A Bonfire of Right-Wing Vanities

The Santa Ana winds have died out, but the smoke of the October 2007 San Diego firestorm still hangs in the air outside. The fires have been contained for a week now, but a thick dust of ash still coats everything and swirls into drifts in the light breeze. 369,000 acres burned, along with nearly 1700 houses. Half a million people evacuated their homes, many escaping just minutes ahead of the flames. By the time the cost of the fires has been tallied, it will exceed $2 billion.

As soon as the fires became national news, Republican politicians began scrambling for photo ops. Mayor Jerry Sanders, who stonewalled the San Diego City Fire Fighters when they pushed for a raise in 2005, now spent his time racing from press conferences to interviews where he praised the fire fighters and cajoled the city to remember, “We’re all in this together.” California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger flew into town for a series of staged tours of smoking homes. Bizarrely, a set of free weights lay in the ashes of one, so the Governator picked up a barbell and curled it a few times for the cameras. President George Bush, who had surveyed the destruction of Katrina from the safety of Air Force One, now put on his best set of rolled up shirt sleeves for a tour of the Republican stronghold of Rancho Bernardo. The presidential motorcade tied up traffic for hours, just as evacuated residents began trying to return home.

As Mike Davis argued a few days later, opportunistic Republicans were ravenous at the political opportunity offered by the fires. The local media tagged right along, glorifying San Diego's leaders as heroes and crowing about how the evacuation was orderly and civilized. After all, just one couple died in their home, trying to open a garage door that was disabled when the fires knocked out the electricity. News anchors and pundits compared the scene at Qualcomm Stadium with the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, gloating about plentiful food, free massages, and the Spiderman movie playing on the giant screen. They even explicitly contrasted Mayor Sanders to Ray Nagin in New Orleans, whom they accused of "losing his head."

But Sanders and his developer cronies are directly responsible for the pro-sprawl policies that have sited huge sub-divisions in the middle of natural fire zones. Instead of acknowledging that they set the stage for an unnatural disaster, they've spun the disaster as a triumph of Republican values. In reality, it's a bonfire of right-wing vanities.