California fires are a reminder of lines we must not cross

Family and friends around the world watch the news and remember us, asking if we are safe. And we, in turn, remember friends closer to the fires. We are packed and ready to evacuate, they say.

This state of readiness and helplessness is now a part of life here. It is always the smell that warns us first, just as it had for our ancestors. Sometimes a hint of woody smoke, like a religious ceremony. Sometimes, a nasty hint of burnt plastic.

Once, in September 2020, the sky stayed dark all day. The smoke from up north had mixed with the Bay Area fog. Bladerunner. Apocalyptic. Like the movies, but real.

Fires, big and small. Last semester, a plume of smoke above the Oakland Hills, property damaged, but no lives lost.  But a few years before that, the opposite. A respected colleague and friend gone, in his own home.

There is a sense of precariousness. But then, each day that passes without disaster, we feel grateful for California. The Pacific Ocean on the rim, the mountains all around. Here, the perfect place, and the recipe, they say, for the perfect disaster. Incompetence. Corruption. Narcissistic aggrandisement. All the ills of the world. As a family elder who came here in the 1960s once said, “everything good, and everything bad, in America has started in California.”

The world we know today is Made in California. Hollywood produced the American Dream for global consumption. Silicon Valley now puts it out on undetachable, addictive, networks and screens; “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

Ironic, then, that companies, and long-time residents, are fleeing. San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger writes that 18,000 companies have left. His book is subtitled “Why progressives ruin cities,” and many victims of the fires will agree. But then, others will argue with that. America’s polarisation is not just about politics, but over reality itself. For some, the sight of thousands of homes burning is proof of “climate change.” For others, the problem is “wokeism,” and the replacement of merit with identity politics. Memes fill the internet blaming lesbian firefighters. With each swipe of our social media feeds, reality itself seems to shift.

The Democrats cut water to save a fish habitat so the hydrants were dry!  Hollywood mocked God at an awards ceremony!

Facts are hard to find. Decency, even harder. Human suffering hardly registers over pre-determined put-downs.

The fire was “karma” for Gaza! Look at California now despite its GDP!

The distant and the near, the relevant and absurd, collapse on us.

Decades ago, media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz wrote an influential book on television called No Sense of Place. With social media, it seems we have no sense of place, time, and truth. One moment, we are with actor James Woods, who talks about watching through home security cameras as the fires come closer. The next moment, a video of the Hollywood sign shooting up in flames appears. That turns out to be AI.

The crisis in California is not of this place alone, but of our place in this world at this time. Competence in human interaction, let alone civic management grounded in consensus on the sanctity of life, all seem lost in the social media age.

But real life is flawed too. A friend runs for a city council position, and knocks on voters’ doors. What do they ask? Not about the fire-risks in their neighborhood from dried-out trees, but your stand on divestment and Israel. Resolutions about India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. Millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on DEI programs to address a non-existent outbreak of caste discrimination by Hindus in America. These are things local politicians focus on now, not what looms in their own communities.

California has no sense of place left, nor a memory of the cultural and spiritual promise it once upheld. It sees the world now through sterile, megalomaniacal, technocratic, psycho-political eyes. It is a state, and a state of mind, on the brink.

But then, California still remains the “final frontier.” Not a colonial one that incites conquest, but a humbling one. A reminder maybe of a frontier we must not presume to cross. Mother Nature’s line in the sand to the Anthropocene, maybe?

An end to the ideology of progress.

Do we really know more than our ancestors did?As David Frawley writes in Yoga and the Sacred Fire, “where the sacred fire is not honoured and kept burning with appropriate offerings, other, more destructive forms of fire must manifest.”

It is the sentiment that drives locals to safeguard the deities of the forests and hills still left after the mindless expansion of “development,” tourism, and even “religious tourism” in India. It is the sentiment that indigenous ecological activists around the world yearn to see manifested in policies.

Progressive Californian towns flaunt posters proclaiming respect for science. But where is the science in how our lives are managed by plutocrats and politicians today? Does “climate change denial” explain the next act of arson, greed, or carelessness in California honestly? Or, does a “regressive Hindu festival” account for the smog in New Delhi more than the tons of stubble being burned?

What we should confront before the next fire, earthquake, stampede or disaster strikes is the truth about how much we are ruled by pseudo-causality today. The day we find the courage to say, “where there is smoke, there is a fire,” and not “Zionism” or “Hindutva,” is the day reality can raise its head again.

And the day we can address the world as “Tamaayawut” (in Tongva) or “Bhu-Devi”( in Telugu) again, is the day we will know our place in it again.

The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco