The End of the California Fairy Tale

It will never be the same. When this horror is behind us people will start over somehow, but lives are destroyed or in some cases extinguished, and a city we often loved but sometimes hated, which alternately charmed and infuriated, has been largely transformed into a charred smoking wasteland. L.A. will rise again. But there’s a sense that its soul is scarred forever.

We each have our personal griefs, pain over the loss of places that meant something to us. For me the Palisades is where my grandparents lived, and even though their house was torn down years ago, replaced by a new owner after my grandmother died, their address has a magic spot in my memory. “I keep thinking about Oma’s squirrels,” my sister said. “Even though I know those squirrels, Oma and the house are long gone, I still think of her out on the patio, tossing them walnut pieces. It’s just so hard thinking of that beautiful place, turned to ashes.”

For people who lost their homes—in the Palisades, Altadena and elsewhere—the heartbreak must be staggering. Even if they have the resources to rebuild or find a new place to live, they will never get back the home where they marked their children’s heights on a doorframe in sharp pencil, where a daughter got married in the backyard, where thousands of dinners were cooked and eaten and nights were spent watching movies on the couch shredded by a naughty cat. They may create a new home—they’ll have to—but they’ll never get back the place that gave them their most intimate sense of belonging.

I grieve, but there’s also room in my heart to rage. “Don’t let’s engage in finger-pointing,” say our local and state officials. “The important thing now is to put out the fires.”

A thousand times yes, put out the fires. As I write, the Palisades and Eaton fires are still barely contained, and the Palisades fire is spreading again. If the Santa Ana wind kicks up again this weekend as is predicted, they will be even harder to combat and new fires are possible. Through it all, L.A.’s firefighters have been heroes. City Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley is one of the few responsible local authorities who emerges with some integrity in this horror; it’s haunting to read that she warned forcefully, as recently as a few days before the fires, that the massive budget cuts Karen Bass wanted to impose on the fire department put the public in serious danger. No one wants to undercut those fighting the blazes, or draw attention from the tremendous things people are doing to support those who have lost homes or businesses.

But there’s good reason to ask hard questions and, yes, accuse those in charge of making the disaster both horrifyingly predictable and worse. Fire hydrants ran dry Tuesday night. Firefighters had no option but to turn to swimming pools to fight the blaze, then watch helplessly as buildings burned. Many people report having received no warning to evacuate; they figured it out only from watching news or seeing the fire through their living room windows. The Santa Ynez reservoir, which should have held 117 million gallons of water for the Palisades, was bone-dry, having been closed for repairs around last February.

Gavin Newsom is demanding an investigation into the Santa Ynez reservoir issue in the transparent hope of drawing attention from his own actions, or lack thereof. He hasn’t built the new water reservoirs that L.A. needs, even though California voters approved Proposition 1 (The Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act) for that and other water-related purposes, like dams, over ten years ago. He cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year, and the funding for preventing forest fires. Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service last October directed its California employees to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future”—even though planned, controlled burns are considered critical to protect homes from wildfires.

Our buildings and bridges are crumbling, our schools are among the worst in the nation, our universities are antisemitic cesspits, we lack essential infrastructure and we live amid the dangers of fire, drought and earthquake, but our leaders don’t seem to consider such matters as interesting as more ethereal or glamorous ones that advertise their progressive bona fides. L.A.’s leaders can always find money for a café for homeless transgender people in Hollywood ($100,000) or a mysterious “equity and inclusion” allotment ($250,000). Some of the allocations may sound like chump change, and I’m sure many of the programs are valuable, but then you get to wondering what’s sacrificed for them. On the other, stratospheric end of the spectrum, there’s the state’s high-speed rail morass, which is now almost $100 billion over budget and nowhere near done. We’re governed by people who don’t seem to recognize, or even care about, material reality.

Fire Chief Crowley may have shown some spine when it came to protesting the cuts to her department, but she showed a warped sense of priorities when she created a new DEI bureau for the fire department at a cost of who-knows-what, waxing about the importance of making the department “diverse and inclusive.” Presumably she approved the promotional video featuring Fire Department Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, which is now making the rounds on Twitter/X. Speaking to the camera against a soft violet and pink background, Larson informs us that when we place a call for an emergency, “You want the person that responds to look like you.” In fact, I don’t want my rescuer to be a fellow decrepit 57-year-old woman, but Larson seems confident that she knows my feelings better than I do.

“’Is she strong enough to do this?’” she imagines critics saying. “Or, ‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.’ Which my response is, ‘He got himself in a wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’” So that’s clear enough. If you, a 240-pound man, are foolish enough to get caught in a fire, don’t come crying because the fire department sends a diminutive woman to try to pull you from the flames.

California has always been a harbinger of national trends; for good or ill, what happens here tends to spread to other parts of the country. Let this tragedy mark the beginning of the end of this madness. L.A. will not return to what it was, and that’s reason to grieve. On the other hand, we shouldn’t want it to.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”