The wildfires now surround Los Angles are uncontained. This from the update received several hours ago from the New York Times:

Los Angeles is surrounded by fire.

The city’s major wildfires have spread, and a new one started overnight in Hollywood Hills. It threatened a wealthy neighborhood and landmarks synonymous with America’s self-image — the Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame. Streets near Hollywood filled with traffic as helicopters raced through the sky.

Nature, a term by which we mean – a layered concatenation of molecules, stuff, and forces such as a 80 mph wind vectored by mountains, along canyon sides hosting bone dry vegetation, as well as million dollar plus homes, etc. etc.. Nature is “real”, the antithesis of what we mean by virtual. The “reality” that we humans fabricate is often shape-shifted in all kinds of ways, according to our taste for illusion.  Nature is not that.

LA burns, the suburbs anyway and I feel a sense of shock. The emotion of my response to words and images pales by comparison to the trauma of being utterly stripped-down by fire, suffering caused by global warming/our way-of-life, plus the institutional paralysis to respond effectively to our situation. What of the stark scene of urber-affluent individuals as bereft of shelter and possessions as are the homeless men, women, children, individuals whom we’ve attempted to make invisible?

How about a story? I like this one in particular because outsized pickup trucks are a contemporary icon of the American male. This story describes a surreal account of workers in a truck stopping to dig a hole. The men “load” this hole onto the pickup bed and after driving off the vehicle strikes a bump in the road. Then, well you’ll get the idea!

…the story
of the lorry and the hole:
some workers dig a hole
and load it onto a lorry,
but when they hit a bump in the road
the hole falls off and,
reversing, the lorry
falls into the hole.

We are the lorry and the hole:
We are weighed down by a hole
in our memories,
weighed down by
the retrospective emptiness
of our history,

to the point that our societies
do not even know whether they are heading
toward the future.

They are riding the surf
of their present,
problematic wealth.
Beneath [our] apparent mobility
and acceleration,
[we] have come to a stop
in our hearts and [our]aims.

That is, indeed, why
[we] are accelerating,
but doing so

out of inertia.

The Illusion of the End, by Jean Baudrillard, Trans. by Chris Turner, page 42