The Fires of Change
The first week of 2025 spells for a year of tumult, crisis and revolution. Here we go folks.
The Times They Are A-UnPrecedented. This week has given us a run of images and news that spell to us that 2025 is going to continue brining us unprecedented times and evidence of deep change as the late-stage capitalism lurches towards its conclusion.
On January 1st a decorated Green Beret soldier shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, minutes before the truck exploded with fireworks. He was a fan of president-elect Donald Trump and deeply disturbed by the lack of leadership in the country. He clearly had a panache for shocking imagery, if not for political ideological coherence.
The choice of venue—the Trump International Hotel—invites speculation. In a nation where politics has become a blood sport, where allegiances are worn like armor, was this act a statement? A protest? Or merely the coincidental intersection of a troubled mind and a prominent edifice? The presence of fuel canisters and firework mortars in the truck's bed determine premeditation, yet the absence of a discernible manifesto leaves only questions. This feels more aligned with the incoherent state of most Americans in 2025 than any partisan statement. A chaotic ungrounded politics more in line with what most people actually feel than the Red or Blue dichotomy we are fed with.
One thing that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that Jimmy Carter was a good man. There isn’t much to say he was a great president. His failures led to Ronald Reagan, neo-liberalism and all of *this*. But he made service and faith his life, for over four decades after he left office. A contrast to the preceding Democrat presidents - Clinton & Obama - who do little more than become highly prized after dinner speakers who dish out mid playlists.
Carter seemed to understand that being a President, and all the violence it entails, demands penance, humility and a return to the people and land that you pledged to serve and protect. While the contrast with Clinton and Obama is notable, the contrast with Donald Trump is dramatic.
There was a time when having character didn’t just matter, it was everything. Carter had relatively little else going for him, but being a man of integrity and service carried him all the way to the presidency. Today there is nothing that matters less to political success.
Jimmy Carter was a man tethered to soil, hands stained with peanut dust and his smile more a ripple of grace than charisma. Soft-spoken, the kind of man who read policy papers by lamplight and prayed for guidance rather than favor. Carter carried humility as both shield and burden.
Donald Trump staggers, all gold-plated bravado and cocksure declarations. His words bulldoze. There is no room for humility in his orbit, only dominance, projected and rehearsed. Trump is not concerned by democracy’s fragility but is the self-styled ringmaster of its spiraling spectacle, a man for whom success is measured in ratings and applause and stock prices.
Seeing the image of Carter’s casket, draped in the American flag, while Trump prepares to ransack the country once more, feels like watching the embers die of American humility, decency & sense of public service,
Inaugurations and incoming governments are something we are used to in January. What we are not used to at this time of year is wildfire.
This is not exactly a surprise. 2024 was the hottest on record. As we expected. The air has changed—hotter, drier, brittle as bone. Wildfire season, once a footnote, has grown into a headline, spilling across months, across borders. The fires have happened before. It is memory baked into the land, an ecology of ash and regrowth, of scrubland and smoke, of roots and seeds programmed to wait for the heat. The chaparral, the coastal hills, the jagged canyons, the mountainsides—they have always known fire. What’s different and unprecedented now is us.
We built homes where the sage and oak once stood, filled in the gaps with fences, pools, and driveways. We built into fire’s old paths, on slopes it used to clear. The climate shifted too, a conspiracy of hotter summers, shorter winters, and winds that carry sparks farther than before. The blaze begins in the dry snap of a branch, the spark of a downed line, the glass shard catching light, and it roars across the land, swallowing walls and windows, hungry and insatiable.
I grew up in Europe where houses are made of bricks. But this is America. Houses are wedded to kindling, landscapes stitched with memories of fire, and the looming question of how long we can live where the land insists we don’t belong.
Joan Didion wrote about precisely this, the Santa Ana winds and the threat of fire:
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
We are all Los Angeleans now. Here in the Appalachian Mountains, I thought I was sheltered for a good while yet from directly experiencing the ravages of climate change. But Hurricane Helene devastated my city and I can pretend no longer. Los Angeles is one of the richest cities in the world. Money does nothing when fire comes a-calling.
