’t catch fire or poison you; competent administrators making sure that emergency responders were up to handling whatever threats might be anticipated.
It hardly took a Katrina or these fires to know that security has pretty well flown out your untempered window. And, hey, look who’s coming in? Not only is crime up in the U.S. in this time of unprecedented wealth disparity, but the government can now come sneaking into your abode, too.
I’d started earlier talking about the Fourth Amendment, before being so brusquely interrupted by these days of fire and ash. I have evacuated friends who don’t know if they have homes to return to. In that context, the thought of government snoops being able now to secretly pry through their possessions seems a minor point; maybe even an encouraging one, since it implies still having possessions to be pried through. So let’s return to that clandestine murk at some point after the actual smoke has cleared. It’s not an issue that’s going away.
The week started with packing peanuts. It’s ending with a patio layered in soot and ash. I’m using the shop vacuum this time.
jim@fourstory.org
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