City on Fire

January 11, 2025

Greetings from fiery Los Angeles.

I am one of many thousands of people who had to evacuate their home with little notice and in mere minutes. To say it was shocking surreal, horrendous and many other adjectives I can’t think of at the moment, and probably wouldn’t do it justice at all, does not tell even a fraction of the story.

But I am also one of the lucky ones who survived, and whose home and immediate neighborhood stands pretty much untouched in comparison to what’s left of the Mad Max terrain in the former gorgeous towns of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and others.

Thanks to the L.A. Fire Department, the response of local officials and the fact that the winds had died down enough for it to be tackled by air, the massive flames in the hills of Hollywood, aka the Sunset Fire, were contained relatively quickly. Though if you lost your home, or someone close to you, this doesn’t mean very much at all.

Over four decades, I have grown to love Los Angeles as much as my hometown of New York City and that’s really saying something. I can’t really tell you exactly why other than to say L.A. is part of California and that people have been coming to California for years for the freedom to be who they are and live the way they choose. It’s a mirage of sorts but not fully. There is something about the vastness of the state and what has become its melting pot of a population during the many years I’ve been here that has more and more made that mirage a bit more real. I mean, you might not get what you want but you have a ton of space to do it in and a vast number of tribes you can sample if you’re looking for a place where you can truly belong.

Also, if you don’t like it you can always leave. Literally no one will judge you for it. Out here most of us eventually learn that it’s up to an individual to make themselves happy. California won’t do it and especially L.A. won’t make it happen for you. You have to figure out how to make it happen.

This is one of the many reasons these L.A. fires have been so devastating for me. Watching it happen is like watching the beauty of all those dreams and all that stunning space get fried to a crisp in real time right before your eyes. Everything is ephemeral but the breadth and randomness of such mass destruction feels unusually, and most particularly, cruel.

Which does not mean we don’t feel that and more for all kinds of cruel destruction. No one has the market cornered on those type of regrettable feelings. In fact, maybe if there were more recognition of the latter, the world wouldn’t feel like the hateful place it all too often does these days.

Still, watching firefighters from neighboring states and countries flying in to help the people of L.A. has been quite something. Not to mention how quickly the American Red Cross, World Central Kitchen and dozens of other organizations and volunteers have opened outlets, service areas and phone lines to help us begin to cope and, eventually, recover.

But here is what is NOT helpful. Playing the Blame Game.

I get the country is divided and L.A. is an easy and often willing target (Note: Yes, we’re in on the joke. Duh). But you’d think an estimated $50 billion in damages from the largest city in a state that sends more money than any other to the federal government, would be enough to satiate the naysayers at this point.

Because I don’t trust myself to 1. Explain this properly and 2. Not go on a tangential, unhelpful and hysterical tirade in this sensitive moment, I want to instead share a very wise social media post from my friend Michael Colleary. This weekend he very smartly and very succinctly explained what happened in L.A. in an effort to offer some truth and reality to friends, family and acquaintances from out of state who have been hearing and reading all kinds of things. It goes as follows:

Dear FB Friends – I have received many messages and emails particularly from friends and family on the East Coast, asking after our safety. A million thanks for your care and concern. I would like to answer a few questions I have been asked repeatedly, particularly about fire hydrants and firefighting crews and LA’s overall response to the fires.

Let me try to provide a little perspective for those of you back East …

The Palisades fire began as a wilderness brush fire at 10:30AM on January 7th.

Driven by 80 MPH winds – hurricane-fast winds – within 24 hours it had burned 12,000 acres and hundreds of structures.

Any chance of LA fire crews – the best trained and most experienced in the world – containing it, let alone extinguishing it, drop to zero because air tankers and water-hauling helicopters can’t fly in 80mph winds.

So, to recap: 24 hours, 12,000 acres burned.

For my New York friends: Central Park is 850 acres. So, imagine a firestorm that incinerates 14 Central Parks in 24 hours. Or more to the point perhaps, imagine a firestorm that blows through Central Park, incinerating every blade of grass FOURTEEN TIMES in 24 hours.

For my NJ friends: our hometown of Montclair gets off a little better. At 4,000 acres, it would have been reduced to ash only THREE times in 24 hours. Imagine every single resident of Montclair becoming homeless on one night. Imagine the violent energy required for that to happen. Because it did, 3 times over.

And Palisades is only one of the massive fires burning here. The Eaton fire has burned 14,000 acres on the eastern edge of LA.

And it’s still going. As of this minute, the Palisades fire is closing in on 40,000 acres. That’s bigger than San Francisco (thankfully most of it is – for the moment – in remote canyons teeming with scrub foliage; yes, LA is that huge).

As shocking and overwhelming and devastating as this has been for so many thousands and thousands of people – my sister and brother-in-law lost their home; his niece and nephew both lost homes in separate fire areas – it is excruciating to hear these endless lies and blaming and gibberish about how DEI and budget cuts somehow caused or contributed to this absolute apocalyptic disaster.

No city, no county, no state, no country on the planet would or could be prepared and equipped to confront what’s happened here.

Because what has happened here is much closer to a volcanic eruption than a “brush fire.”

Our neighborhood is now within sight of the Palisades fire which overnight spread to Brentwood. Shan is packing her clothes. I have to go inside now and get my mother – already evacuated once with just the clothes on her back – up and ready to go should we be ordered to leave.

Friends, I know there’s not much you can do from far away – aside from donate to the Red Cross, etc.

But I humbly ask that – if you hear someone spreading the all-too prevalent lies being spewed for political score-settling – tell that person – from me – to STFU. Because they have no idea what’s really happening here.

Thanks for listening. I’ll keep you posted, unless we become like the other 10s of thousands who still have no power.

If you’re looking to donate, here are three great, and vetted, places among many:

Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles

World Central Kitchen

Pasadena Humane Society

Andra Day – “Rise Up”

01.05.25

by notesfromachair

Sanewashing

A friend sent me this story from The Daily Beast. It’s about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post refusing to publish a cartoon on its editorial page depicting multi-billionaires like Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as others, kneeling at the altar of Trump and offering up bags of money.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s the cartoon:

It is well known both men, as well as many others in the M-Billionaire class, have donated $1 million apiece to the president elect’s inaugural fund and jetted down to Mar-A-Lago to spend time with him doing…stuff.

As for the cartoon, it was drawn by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who’s been employed at The Post since 2008.

But not anymore.

She quit in protest because in all her time there never once had the paper refused to publish one of her drawings. Tweaks, yes. Out and out refusal? Never. Here’s a link to her Substack with a more specific explanation:

One nixed cartoon is not necessarily concerning. But this is part of a clear trend. Just a few months ago Mr. Bezos overruled his own editorial board and refused to allow The Post to publish its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. In His own piece on His opinion page, he stated, seemingly out of nowhere, that the centuries old tradition of newspaper editorial endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”

Two editorial board members who resigned, as well as a slew of other reporters who also left or spoke out against his new policy, disagreed. As did, well, about 200,000 readers who cancelled their subscriptions.

But this was not limited to The Post.

L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, another M-Billionaire who was also pictured in Ms. Telnaes’ cartoon, similarly blocked that paper’s endorsement of Harris weeks before the 2024 election. Predictably, several members of his board, as well as two of its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writers, resigned.

Not that it any of this ruffled the feathers of the aforementioned M-Bs, or as I now think of them – the new AOCs.

That would be – Aspiring Oligarch Class.

To whit:

Since P S-S’s announcement at the Times, he fired his entire editorial board, noting he plans to replace it with a new team of “more conservative voices ” that will make the publication he’s owned since 2018 a more “fair and balanced newspaper.”

To that end, he announced in December he’d be injecting an AI-powered BIAS METER into its coverage.

Because what could go wrong with that?

On one level, all of this is hilariously unfunny. On another, the Chair (Note: I defer to the third person when my blood begins to boil), who went to grad school in journalism at Northwestern in the post-Watergate era, has to marvel at the chutzpah.

For the one or two of you out there who don’t speak Yiddish or never went to the house of a Jewish friend or met one of their older relatives, chutzpah means extreme self-confidence or audacity.

The coincidental timing of both major newspapers suddenly deciding not to endorse, the large money contributions, and the total lack of concern of what the trained journalists they have working for them and, in many cases have long employed, have to say, IS a THING. It’s what they teach us in journalism school to sniff out (Note: That’s the technical term). In court, it’s called evidence. And when there are enough examples of it in enough places and at enough places, it’s called a trend. And if you google any of this subject matter, or even political contributions among billionaires, you will come upon numerous stories from REPUTABLE news sources (Note: Not “fake.” And not from a random podcast or on TikTok) with much more evidence.

Now of course, there is going to be blow back. Like David Shipley, editor of the WaPo’s opinion page, who stated re: the cartoon nixing that “not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force” and that HIS decision (Note: Bezos’ name was cleverly not mentioned) was made because a previous column had covered the subject and another satirical column was scheduled.

But is a cartoon a column? And what is the limit on covering a subject like a coterie of potential U.S. oligarchs being lined up among the billionaire class all across the country for the first time in history?

Imagine if Watergate had been covered that way? Or the existence of concentration camps during World War II? On second thought….

I often ask friends this rhetorical question re: money and power and the wealthy who wield them as a way to expand both with no real regard for the preservation of democracy, personal freedoms or even the mere existence of a habitable planet –

When is it enough?

The answer is also rhetorical but I’ll state it anyway. There aren’t enough billions in the world to make a scared individual secure, or an insatiable person filled up, or a person who is bottom line obsessed with their own self-interest suddenly become someone who will put you or anyone else in the word before themselves.

Money doesn’t do that. Nor does extreme, outsized power.

It takes a village of relentless truth sayers to hold them accountable.

Loudly and unrelentingly.

Like the people of Bedford Falls vs. Mr. Potter

The biggest note of hope in all of this is that The Daily Beast story linked above was written by an intern named Liam Archaki. He’s a rising senior at Amherst College with a double major in English and philosophy. Not even a journalism major. Also, he interns at The Christian Science Monitor – not one of those fake news, left wing rags the MAGA movement uses to describe credible – meaning vetted – sources of actual news.

See, like other credible online sites, The Daily Beast picks up stories from other reputable bureaus and syndicates. This is even something The Washington Post does. At least at this writing. Who knows what Bezos and some of the other guys have in store for us over the next four years. We could very likely see sources like the One America News morning show hosted by Matt Gaetz in an effort to cover “both sides.”

Sanewashing the most outrageous statements by publishing them in the name of a balanced agenda.

Travie McCoy ft Bruno Mars – “Billionaire”

notes from a chair

Monthly Archives: January 2025

City on Fire

Sanewashing