Los Angeles is burning

Lyrics:

Somewhere high in the desert near a curtain of blue
Saint Ann's skirts are billowing
But down here in the city of limelights
The fans of Santa Ana are withering

And you can't deny the living is easy
If you never look behind the scenery
It's showtime for dry climes
And Bedlam is dreaming of rain

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning

This is not a test
Of the emergency broadcast system
When Malibu fires and radio towers
Conspire to dance again

And I cannot believe the media Mecca
They're only trying to peddle reality, catch it on
Primetime, story at nine
The whole world is going insane

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning

A placard reads the end of days
Jacaranda boughs are bending in the haze
More a question than a curse
How could hell be any worse?

The flames are starting
The camera's running
So take warning

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning

Photo hard to credit, but looks like @CosmossUp

 
Bad Religion's Los Angeles is Burning was released in 2004 on a stinker of an album called The Empire Strikes First. This song, like so many (not counting 10 in 2010, which said the world's population would reach 10 billion in the year 2010), was prophetic. Of course, it's perhaps not really that prophetic to say an unsustainable city built in a tinderbox desert state would burn. 

Having said that, I've always loved this song. In it, they reference their first album, How Could Hell Be Any Worse? (1982), and for a moment you think they might be okay with their hometown burning. The song actually uses fire as a metaphor for media coverage, which sensationalizes and overblows situations for its own purposes. This remains true. 

The Wikipedia post for this song states the following: "The music video is shot in cut-out animation and depicts a man in shorts and a track singlet with a Crossbuster (Bad Religion's logo which features a black cross with a red prohibition sign over it) on it running through a burning, apocalyptic Los Angeles. People with TV news cameras as heads are also shown shooting fire out of their "mouths" (represented by the camera lenses). Frontman Greg Graffin plays a psychotic news reporter who reads messages like "Panic & Fear Widespread; Retail Up 25%," "Four Horsemen Back In Saddle" and "You are not being brainwashed." Right before the guitar solo, the man shown running through the city burns when the flames catch up to him and the video transitions to the band playing the song among all the chaos in the city, before they burn too. At the end of the video, the entire city goes up in flames moments after Graffin does."

It's hard to comment about the firestorms raging in California without feeling incredibly sad. I live in a part of the country that sees wildfires frequently. It's one of our seasons, actually — wildfire season. It was less than a year ago we saw the third-largest wildfire in Black Hills history. Sobering stuff. 

The prevailing opinion is that our president is a buffoon. I can't argue with that, but he did say something recently about the California fires that made sense. I know, I was surprised too. He said mismanagement of our forests led to these super-fires, which is partially true. In the United States, we had a policy of fire suppression for over 100 years, which allowed for unprecedented overgrowth and density of fuels on our public lands. That policy has since been abandoned because it never did work. 

We've always had ridiculous wildland fires in this country, many of which led to the policy of fire suppression. These were mega-fires on par and sometimes exceeding the fires we have today. For the curious, there's more information here.
  
Now we have hotter and faster-burning fires than ever before, and they are aided by climate change. There is something wicked about these California fires, though, that seems illogical. I've heard firefighters I know comment about how cinderblock buildings out there are burning to the ground — incinerated — even though concrete is insulative. How do fires get that hot? Another strange thing is that in many cases, the trees surrounded these super-intense fires are left living. I'd like for someone to explain that phenomenon to me. 

It's an interesting time in America when everything is politicized, even wildland fires. Everyone has to comment and make a point. Consider what Bad Religion has to say about the media coverage of these fires and how "the whole world is going insane." Now remind yourself this song was released 14 years ago. It appears there is something as deadly as wildland fire, and that's how the media is treating it. In an age when we're being spoon-fed the news, perhaps it would be wise to see if there is another agenda at work besides just disseminating the news.