Everyone's looking for answers to The Big Stuff. You know: What's Life All About? Why Are We Here? What's Beyond This World? What The Hell Was That Thing Atop The Old West Hollywood Sheriff Station?

I was looking for reproductions of those unintentionally ironic 50s and 60s Civil Defense brochures, as ideas for an art project. There's a style of bad commercial illustration peculiar to that period, and for some reason the best examples tend to be on instructions for surviving nuclear holocausts. O magnum mysterium right there, but we digress.

Suddenly, while I was perusing a great site full of old CD memorabilia, my eyes fell upon The Picture. The Picture which did nothing less than answer one of the Great Questions posed above. That Thing Atop West Hollywood Sheriff was a Chrysler Air Raid Siren.

That's right. At the height of the 50s nuclear-hysteria period, Chrysler made air raid sirens. Not just ordinary air raid sirens. Chrysler air raid sirens. Powered by nothing less than the industrial-strength version of their awesome old hemi-head V8, the engine that invented nitro burnin', tire smokin', Top Fuel Eliminator racing. This one had 331 cubes for 180 honest horsepower at 4000 RPM. It ran at 4600 RPM peak, coupled by a drag-racing-style clutch to a jet-turbine-sized compressor and chopper device. All this pushed better than 20,000 acoustic watts out a battery of lethal-looking exponential horns, creating a different sort of blown Chrysler. And if you think Chrysler engines made noise at the drags, these gave you 138 dBC at 100 feet. Folks, that's loud. Jet afterburner loud. Rocket liftoff loud. We're cranking.

I knew from a misspent youth and too many visits to UCLA physics open houses that sirens are the hot setup if you want to make serious noise. Foghorns, steam whistles, electronic warning devices, etc all have their uses, but sirens are what turn real grown up peoples' horsepower into the kind of acoustic energy that sets fire to cotton brought nearby. The kind that not only warns you through the fog, but dissipates some of it. The kind that sold Chrysler Air Raid Sirens to cities looking to alert, or at least considerably frighten, every last living soul in a five mile radius with one conveniently located cry of doom right from atop the police or fire station.

Nuclear family?

And, of course, the cry of doom is just what it was. I guess the operating manual for Gabriel's Global Nuke War Horn would have been a bad place for irony, but even so, the whole semiotic is a bit, uh, fifties. You are told, in the most offhand language possible, just how to fire up the hemi-head. You are shown just how to sound the Take Cover (aka Kiss Your Butt Goodbye) signal by operating the engine throttle, either remotely or while riding atop the rotating 12-foot assembly, wearing your 30 dB hearing protection. Then, having sounded the curtain for Western civilization, you are matter-of-factly instructed to idle the engine for another 2 minutes before shutting it down. Yes, we'd hate to overheat that nice mill before it gets vaporized along with its operator.

Well, at least all this noise making must have provided good, guy-type fun on L.A.'s world-famous "10 AM last Friday of the month" drills. I used to love those. The siren goes off. Quick! Ask Bert the Turtle what time it is! 10 AM! Quick! Ask Bert the Turtle what day it is! Friday! Quick! Ask Bert the Turtle what week it is! Oh good. Don't have to duck 'n' cover THIS time.

It turns out that L.A. County had several of these urban sound machines, all painted green instead of Chrysler's normal bright red. I remember seeing The Button at Sheriff's Radio Center downtown, one push of which would activate the County sirens, but I never dreamed what kind of horsepower it waited to unleash.

When the air raid siren system was retired, it was cheaper to disconnect the things than try to get them back down and haul them away (listed weight: close to three US tons). So there they sat. Later, when people started showing an interest in these kind of devices, the sirens finally came down, one by one, until today there are only three left. The Big Bopper went to an uncertain fate in 1994, when the WeHo sheriff built a new station. He's cracked his last nightclub window on Santa Monica Boulevard. The "exotic dancers" will just have to do that themselves.

Another of L.A. County's doom sounders, apparently from out in the S.F. Valley somewhere, has gone to Texas, a good place for doom nowadays. It worked the first time it was fired up, out in the country where one can do such a thing, blowing years of dirt and rust out the horns at 400 miles per hour, and making a fine old racket. It is being fully restored, and will make the show circuit as "Big Red". The owner has two of these sirens, one for show and one for blow, and he advises that six others are owned by collectors/restorers.

