Heatwaves and Mushroom Clouds
Living on the edge of a slow apocalypse surrounded by pristine beaches and
multi-million dollar homes and homeless encampments. That's the Los Angeles
way!
Yasha Levine
Aug 15
There's a heatwave in Los Angeles and much of California - something about a
high-pressure system trapping the air and not letting it circulate. That, on
top of global warming, means that heat records are being broken all over the
place. Our crappy privatized electrical grid is having trouble handling the
AC demand - and companies are rolling out targeted blackouts to dampen the
load. And it's only gonna get worse next week.
We drove to the beach in Santa Monica yesterday to try to catch a breeze and
cool off in the ocean. We got set up, and then I looked behind us - and
there was a gigantic mushroom cloud hanging over us. I looked like North
Korea finally did it. Those good people finally decided to do us all a solid
and put us out of our misery!
But nah, we weren't hit by North Korean nukes. It was just another giant
plume of smoke being sent up by yet another massive wildfire - this one an
hour north of us, in the mountains at the edge of the Mojave Desert. It's
been burning since Wednesday and shows no sign of being contained. These
things are so common and so huge now no one even notices them.
Like everywhere else in the world - from Alaska to the vast peat fires in
Siberia - the blazes here in California are bigger and more frequent than
ever. We saw a similar fire-fueled mushroom cloud in San Bernardino County a
few weeks back.
We're living on the edge of a slow-moving apocalypse - surrounded by
pristine beaches, multi-million dollar homes, homeless encampments, and a
slow-burning pandemic. But that's the Los Angeles way. Just pretend the
world beyond your lawn doesn't really exist - or, if does exist, it's all
the fault of some malicious foreign power.
I'm sure buying that extra Tesla will get us out of this. That, and using
unredeemable prison labor to fight fires. And of course bringing democracy
to Belarus.
-Yasha Levine
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PS: Read my old letter about about recently moving back to LA:
Walking around LA and looking at how fucked things are this holiday season
got me thinking.and I realized that this year - 2020 - will mark the 30th
anniversary of my family coming to America from the Soviet Union.
Looking around, I gotta say that these decades have not been kind to the
America Way of Life. In the time that we've been here, just about
everything's gotten worse - more billionaires, more pollution and
environmental collapse, more inequality, more wage theft, more energy
consumption, more garbage production, more wars, more privatization, more
school shootings, more poverty, and of course much much more homelessness.
With every year the pitch of the decline has gotten steeper and steeper and
it feels like we're now in free fall. There's systemic failure and
stagnation on every level, papered-over with lies and self-deception. Hell,
even basic things like recycling turned out to be a failure and a
petro-industry consumerist scam.
Kinda weird for a Soviet immigrant like me to realize that you fled one
failing society only to end up in a society that was also entering an
accelerated phase of decline and degradation.
And.