Strike at the right moment.
The catch is, we often don’t know when that moment is until later.
Stay alert. Stay woke.
I want to thank everyone who commented on my Harry & Tonto post.
I wrote it during a moment of doubt: second-, third-, and fourth-guessing myself, wondering why I even bother with this Substack. I’d fallen into one of those “I’m worthless” pits. Why would anyone want to read a review of a forgotten 1974 movie? But I ploughed ahead and posted it, and then your comments came in. One person shared his own experiences of loss. I was deeply touched that I had touched other people.
One shouldn’t write for approval (or disapproval), but still….
To those readers: thank you. You keep me going.1
Bandwidth—that not-so-new term for personal capacity. With energy, you have near-infinite bandwidth. My bandwidth is currently shot and my patience with nonsense (never high) is at rock bottom.
January 7 to 13 was a bad stretch. I was — and am — gutted over the murder of Debrina Kawam on the subway. The murder itself. On a line I grew up riding. In a station I’ve been to, where you get off to visit Coney Island. By an illegal who had been deported, and who returned during the calamitous reign of the most corrupt administration in the history of the Union. By the way an apparently normal life can veer into catastrophe.
So I was in an already gloomy mood when I overdosed on doomscrolling about the LA fires. My eyes bugged out. I forgot things. Lost things. On the 13th, I deleted the app from my phone and logged out on all my devices.
The fires feel like 9/11 or October 7th on a loop. In all instances, the negligence is mindboggling.
‘Beyond the brink’: Data shows LA Fire Department among the most understaffed in America
Less than a month before fires swept across Los Angeles, a group of longtime firefighters gathered at City Hall to plead for more resources. They were at a “breaking point,” one said. Another revealed that million-dollar fire trucks sat idle because budget cuts had shrunk the number of mechanics available to fix them.
“I’m going to say what people can’t say,” said Freddy Escobar, president of the city’s fire union and a veteran firefighter. “If we cut one position, if we close one station … the residents of Los Angeles are going to pay the ultimate sacrifice, and someone will die.”
This reminds me of the Dust Bowl. “Big Hugh” Bennett warned for years that we were destroying the topsoil of the Great Plains.
No one listened until stuff like this happened.2
I’m furious at the folly, not the fires.
Empty reservoirs. Mayors skipping town. Probationers with blowtorches caught near active fires. California’s sanctuary laws making deportation a joke. Gavin Newsom tossing $50 million at “Trump-proofing the state.”
I am angry at this guy’s goddamned face. He’s Patrick Bateman with political power.
And water—the billionaires who control it, the government that allows it. (And of course, where disaster strikes, can antisemitism be far behind? However, I don’t think that water rights should ever be entangled with private enterprise. California needs to change the laws.)
I am angry because, and I truly hate to say this, there’s a lot of truth in what this Communist-Chinese loving, Jew-hating French bastard says. (Like a drug addict, I went back and checked Xitter, but only for a quick fix.)
I am angry that Biden will throw billions of dollars at California, and none at North Carolina, and without oversight that money will grease the pockets of California’s totally corrupt leftwing political establishment.
I’m angry at this:
I have zero patience for this crap.
I don’t want to discuss it. I just want it swept away in one great big cleansing gust.
I’m angry at DEI. That’s what caused this criminal unpreparedness.
I’m angry at DEI’s enablers, like this jerk from England. Screw him and his ilk. Go back to England, Ben Cohen, and write about the rape gangs that you ignored!
No Benny, DEI is the worst thing on earth. DEI kills. DEI gives us fat lesbian fire chiefs who tell us that it’s our fault we were in a fire.
There’s been a vibe shift, but I don’t think that DEI is anywhere close to being vanquished. Although he wasn’t the slightest bit original3, Richard Hanania is right by saying that the origins of DEI lie in the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965.
Nevertheless…
I think that America may have been thrown a lifeline. We’ll survive not because of our own efforts, but because stuff sometimes works out that way.
We have to be careful not to mess things up. Destroying DEI will take courage, honesty, and stealth.
We can’t afford DEI anymore.
The house is burning.
I did delete one comment, because it was rude and presumptuous. “Never complain, never explain,” said John D. Rockefeller, or Disraeli, or Katharine Hepburn. I agree with the first part. Complaining is a waste of energy. Explaining is different. My comment policy is here. I’ve thought about turning off comments, but I keep them because the good far outweighs the bad.
I’m aware that there are Dust Bowl revisionists who deny any human agency. I don’t want to get distracted by this. Suffice it to say I put them on the same level as Holocaust deniers.
Hanania was preceded by classics about the managerial state by James Burnham, Christopher Caldwell, and Dwight Waldo. But every year the publishing industry needs to make money off old wine in new bottles.