"Big Daddy" Don Garlits, the champion drag racer who certainly went through his share of Chrysler parts in his time, has one of these. Besides Texas, operating sirens are in NC and PA. Soon MI will have one too, in the Chrysler Museum.

I always thought L.A. should have kept some kind of working siren system. I think people got way too conceptually bogged down in the notion of an "air raid siren" as opposed to just an "emergency siren." In tornado country they have no such illusions, and no town is considered safe without some way of making noise that warns people to take cover in a hurry.

Of course, the cruddy little L.A. city sirens were getting to be a nuisance, going off at all the wrong times and giving nuke-era flashbacks to baby boomers, so the wires to them were cut. They continue to sit on their poles throughout the city and rust. Presumably, though, this would not be prohibitively expensive to fix. Meanwhile, I doubt any of the county's proper Chrysler Air Raid Sirens ever accidentally went off in Los Angeles. I think THAT would have been something I'd have heard about, or more likely, heard.

But what is there to warn about in L.A.? Earthquakes, of course. It's known that, depending on just where the San Andreas Fault ruptures, there'd be anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes' warning of The Big One everyone's always predicting. That's how much faster radio waves travel than the earthquake waves in the ground, provided the proper signal is transmitted. You wouldn't have time to run out for some extra water and batteries, but at least you could find a safe place to ride it out, just like Bert told you to.

Of course, you'd need money, training, and commitment to educating the public. All three are a bit short in Arnie's brave new California. Maybe it's time to aim a Chrysler Air Raid Siren at the State Capitol.

 

Gimme Shelter

Chrysler Air Raid Siren Specifications
Online Civil Defense Museum
VictorySiren.com

We hear a lot about how America was able to resolve a disputed election without tanks in the streets of Miami. For some reason, we are supposed to be proud of this, though I can't imagine why apathy would be anything to brag about.

Well, we can't cite even this dubious fact as an example of our fine democracy any more. Here's a photo taken November 21, 2003, in the fine city of Miami:

Looks like it just took the USA a little longer.

Now, the question becomes whether any government that needs to call out the tanks against a broad cross section of its own people can retain legitimacy for any length of time. The "Eastern Bloc" had a good thing going for a while, and tanks were most definitely a major part of street culture at times. Today, however, there is no "Eastern Bloc," and no USSR either. In Central America, US-annointed strongmen were able to tank their own people, but most of them no longer exist either.

These photographs from Miami, therefore, have empowered both ends of the anti-fascist spectrum. Some of the best, and most politically relevant, ones were taken by a Freeper, as the members of that pugnacious conservative site are sometimes called. Just as the Greek Orthodox Church has its Second Easter, our cause now has a Second Florida, and it won't help the Man any more than the first one did. They continue to win all the battles, but they're losing the struggle.

People tell a lot of crazy stories about that part of Dubbya's Axis known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). At least around the DMZ, it probably really is one of the planet's odder places. The oddest story I recall is how some radios were once sold with their tuning capacitors welded into place by government order, so that they only received one station.

Similar tales are told about the hotel in Pyongyang, where every guest room had a multi-position selector switch for changing the radio station. The guests could twiddle this switch until the knob fell off, but every position got the same thing.

True or false, such stories make one appreciate the USA. We simply don't do that kind of crap here. Never have, and (cross your fingers!) never will. Often, though, I start to get the rather unsettling notion that, with our current media, we'll never have to.

Let's do some background: Today, at least 100 thousand marched in London to express their displeasure with Dubbya and his poodle Tony Blair. In Turkey, where people have lately been making their statements with ammonium nitrate, someone took out the whole British consulate, with the consul in it, and also removed a British bank while they were at it. Presumably Al-Queda had a lot to do with this, reviving debate over whether US policy has in fact made it into the world's other superpower. All this was enough to send the Dow down 70 points.

Nearer home, a dandy police riot is going in various parts of Miami, not the quietest city even on a good day, as a few thousand protesters take on a few thousand cops protecting the latest world trade meeting. As always, the protesters are losing all the battles and winning the war, showing the world once again that the invisible hand of the market is really the visible fist of the global corporate ruling class. The litigation from this one will last years, for better or worse, just like Chicago in 1968.

