What’s gone can never be replaced: thoughts on Los Angeles, disasters, and the present moment

As you read this, Los Angeles is still in flames. The fires that consumed the Pacific Palisades and Eaton are already thought to be the worst in the region’s history, with over 2,000 structures burned and at least 130,000 residents ordered to evacuate. The full scope will take a long time to be known because things are so chaotic and purely survival-driven. Still, it’s already clear that this is a catastrophe on the level of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans 20 years ago or, more directly analogous, the Chicago fire of 1971, which rendered 100,000 people homeless and destroyed 3.3. square miles of the city. The disaster is also a nexus point for so many of the problems that plague us as a country and as a species.

The scale is hard to process. The images coming out of the city via news coverage and social media posts are surreal. Images captured by the Associated Press’s photographer Ethan Swope are especially unnerving. Two side-by-side images from the Palisades have just two dominant colors, black and orange. Fire trucks, trees, cars, and building frames look like they’ve been cut from black paper. Homes are burning from within and without. We’re seeing a way of life disappear, to be replaced with something else—who knows what. There will be rebuilding and regrowth, but what’s gone can never be replaced. 

It’s a cultural catastrophe as well as a physical one. The center of American entertainment for more than a century had already been fighting for decades to preserve meaningful structures (including studio-era restaurants and early movie palaces) from real estate developers, not to mention semi-regular Southern California wildfires of smaller magnitude. Billy Crystal and his wife Janice lost the home they’d lived in since 1979, and Mandy Moore lost her house as well. “Honestly, I’m in shock and feeling numb for all so many have lost, including my family. My children’s school is gone. Our favorite restaurants, leveled,” she wrote on Instagram.

Traditional signifiers of Southern California-as-paradise, including palm trees and Spanish Colonial-style bungalows, are shown engulfed in flames. Los Angeles Times reporter Jason Rainey took video at Carbon Beach in Malibu, also known as “Millionaire’s Beach,” showing piles of charred rubble and frames that used to be the homes of some significance in entertainment history. One was a home originally owned by movie star Doris Day and later by film and music executive David Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. 

But at least the celebrity will find a way to recover, and the overwhelming majority of people living in the United States’ second largest metro area are far from rich. They’re drivers, office workers, fitness instructors, food service workers, tech workers, hospital nurses and orderlies, schoolteachers, sanitation workers, animal control officers, bus drivers and the like: regular people, increasing numbers of whom hold multiple jobs because rents have become punishing all over the country, more so in big cities. Thousands of Los Angelenos are effectively homeless now. Even in California, which is more generous about social services than most US states, the system isn’t set up to absorb a massive, sudden influx of people who need help. 

The use of disasters as a political football has a long history—though it arguably picked up steam during Katrina—and it’s happening again. Some in America’s politically reactionary wing are cheering the carnage in Southern California or treating the disaster as a theological or karmic judgment against “Hollywood”—a word that has come to signify an abstract idea of hedonism, godlessness, and progressive politics rather than a specific neighborhood in L.A. “The Hollywood Hills are on fire, it’s almost poetic,” tweeted antisemitic right-wing podcaster Stew Peters. Others are trying to spin the disaster as being somehow the fault of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, who was already “away from the city on a planned diplomatic trip to Ghana Tuesday when the Palisades Fire first erupted,” per ABC News; or governor Gavin Newsom, whom President-elect Donald Trump blasted on Truth Social (“It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!”).

Trump also claimed Southern California had a water shortage because Newsom, per The Hill, backed “regulations [that] limit the amount of water that can be pumped from the nearby Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in order to protect a fish called the smelt.” Unsurprisingly, the smelt has nothing to do with firefighting and water in the current crisis. Nor was there ever a “water declaration restoration” mentioned by Trump as a document that Newsom refused to sign. (Trump’s transition team told CNN that their boss might’ve gotten confused and superimposed a nonexistent declaration onto his 2020 fight with Newsom over “a Trump plan to deliver more water from Northern California to farmers in the state’s Central Valley agricultural hub,” which was derailed over concerns about fish extinction. (We’re looking at four more years of this stuff, folks; support your local fact-checkers.)

Conspiracy theories spread like wildfire at times like these. Los Angeles-based writer Anna Merlan published a heartbreaking piece at Mother Jones about being “a journalist who’s covered conspiracy theories and disinformation for many years” and having to watch “the disaster threatening my safety blamed on false flag attacks, Democrat plotting, the evils of diversity, and—say it with me—the Jews. A disaster is a ripe moment for conspiracy peddlers to ply their wares, and a historic series of fires threatening a major city—especially one filled with Democrats, non-white people and wealthy celebrities—has sent the machine into overdrive.”

The elephant in this epochal room is, of course, climate change. Southern California has been gripped by eight months of drought, which surely amplified this year’s blazes, and all over the country (and around the world), we’ve seen nations posting record high and low temperatures year after year, along with reports of water shortages and the loss of what was one regular snowfall. When I was a kid in the 1970s, I remember being taught about the dangers of environmental neglect and pollution, including fluorocarbons (which we actually did something to regulate) and fossil fuel emissions (which we really didn’t). We’ve been not-dealing with this stuff for over half a century. The first study warning that discarded plastic was being ingested by wildlife was published in 1969.

President Jimmy Carter, who died at 100 before he had to watch Southern California burn on the news and Trump being sworn in for a second time, was the only president in my lifetime to take what we now call climate change seriously, to the point of installing solar panels on the roof of the White House (his successor Ronald Reagan had them removed) and asking Americans to turn down their thermostats during the winter and wear sweaters inside to preserve heating oil. It’s hard to imagine a president trying something like that now. Would he have done it back then if he’d known it would’ve been a factor in his 1980 defeat? I’d like to think so.

This is all intertwined—the politicization of disasters in lieu of compassion and aid; the misinformation and conspiracy theories; the lack of empathy for people enduring unimaginable horrors because, in the minds of others, they are different or somehow The Enemy. Where it leads, I’d rather not guess. No place good, that’s for sure. 

It seems as if we will do anything, and say anything, if it means not dealing with problems that we don’t want to think about, or that would require sacrifice—or just change.

I hope Los Angeles rebuilds as soon as humanly possible, and figures out what it will become, now that it can no longer be what it always was.