The beach, a scintillating embodiment of the California Dream just hours earlier, now looked more like the landing pad for Charon, the ferryman of Hades, with wisps of yellow smoke hovering above leaden waves and pebbles. It is hard not to think of California’s wildfire plight as a metaphor for America’s decline. “Just come to the state of California,” Governor Newsom said. “This is a climate damn emergency. This is real.” When the president finally visited the state, for a mere two hours this past Monday, he told its suffocating residents to be patient: “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” It felt like an inverted déjà vu of what Trump had said about the coronavirus in February, when he told Americans to wait till “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
Source : The Big Smoke