Up in DC, meanwhile, a false radar contact caused the brief evacuation of the White House East Wing, and scrambled fighters from Andrews (no stand-down this time!). Over on the Hill, Democrats are threatening to filibuster Dubbya's energy bill.

Nearest yet, they finally charged Phil Spector, the teenage Wall Of Sound producer turned paranoid gun nut, with murder. Our transit system is grinding back to life following an agreement to mediate the strike. The food markets are still out, though, and that epic strike/lockout gets nastier by the day.

In other words, a lot of big stuff happened today. One might think that the news would want to talk about some it. One might. But one would think wrong.

CNN has aired nothing but Michael Jackson's surrender to the Santa Barbara fuzz for at least two hours now. Oh, the face on the screen changes, and tempting news tidbits crawl past underneath. About every 8 minutes the suddenly politicized AARP tells us why we need Dubbya's Medicare bill. The live story being covered, though, stays the same, and drones on, showing us the outsides of airplanes, the outsides of cars, the outsides of vans. Transportation seems to be very important today.

But this is America. We have choices. Don't like CNN? Try another channel. Pfft... The Great One. Try yet another. Nope, all Michael all the time. OK, try Google. The White Glove Wearer. Surf the net... well, uh, watch out for the overload from CNN sending everyone to SB Sheriff's web server for Michael's compellingly bizarre mug shot. Oops.

In the interest of efficient operation of the Internet, I will provide everyone with the mug shot right here, even though I think celebrity felonies are basically jamming. You know, like when you try to tune in your short wave station and make up your mind for yourself, but you get bloob gobble glunk glub blub blub instead, because someone's decided to make up your mind for you. That kind of jamming. Not a weapon of mass distraction. A weapon of mass bandwidth denial.

Many of us watching the hundreds of media converging on Santa Barbara already have OJ deja vu all over again. Is Camp Michael far behind? Now, some will call this giving the public what it wants to see. I call it giving the public what it's been trained to want. And I call it totalitarianism.

At least Kim Jong-il is honest about it.

Halloween is always a good time to think about the old 1938 radio drama "War of the Worlds," since it was broadcast on October 30, as something of a Halloween trick or treat.

Everyone knows the schtick. It starts off with a fake weather forecast, than a fake RRRRRRRamon RRRRRRRaquello orchestra "live" from the fake Meridian Room of the fake Hotel Park Plaza in a fake New York City.

Practically before RRRRRamon can finish "La Cumparsita," fake New Jersey is toast. Minutes later, fake New York is gassed. All the fake people are dead, and so is the fake air. We end up with a fake ham (2X2L) calling any fake station (on WABC's broadcasting frequency, apparently) and not raising a fake soul. Finally, he too drops dead at the mike. At least I think he's supposed to be dead. You can't shut up a ham any other way.

The tale is often told of how, by the time 2X2L had taken The Big QRT, the non-fake US public had gone absolutely nucking futs, panicking in the non-fake street.

Whatever.

I learned early on in film school that "War of the Worlds" had been Howard Koch's first big-time writing gig. And, of course, we know all about Orson Welles and Rosebud and all that. I took it upon myself to transcribe the really well-written part, around when Carl Phillips, the fake CBS news announcer, gets fake-toasted while covering the fake Martian immolation of a decidedly non-fake little bend in the road called Grover's Mill, NJ. (It is said that Koch got the name by closing his eyes and sticking a pin in the map.)

A few minutes into this effort, I became scared as hell. Reading Howard Koch's words, playing them in the brain instead of from a noisy old recording, turned this into some damn good shit. I got a huge respect for this show, and that of course made it an even better obsession than it had been most of my life anyway.

I didn't get very far in my transcription, but a fan has since done this work for me. (Wonderful, this net.) It's at http://members.aol.com/jeff1070/script.html, and it's still pretty damn scary reading.

At some point in my callow youth, I had asked my mother, who of course I figured was born sometime around the upper Pleistocene, whether she'd actually heard the first (live) airing of "War of the Worlds." Turned out she had. Pretty cool.

