California Burning: Life on a Tinderbox Planet
The metaphors are too ripe. California, symbol of limitless abundance, material wealth, possibilities for personal transformation. California, the impossibly over-endowed beauty, who wins all the contests, to the bitter envy or sycophantic admiration of the average Joes and Janes. California, the consummate global destination for the millions of who are desperate for reinvention: sexual, political, economic. California – thanks to the limitless marketability of human desire, which built its gargantuan industry of dreams – the world’s avatar for the whole USA.
All this is now tinder in a planetary fireplace.
New York, financial capital of the uniquely nameless and stateless global empire whose figurehead is California, has already received its exaggeratedly symbolic apocalyptic warnings. The Towers at the dawning millennium, like some contemporary tarot symbol, knifed by the colliding planes, collapsing in on themselves, creating a proto-nuclear explosion of toxic dust and uncountable reams of paper. (What symbolizes a bygone civilization better than ruins, dust, and fragmented archives?) Since civilization is always played on the world’s chessboard as a zero sum game, blowback is a defining aspect of weakening ones.
That, however, was still an example of human scale.
Then Superstorm Sandy (short for Cassandra?) flooded the downtown subways with chilly waters, lapping at the gone-silent monoliths where the world’s deals were done. The trains didn’t run at all, much less on time, the heat went off, the lights went out. Under the hurricane’s glaring eye, New York blinked.
And now California, producer of food and dreams to the world, gets its own head’s up from the gods of increasing chaos. Bone dry for four years, burning every year (as it has for millennia, but never before with 38 million of us, a primate subspecies born in an Ice Age, inhabiting and drastically altering its landscape). The annual fires (approximately6,000 this year, 1,500 more than last year) have created localized holocausts – a blackened line of hills that was once a scenic view, a demolished suburban or exurban tract, a decimated small town.
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