Image by Nick Roney.

“LA is vast. It is a city and a county. It is a global place, a Pacific Rim space, a “Third World” metropolis. It has all the contradictions of the world and all the world is condensed in it. The homes of rich, poor, middle class, Black, white, Asian, Latino have burned. Fire is coming for all of us.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen

As I sit at my desk to write, the light shining through my office window is a distinct orange, and the sky outside is a murky, polluted shade of brown. The air quality is horrendous, and my eyes are dry and itchy. My throat is sore. Two major fires are still raging out of control in Los Angeles, the city I love, with little to no containment. Another has just erupted in Woodland Hills. Fortunately, we’re in a safe zone away from the infernos. Many more are not so lucky.

Scrolling through the latest fire updates on social media, I quickly read commenters who are cheering on the flames as if they’ve been ignited to smoke out the wealthy elites from their mansions. They seem gleeful. A few conspiracists I come across believe this is all a planned land grab (by whom I’m unsure), while others spread lies that the shadowy Deep State, the ones behind weather-altering chemtrails, is somehow responsible.

I gather that most of these folks don’t live in Los Angeles (or the real world?), and I’m sure very few could point out the location of Eagle Rock on a map. Yet, here they are, experts on fire ecology and the history of Los Angeles.

I see, as per usual during a big L.A. fire, that a few are passing around Mike Davis’s fantastic essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” not because of Davis’s thesis that the poor, by capitalist design, suffer most during a natural disaster but because they seem to believe he was some kind of schadenfreude. It’s all a disservice to his legacy and a twisted misreading of Davis’s important work.

A fervent critic of the conditions that lead to........

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