She told the classic story we've all heard. It was Sunday night. Tubes warmed up in Crosleys and Silvertones all over Yahoo Holler, or wherever people lived in the Jurassic Era. Tension mounted as we neared 8 PM, when the most popular show on the whole radio came on the Red Network of the National Broadcasting Corporation (boing boing boing).

This was the "Chase & Sanborn Hour." It always started with a comedy sketch by Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Yes, the big-time act of 1938 was a ventriliquist on the radio. And you never ONCE saw his lips move, either.

My understanding is that Grandpa, like everyone else, flipped over to Mercury Theater on CBS when NBC went to music. This was the high-class program of the week, no commercials, no sponsor in fact. And so he came in on the neo-Hindenburg scene, got the living shit scared out of him, and decided he'd load up the old Model A just in case. While it sounds almost TOO good, I'm sure his shotgun was never far out of reach. He's said to have run the Klan off his farm with it. Martians in 600-foot heat-ray machines would have listened a lot better.

And so I never had any trouble believing that War of the Worlds had flipped out the whole country. Unfortunately, this now appears to be an urban legend. Rating surveys of the era show that only about 12 per cent of Mercury Theatre's audience actually tuned in late. Therefore, while I have no trouble believing Grandpa's story, it can't explain the mass panic.

The most fashionable current explanation for the mass panic is that there wasn't one. Media spin, apparently.

Print media, as the story goes, were eager to jump on the few police reports of people losing it, embellishing them with all the he-said-she-said friend-of-friend accounts of suicides, screaming masses, distraught New Yorkers leaping into the Hudson River, families fleeing Newark with wet rags over their faces, and other such wholesome entertainment. These old newspaper accounts make today's TV news look positively sober by comparison. They're also racist, with stereotypically gullible "Negroes" flocking to their Harlem parlor churches for a few final choruses of "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" before the world ended.

But there's a kernal of truth here. Some impressionable souls just went completely over the edge. No matter that the time frame is completely wrong (think all of World War II in 15 minutes). No matter that the whole second half is a Welles monologue broken by only one (rather hokey) dialogue scene. No matter - biggest stretch of all - that Welles doesn't have to wait even one second at the Holland Tunnel. Nope. They heard it, they believed it, and that's all there was to it.

Trick or treat.

We probably shouldn't feel superior. The radio is still a very subliminal and insidious medium, which is why we love it so. I remember the time I called up a friend, all breathless because I'd turned on my radio and heard KPFK being raided by the FBI, right on the air. Well, KPFK had indeed been raided by the FBI, but not right on the air, because I came in on an old tape of a Patty Hearst investigation which had indeed culminated in the raiding of the station - 25 years ago. Trick or treat. The treat is the reminder that the radio retains its unique character, and its power. We have a superheterodyne and we are going to use it.

The psywar types talk about black propaganda - basically War of the Worlds done as tactical deception instead of trick or treat, to mislead target groups into giving up their positions or their will to fight. Closer to home, plenty of Americans believe what they hear on the radio, though it runs more to terrorists from Iraq than invaders from Mars. Is this a psyop too? You decide.

But surely, say the pundits, anything as big as the instant vaporization of New Jersey would now send everyone straight to the TV, for the pictures. This is true. Everyone who wasn't in a car or similarly inconvenienced would flip on the TV. They'd get Judge Judy. End of the story?

Maybe at one time, but now I'm not so sure. In our recent fires, I'd frequently hear something ominous on the scanner, go running to the TV, and catch it once again with its head up its electronic butt. Even when they had actually broken in for news, they were never really on top of the situation. And the TV stations have scanners too. I know the guy who installed half of them. What they don't have, any more, is the troops, the desire, or the corporate commitment. You're gonna trust this bunch for anything?

No, the TV nooz sure ain't what it used to be, when Channel 5 kept the monochrome Orthicon cameras on the flames all night long, even when the tubes burned in and the transmitter overmodulated. Glass pickups and iron men. All gone, like faux-Jersey in "War of the Worlds."

There's something to the ancient wisdom that the veil between our world and whatever else is out there becomes thinnest when October becomes November. I've noticed that all my life.

