Fuck You, Orange County

See him! Does he not offend thee? Does such iniquity not rise stinking to the very heavens? The viperous evangelist reared up, his elbows cocked and goat's eyes smoking, and thrust a bony finger down. Die! he screamed. Perish a terrible death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye, God save your soul amen.
-From McCarthy's Suttree

The night before last I was in the hotel bar with Ian and Patra, logisticians over a beer. We were discussing the road agead when I started to notice a CNN International Edition newscast on the satellite TV. The hour’s grim tidings began with a report on Iraqi refugees. After eliding any talk of ultimate responsibility, the show moved on to a segment that centered on the material losses incurred by Orange County homeowners as a result of wildfires with arson as the suspected cause. As I listened to the reporter rattle off how many millions of dollars had gone up in smoke, and as I watched a wholesome and well-heeled looking white family wail over the cinders of what had been their dream home, it occurred to me that the segment was being broadcast in the service of a religious rite, however unconsciously. What we were watching was an elaborately coded ritual to mourn the loss, not only of material possessions, but of the sanitized atomistic disentropy of the American dream. Never mind that the family was entirely unscathed in life and limb (even the fucking dog made it); never mind that, pending the insurance disbursement, they were about to embark on a million dollar shopping spree; never mind that the privileged strata of our society (of which these people eminently were a part) have transcended any true dependence on their material goods as a function of insurance policies and financial instruments—what CNN had put together was a hypocritical and atavistic dirge where the tawdry bit players keened over a feigned loss of wealth, fungible chattel that they will promptly forget all about after picking out a new house and taking a few trips to the mall, with maybe a weekend in Acapulco thrown in for good measure. Alloying con artistry with myth, the program showed the family isolated amid the ruins of their gorgeous refuge, conspicuously omitting the social and financial institutions that would nullify their loss, so inviting us to take part in a mourning ritual that was as offensive as it was meaningless. The gall.

As hinted earlier, the ritual's second function was to lay bare a rupture in the mail of the American dream—unguessed, I guess, by its orchestrators. Look at this family, formerly so secure in their home nestled in the woods away from everything and everybody. Who righteously were reenacting their innocent roles as settlers on the frontier, these proud, standardbearing, insular encapsulators of that original taming and of all that is white and godly, carbons to a tee of their forebears save his commutes to Burbank and her online shopping. When what foul heathen should set a satanic FIRE and destroy all they had accomplished at a stroke. The reactions seem neatly scripted: “I can’t believe it.” “Who would do this to people they don't even know?" “I never thought it would happen to us.” Read: People like us are not supposed to be affected by the outside world, or be vulnerable to disaster. It’s their own little 9-11. And just like 9-11, fragments of the shattered myth must be reconstructed using a scaffolding of righteousness, a mortar of vengeance. And then, when the shackled perpetrator is brought before wrathful Justice and sentenced and dragged off, the whole charade can start from the top.

I think being in Ethiopia helped key me into the absurdity of the segment somewhat. I imagine that on the very evening the report was shown, there were dozens of people throughout this impoverished country who were silently starving, shitting themselves to death, or succumbing to the final inert throes of malaria or AIDS. I wonder: How would a poor Ethiopian audience member react when made to understand that these people had not really lost anything? Not that I claim any kind of novelty for my observation. I would hope that there might be millions of Americans who might—should they pause to really consider it—be offended by that dirge to material lost. And more millions of intelligent Americans who would fail to understand why insurers and government should be obliged to defray the losses suffered by fools who choose to live on beaches and floodplains and faultlines or on southern California’s tinderbox chaparral. It is a mockery of the human intelligence to beg pity for a disaster without a victim (though our vindictive pseudobiblical legal system is expert at prosecuting crimes with no victim other than the wrathful deity of the old testament)—or, more properly, a disaster whose victim is the majority who subsidize the vain and wasteful 'lifestyle' choices that are the ordained prerogative of the hood-winking, forest-and-beachland-dwelling minority, America's Saxon elect, of whose depredations and hypocrisy the continent’s modern history is but a long blotter.

At the end of the broadcast there was talk of a $250,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of the putative arsonist. Would that I had $250,000 of my own to offer up to a copycat. Fuck you, Orange County.