Friday, September 18, 2020

The Same Old, Same Old California Suicide

 Victor Davis Hanson

Tech titans and Bay Area Bourbons grow rich, the middle class flees, forests burn.  


Fall
 is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.

"Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames." . . 

"Once can anticipate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s next move because, beneath her self-righteousness, she will predictably be silly, often cruel, and entirely hypocritical. She may be the only House speaker in history to publicly tear up the president’s State of the Union address, after he customarily handed it to her on live television. She worries whether we are Christian enough in welcoming illegal aliens and sacrificing during the quarantine, while she shows off her designer ice cream in her designer Sub-Zero refrigerators in her designer wine-country palazzo — surrounded by the sort of “decorative” fences and “modest” gates we are assured are not walls to keep out those who, she lectures us, are California’s blessed future.

. . . How long can a state suffer the rich Bourbons of the Bay Area?  

"As long as its brave nobodies still drive ’dozers right into conflagrations to create lifesaving fire breaks, as long as its despised farmers continue to serve as the nation’s food basket, as long as unheralded pilots fly blind into smoke to drop fire retardant, and as long as there is something left for the parasitical elite of the rich inheritance from California’s brilliant and industrious but now long-dead past"

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