Of course, science can provide answers too. This is the season when, for whatever reason of orbital alignment, all the various goofy geomagnetic and ionospheric things happen the most. Absent the light pollution we have now, the Pagans would have surely noticed this, and the Christians of course built on the Pagan tradition for All Hallow's Eve.

Even in the old days when we had a real rainy season, Halloween was too early. Nevertheless, it's pouring tonight. I'm wondering if all the smoke in the air didn't seed the clouds. They say that it always rained hard after old gun battles, before smokeless powder came in. Maybe someone knows more about this than I do. In any event, this has to be the first time we got the mudslides in the burned-off areas before the fires even went out. Poor L.A..

Turner Classic Movies is showing all the great old Frankenstein flicks, in order. We're up to Son of Frankenstein. As his appliance makeup gets smoother and cheaper, the monster is looking more and more like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Check it out. Put the bolts in our new governator's neck and you've got it. I wonder if this unconscious association affected the voting.

Have a good Samhain.

The fire burned to the east of Lake Arrowhead. It blew rapidly north in the heavy wind, taking 350 buildings up the hill in Upper Cedar Glen before running off into uninhabited forest. These are not rich people who were burned out. It's one of the places working locals live. The rich folks have apparently gotten off this time.

News reporters will not be able to do the fake-pity number on all the "expensive homes," as if somehow a $3 million loss to a billionaire is more tragic than a $300,000 loss to a working family. They love this one. I always get the idea it's almost a national pride thing, in the same way the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast took to burning property in their potlatches just to prove they could afford it. "We just burned up more than your whole country is worth, how bout THEM apples, losers?"

Here's a real good web page by someone who knows people up there, with detailed telephone reports on the situation. Despite critically low resources, the fire fighters did their usual heroic job. Everyone always thanks them after one of these things. Well, so do we. Nice work.

Of course, the politicians are already traipsing through the ashes, looking appropriately shocked for the heavy metal brigades of news cameras. The current governor, who we elected and then blamed for Enron, continues to tell a hokey story of a little girl who showed him where her room used to be. Some bodybuilder, who we apparently elected to replace the governor we blamed for Enron, continues to mumble about how much worse a mess this state is in than he thought. Hasta la vista, bebe.

All you need to know about the public's grasp on reality in California is that someone graffiti'd "I'LL BE BACK" on the ruins of their home. Unfortunately, something tells me that The Terminator won't be around any time soon with a robot construction crew from the future.

It should come as no surprise that the Washington oiligarchs are already dancing around the bonfire. There have been a lot of noises about how it's finally time to pass Bush's "Healthy Forests Act." This is the one which environmentalists have derisively tagged "No Forest Left Behind," since it would set a legal precedent for major logging in just about all of them.

It's a complex issue. As we're finding out, California forests got too thick to survive our increasingly frequent droughts. Up at Lake Tahoe, they've been cutting selected trees, and burning off a lot of the dead stuff and scrubby secondary growth. As they say in the bureaucratese, "Fire is sometimes appropriate to the ecology."

Unfortunately, lumber companies aren't always into thinning the forest. They vastly prefer to clear everything out, completely destroying whole regions forever. Anyone who trusts these bark beetles to do the right thing might as well pop a nuke on the forest right now.

I hope this tragedy doesn't end up with yet another resource handed over to corporate rapacity. We've already had one Reichstag Fire in this country.

To be fair, though, here's a link to the other side of the debate.

On September 11, 2001, we cancelled our annual trip to New York, after a certain unpleasantness took place in that city. The airline, which had just seen 3 of its aircraft experience controlled flight into buildings, and had lost another one out in Pennsylvania on the way to no good itself, gave us our money back.

This left us with some extra money and time, and so we picked a nearby driving destination for an alternate little trip. We did what people in El Lay have been doing for a cheap quickie since the water company built a dam in 18-something, and went to Lake Arrowhead, which I'd by some weird twist of fate missed ever visiting.

I'm something of a conoisseur of nosebleed roads hereabouts. I rate them on a 0-10 scale, where 0 is the Santa Ana Freeway and 10 is the Mount Wilson Fire Road, an experience that makes Wolf Creek Pass look tame. The road up to Arrowhead came in around 8.75. It was beautiful. All the heat and smog dropped away, the light changed, and the vegetation took on a fall look almost as good as New York would have been. The road kept switching back on itself, climbing vertiginously to a 5000-foot clifftop where it became the well-named "Rim of the World Highway." Such a rim in the ocean would definitely have sent Columbus back to Spain in terror, a broken man, welcoming his certain decapitation at the hands of Ferd and Izzy.

