Is Los Angeles Doomed?
The annihilation of Los Angeles has been a popular topic for a century. What else can Los Angeles do to protect itself from fire?
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Is Los Angeles Doomed?
Steve Sailer
January 15, 2025I’m writing on Monday night, so when you read this, you’ll know more than I did about how badly the Los Angeles fires flared back up during Tuesday’s forecasted windstorm.
The coming annihilation of Los Angeles has been a persistently popular topic over the past century, which has once again risen up with the current fires.
The late journalist Mike Davis published a local bestseller in 1998, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, in which he tabulated, “The destruction of Los Angeles has been the central theme or dominating image in more than a hundred and fifty novels, short stories, and films.” Common fictional causes of L.A.’s coming catastrophe include fire, earthquake, flood, nuclear bombardment, comet strike, and invading hordes of creatures, whether human, animal, or alien.
Some of this is a supply-side phenomenon: The movie industry is centered here, so Los Angeles is the most convenient city for them to blow up.
And many famous science fiction writers were attracted to Los Angeles by the military-industrial complex, such as my late neighbor Jerry Pournelle, who cowrote his comet-strike epic Lucifer’s Hammer with his authorial partner Larry Niven….
But much of it is demand-driven. Lots of people enjoy thinking about the annihilation of Los Angeles.
For example, one of the earlier L.A. Armageddon books, Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, features a sensitive Ivy League-trained painter who is inspired by encountering a typical Los Angeleno simpleton named Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where Matt Groening got the name) to envision his masterpiece: “The Burning of Los Angeles.” At the end, the overexcited throng at a movie premiere white-riots and carries out his theme by burning down Los Angeles.
Read the whole thing there.
The way to keep Los Angeles County from burning down is to INTEND TO. It's the same as for eliminating homelessness. Our ancestors, who were less prosperous, didn't tolerate camping on public and private property without permission. They called it vagrancy and dealt with it as a criminal matter. (They also funded state hospitals for those incapable of living as functioning adults.) As a result, they could have, as Steve would say, "nice things."
Similarly, if asked to guide public policy now from Heaven, they would see that significant public resources were put to clearing brush, controlled burns, pre-positioned fire-fighting resources, and so on. Fewer resources for, well, you know - name the latest progressive obsessions.
California needs simple competence, which is, unfortunately, in short supply.
Ken
The drunken LA advice columnist in Waugh’s “The Loved One” seems almost entirely lifted from West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”.