By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Fall is almost here in California. So we know the annual
script.
A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the
need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and
subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire
services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.
Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees
fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of
“climate deniers.”
Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills,
mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send
their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.
Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the
lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go
up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for
weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives
disrupted — and those are the lucky.
California’s deer-in-the headlight progressive officials
will blame “climate change” for the conflagrations. The accompanying power
brownouts, tardy responses, and official blame-gaming will follow as a prelude
for still more solar-panel farms and still less forest management.
There could be a long answer to explain why California
for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60
million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra
forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes
were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.
A cynical interpretation of the eco-agenda was that doing
nothing to clean up the mess was cheap for a broke state eager to spend
billions on high-speed rail and the consequences of open borders. The even more
cynical take would be that dead trees served as green napalm during fire season
to discourage the unwanted hoi polloi from living in the hill and
mountain cabins that in a more perfect world would properly belong, in Sheriff
of Nottingham style, to the Sierra Club. And indeed, the unspoken aftermath of
this latest round of conflagrations is that insurance rates will soar even
higher and make it nearly impossible to live in rural hills and mountains.
Apparently, our ancestral, Neanderthal foresters once
upon a time believed in the time-tried lore of removing dead brush, cutting
down withered trees for needed lumber, and allowing grazing to clear foothills
of dead grasses and low vegetation. But then again, the old-breed thinking has
been seen as obsolete by today’s brilliant new progressive consultants,
professors, and activists. They were too eager to implement a natural strategy
of letting medicinal fires periodically burn forest fuel to remind us that
millions of trees are not for living among, or logging or recreating amid, or
for anything much human-orientated other than a week or so a year backpacking.
California is shutting down both clean-burning
natural-gas plants and nuclear generation, only to find that its heralded wind
and solar plants do not produce enough power in times of high heat, smoke, and
fire, at night or during the day, just when the heat of the dog days forces
millions to ramp up their air-conditioners.
There could be a longer answer for why — when California
is faced with existential threats of soaring taxes, the exoduses of its best
and brightest citizens, crashing services, and biblical heat, smoke, plague,
and fire— its officials obsess over reparations, raising property taxes,
implementing a socialist “you didn’t build that” wealth tax, and jacking up top
income-tax rates over 16 percent.
The more money the state gets, the more the services
degenerate, and the more it needs. And because it has no answer for the
existential crisis of millions of impoverished recent illegal immigrants (20
percent of the state lives below the poverty line, a third of the nation’s poor
live in California), soaring Medical-subsidized health costs, unsustainable
pensions, the largest homeless population in the nation, and hare-brained
schemes like its fossilized high-speed-rail project, in expiation it seeks
postmodern escapes from premodern threats.
Can’t prevent biblical fires? Then turn to reparations or
a wealth tax. Can’t afford fixing decrepit freeways? Then dream on, with
half-finished high-speed-rail overpasses.
Solar panels fail the grid? Then why not ban more nuclear
plants?
Over the past 40 years, a small coastal cadre became the
nexus of trillions of dollars in global income from high tech, computers,
finance, tony universities, and Hollywood. As the middle class fled the new
Hell of California, the poor of Mexico and Latin America discovered that what
others called a wrecked state, broke from soaring social services and state
pensions, nevertheless seemed to be heaven on earth compared with Oaxaca or El
Salvador.
So the rich got really rich, the poor came in and got a
little less poor, and the middle fled either out of state or to the Sierra and
coastal foothills that are now aflame. So California’s destruction can be
summed up in the hypocrisies and paradoxes of its bankrupt elite, who believe
that their money insulates them from their own toxic ideology, and their
virtue-signaling squares the circle of feeling guilty that they want nothing to
do with the millions of poor they invited in and are relieved that they drove
out millions in the middle classes.
Governor Gavin Newsom not long ago ordered shutdowns of
non–Napa Valley wine-tasting rooms — the winery he owns conveniently being
located in Napa and thus escaping the lockdown orders. A hyper-capitalist made
rich by his inherited “white privilege,” he brags
that the virus will provide the necessary fear and confusion to allow
“opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it pertains to
capitalism”
Newsom certainly in his own case “reimagines” capitalism.
For example, recently, the redistributionist governor was delinquent in paying
thousands of dollars in back property and gift taxes, largely because even his
sizable income and capital have never been sufficient to support his Bay Area
lifestyle. So his rich friends and distant family struggle to fund trusts and
foundations by which to funnel tax-free money to meet his considerable needs.
Newsom seems bewildered about the source of his ample cash flow and so
apparently should not pay his own state what he owes it. In other words, it
would be impossible for such a sort to feel any real empathy for those who were
destroyed by the policies he implements and whose ramifications he avoids.
Once can anticipate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s next move
because, beneath her self-righteousness, she will predictably be silly, often
cruel, and entirely hypocritical. She may be the only House speaker in history
to publicly tear up the president’s State of the Union address, after he
customarily handed it to her on live television. She worries whether we are
Christian enough in welcoming illegal aliens and sacrificing during the
quarantine, while she shows off her designer ice cream in her designer Sub-Zero
refrigerators in her designer wine-country palazzo — surrounded by the sort of
“decorative” fences and “modest” gates we are assured are not walls to keep out
those who, she lectures us, are California’s blessed future.
Pelosi rails about the need for masks. She banters about
the struggle to social distance. She lauds the requirement to shut down the
businesses of the nobodies (at least until the November election is over). And
then, like a teen prankster, she sneaks into a salon, unmasked, scurries about
to get her hair done at a business she wants closed. And yet we wonder whether
she worries about the effects of fires, insolvency, crushing taxes, and illegal
immigration upon others in her state.
Diane Feinstein occasionally offers embarrassing
panegyrics to the Chinese ascendency, often in response to others wishing to
curb Beijing’s mercantilism, dumping, currency manipulation, patent and
copyright theft, technological appropriation, and its eerie mesmerizing of
America’s wealthiest classes with joint ventures. She is a Chinese encomiast
because she has never herself lost a job to outsourcing. She seems oblivious
that the Chinese Communist Party was allowing direct flights into nearby SFO
from Wuhan, ground zero of the virus, whose origins and nature China so long
lied about, while banning travel from Wuhan to anywhere inside China.
No matter, Diane Feinstein’s husband is a billionaire
financier, in part from substantial Chinese investments, despite the “fire
wall” that, she claims, separates every married couple’s finances. In the age
of the Russian-collusion hoax and a pesky Russian under every government bed,
no one in the CIA or FBI seemed to worry much when Feinstein’s loyal chauffeur
of some 20 years proved to be a Chinese Communist spy and informant. Had not
every prior chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee from time to time
chatted on the phone in front of a spy?
How long can a state suffer the rich Bourbons of the Bay
Area?
As long as its brave nobodies still drive ’dozers right
into conflagrations to create lifesaving fire breaks, as long as its despised
farmers continue to serve as the nation’s food basket, as long as unheralded
pilots fly blind into smoke to drop fire retardant, and as long as there is
something left for the parasitical elite of the rich inheritance from
California’s brilliant and industrious but now long-dead past.
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