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Firefighters attend to the California fires. Picture: Getty Images
Firefighters attend to the California fires. Picture: Getty Images

“Everything is politics,” said the German “exile writer” Thomas Mann (and he, having fled the Nazis after being declared an enemy of the state, would know).

So a fire consuming one of the world’s most iconic cities could never just be a natural disaster, sparked by a combination of a long, dry season and hurricane-force winds.

Even as the fires continue to burn wide swathes of the City of Angels to the ground, politicians on both sides of the yawning chasm are grubbing for points. President-elect Donald Trump says California’s officials are “incompetent”, lobbing a can of petrol into the fire just to reignite his long-running feud with governor Gavin Newsom.

Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has offered to send Ukrainian firefighters to help LA’s hard-pressed thin orange line. That was after Donald Trump Jr took to X to have a dig at the Los Angeles fire department for donating surplus firefighting supplies to Ukraine after the Russian invasion.

A firefighter walks by a home in flames in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California Getty Images/Apu Gomes
A firefighter walks by a home in flames in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California Getty Images/Apu Gomes

If they come, the Ukrainians will join firefighters sent from Mexico and Canada. That the help comes from countries that Trump wants to annex is an irony that would be delicious if people were not actually dying.

The biggest parts of the Canadian offering are a pair of Canadair CL-415 “super scooper” aircraft — amphibious water-bombers that can scoop 6,000l at a time from lakes or the ocean. And the Pacific Ocean is just a diamond’s throw away from this conflagration.

One of the aircraft was grounded for three days following a collision with a civilian drone being flown over the fire zone by someone either catastrophically stupid or fame-seeking, or both

The Canadians may think twice about helping next time, however. One of the aircraft was grounded for three days with a hole in its wing, following a collision with a civilian drone being flown over the fire zone by someone either catastrophically stupid or fame-seeking, or both. Then again, this is Hollywood where the whole city is a (sound) stage.

Meanwhile, the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office in LA has donated 10,000 N95 face masks to firefighters and civilians. Whether the gift will do anything to remind the incoming US administration that Taipei is highly anxious about the sabre-rattling going on on the other side of the Taiwan Strait is probably, at this point, a no.

The deluded are having a fine time too. Alex Jones, the disgraced founder of conspiracy-swamp website Infowars, reckons the fires are “part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare” against the Land of the (not-so) Free. MAGA misogynists, doubtless posting without any sense of irony from the basements in their moms’ homes, blame the fires on women, especially LA fire chief Kristin Crowley and mayor Karen Bass, just because they can.

Mann was right, but too kind. That master dystopian, George Orwell, framed our world much better.

“All issues are political issues,” he wrote, “and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

And we’re barely halfway through the first month of the year.

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