After hanging over this abyss for a number of miles, we reached a turnoff, and took a beautiful trip into Arrowhead itself. The best thing about this area was its enormous, old, Ponderosa pines. Between the obscene, corporate desecration of the giant redwoods and sequoias in the north of our state, and the belchings of a million SUVs stunting too many of the pines down here, there really aren't many places left that have that true, majestic, California, old-growth, forest look. But this, surprisingly, was one of them.

We hung out in Arrowhead for about a week. It was warm in the day and New York-cold at night. The experience was surprisingly wonderful, and wonderfully surprising. In fact, it was far better than Big Bear down the road, which is more resort-y and skier-y.

Early on, the bourgeoisie had discovered Arrowhead. They were still very much there, throwing up gargantuan, $2.5 million, "vacation homes" all the way around the lake. Places big enough to house 10 families in Haiti sat shuttered and empty for months at a time.

Farther back from the lake were the full-time residences of ordinary people who just wanted to be in the mountains. These were your typical, attractive mountain houses, a few A-frames, a few yuppie design statements, but mostly just the kind of modest property one sees all around the San Bernardino National Forest.

The locals didn't have to like us, but they did, and we got into some wonderful conversations. Outside of town was a real, working observatory, that someone had built just to have a real, working observatory. Going the other way, one found a strange and wonderful little neighborhood up one hill, where the women were into dirt biking and a tame wolf wandered the street. I even found two of the right kind of pre-stretched artist canvases at a nondescript little mom-and-pop everything-store where we'd stopped for drinks. Into the car trunk they went, and there was one less thing to do on return to L.A..

If the wind blew, the trees all gave off a soothing, white noise that swirled around from all directions. If the wind stopped, you had that same, above-the-inversion, dead stillness which makes Mount Wilson such a spiritual experience back in L.A.

I always remembered Arrowhead, and its beauty, and how for a week there had been something to think about, and meditate on, besides Bush, Ashcroft, war, fear, Anthrax, and The Next Attack.

Unfortunately, we probably saw the last such fall in poor wonderful Arrowhead. There were problems even when we were there. The climate in Southern California has changed in the last 20 years, almost certainly due to global warming, though you'll never get anyone to admit this on the record. The rainy season starts later, when it comes at all, and then it's over too fast to restore the water table. When it does last longer, there's a flood, but that's another story.

Arrowhead, for some reason, gets the worst of this. They've had a severe drought as long as anyone can remember. Even when it does rain (or snow), it seems to pass Arrowhead by. When we were there in 2001, the lake had dropped something like 17 feet, leaving many boat docks high and dry.

It got far, far worse. Starting in 2002, the forest died.

One never hears about this ecological calamity, because the media don't cover ecological calamities. But let's cut to the chase: The entire San Bernardino National Forest is dead. Gone. Period.

By 2003, it was only painfully obvious to scientists and public alike that there would soon be no pine trees left, at all. Coniferous trees are giving in to the drought, all the way down to San Diego, but it's worst in Arrowhead. What the bark beetles didn't get, the fungus did. R.I.P.. The whole forest. A 40-mile-long ridgetop, as densely wooded as any mountain in the United States, was guaranteed to turn brown and ugly, until taken over by secondary growth in time.

For two years, the problem became what to do with the dead remains of the formerly best forest in California. Locals got permission to cut down a few of the deadest trees, and stack the long wooden logs. Most of the dead trees, however, just sat there, while people decided who was going to have to pay for this mess.

It's one of those ironies that make capitalism so infuriating. There's been more than enough money to log off the sacred groves of the north, but none to take out Arrowhead's dead trees. And so they just stood there, deader than last year's Christmas tree, waiting to explode.

I mean really. Have you ever set fire to last year's Christmas tree? Fess up. C'mon, all the guys know what I'm talking about. They were little boys once too.

Scary huh? Bet you didn't play with fire for at least a whole month after that one.

