Slouching Toward Nonsense
LAGUNA BEACH — “Poor La-La Land,” clucks Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist. In town for the fires, she writes of “flights of apocalyptic fancy,” of “weird rumors” and “Tinseltown” and “Manson” and “no more California dreamin’, no more wishing they all could be California girls, no more laid-back, golden California.” And that’s only the first few paragraphs. She goes on:
“Today, the sky is raining ashes on Downtown L.A., so the sense of ‘Apocalypse Now’ is still strong. But even if rain should come to put out the fires, it will only cause massive mudslides that destroy more homes, so, thinks the Angeleno, there’s not that much point in worrying about it, and has anyone seen the Hollywood Madam’s new pajama line?”
Not certain how canyon fires connect to Heidi Fleiss, I seek enlightenment on the front page of the New York Times: “As evacuees began to return, they had cause to ponder the central paradox of California, a land whose environment can be as terrible as it is beautiful. Fires, floods, earthquakes, drought and mudslides often exact a steep price for the good life.”
Deeper in the same newspaper, author Marc Reisner scolds Californians--especially those who dwell in Los Angeles, which he describes as “some fake Miami”--for failing to comprehend nature “in the least,” and he concludes: “Seeing those infernos, who would want to live in California anyway?”
Got the picture, folks?
They are doing it again.
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It is inevitable. In California, after the “fires, floods, earthquakes, droughts and mudslides,” there comes a lesser plague: the descent of the preacher-pundits, keyboard deacons who extrapolate from any California calamity stern lessons about the foolishness of California life. Often, but not always, affiliated with East Coast media, they see our state--not as a piece of geography, not as a scattered collection of 30 million different people--but as one giant, cohesive parable, ripe for the picking.
How dare we defy nature and build houses on hills, or near earthquake faults? Drought is punishment for taking water from mountains to farm desert land. Riot results from “Tinseltown” insensitivity. We are victims, not of wind and matches, but of our own excess. See the California fires? This is what happens when a people come looking for too much fun in the sun.
These sermons typically come wrapped in prose that suggests the author consumed much Didion on the flight west. To pass muster as a true California tale, there must be references to subtropical sunsets and dreamers of the Golden Dream and the center not holding in the place where we run out of land. Stuff like that. When I read these pieces I imagine a scene in some snowbound newsroom: “Big fire in California,” national editor pants to ace feature writer. “We’ll need 1,500 words on Paradise Lost by Sunday, and here’s a copy of ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem.’ Don’t lose it. We’ll need it again.”
This treatment is not applied to any other state. New York blizzards are not seen as punishment for various Manhattan sins. Florida hurricanes are not springboards for polemics about the flawed psyche of snowbirds. I watched closely during the Mississippi floods. Not once did I see a reference to the “central paradox” of Iowa. The sanity of millions of Midwesterners who build houses on flood plains was not questioned. Indeed, the main theme of most reportage was American pluckiness. We were buried with images of courageous farmers rowing out to rescue the pigs. No one asked: Who’d want to live in Des Moines anyway?
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No, only our disasters are cast as cosmic retribution, apparently for the sin of living in California in the first place. A compilation of previous sermons would suggest that Californians have no business living in coastal canyons, or the arid basins of Los Angeles, or any terrain near the San Andreas fault line, or the Sierra foothills, or the reclaimed swamps of the Central Valley. I believe this leaves us only Modoc County, and it would be a tight fit.
Better to roll with the punches. Consumed properly--which is to say, read out loud, with excess feeling, to some fellow Golden-dreaming, nature-taunting, devil Californian--these pieces can be downright funny. Last Friday I called an old friend who had spent the week frantically sweeping pine needles off his La Canada Flintridge porch. I read him some purple passages from the fire reportage.
“So, you heathen,” I asked after he stopped giggling, “why do you insist on living up in that canyon?”
“Because,” he said, “up in the hills is where the action is at. People would be surprised what goes on every night under all those shake roofs.” And then he laughed again, the devil.
