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.