Now imagine 5 million of last year's Christmas tree, all 60 feet high, completely enveloping a series of small towns totalling maybe 70,000 in population. Not a good feeling.

Bureaucratic wheels turned fitfully, groaning and creaking, but nothing happened until this week. Finally, the bill to commit the first $10 million, a tiny fraction of the amount that will be needed, made it to conference committee in Congress. It was given a good chance to pass.

There is only one little problem. Much of the forest just burned down.

Now, California burns every fall, but this year is different. It's meaner, it's everywhere at once, and it doesn't let up. It's already burned off an area larger than Rhode Island, eaten at least 2000 buildings, and killed one fire fighter. Control is weeks off.

Humans get tired and drop, but the fire doesn't. Fire fighters are doing an incredible job, on very little rest, but much of the time they're outflanked. They'll be the first to tell you that they've won the battles and lost the war. They've been done in partly by weather, but mostly by too much political bureaucracy, too much BS, too many cuts for too many years, too many misplaced priorities, and too many people talking instead of doing.

We've failed as a culture. We've gone right on consuming, devouring, burning carbon, building better and deadlier bombs, indulging our fantasies of global empire, and cutting back at home, over and over again. It's been decades since our priorities have included essential public safety services, and good forest management. Wildfires in other states gave a clear warning of the catastrophe in store if Southern California ever went off all at once. Was anyone learning? Sure doesn't look that way.

Now, we get to be the ones who are Shocked and Awed. Up in Arrowhead, it's the damndest firestorm in California history, 2500 degrees F, a Hiroshima bomb's worth every 20 minutes, with flames shooting 300 feet into the air. Fire hoses do absolutely nothing, as the water vaporizes in mid-air. Whole streets of buildings simply vanish, turning instantly to exploding gases and evil black smoke. Cars don't burn as much as they melt. A nuke cloud rises three miles into the sky before blowing hundreds of miles downwind.

It shows up on the weather satellite pictures, and why not? It is the weather. The air in this part of L.A., 70 miles west, is opaque. Measured 1.5 mile visibility at the airport, and it's all smoke. The sunlight is red and the shade is yellow-pink. The setting moon is orange. My green car is a dirty brownish-white from the ash, which I'm warned eats the paint. Apparently they're having the same problems in Las Vegas, 200 miles the other way, and in Arizona. It's covering the whole US southwest.

As I write this, Arrowhead's fate is very much unknown. The power lines are gone, the population has fled, the smoke and flame have blocked all visibility, the harsh mountain winds shift every few hours, and the fire fighters run from one sudden explosion to the next. Right now, the worst damage appears to be in a place called Hook Canyon, just east of the lake, but a good ways up into the hills. Much of it looks like a nuke scene. However, that was two wind shifts ago. Nobody has the slightest idea how this one will end. It will be days before we finally know what will get to remain there, and what won't.

This pisses me off, and saddens me, at the same time. I loved Arrowhead, for being beautiful, and for getting my mind off politics for a whole week right after 9/11. It was a dream of a place, and it will be again, in 5 years. Eventually, that wet-ash smell will finally all blow away, the soil will turn green instead of white, the secondary growth will soften the post-nuclear outlines of scorched chimneys, the rockslides will stop, and Arrowhead will achieve a new and different sort of beauty. The people, being adaptable mountain people, will prevail. Mountain people always do. But this forest didn't have to die, and this fire didn't have to happen.

I hope there's one hell of a stink about this, but I suspect that there won't be. There's no one in a foreign country that we can blame for it.

Unless, of course, Texas secedes again.

Simple.

I'm mad at Dennis Miller.

It started last summer when I joined about 6000 of my closest friends in the street in front of the Century Plaza Hotel, where we gave a fine Los Angeles welcome to the governor of Texas, who was inside the building raising $2 million while serving in his acting capacity as President of the United States.

There was a time when Dennis Miller would have been down in the street too, instead of inside the building introducing said governor of Texas to the assembled fat cats who had come in their shiny SUVs. Well, I guess we all change.

Another thing, though. The rant, as an art form, has kind of run its course. Every web site out there has a weekly rant, monthly rant, or yearly rant (which is about how often I've changed mine lately).

Blogs aren't much less common, but they're so much hipper. Enjoy this one.