From The Rooftops Of New Orleans To Paradise: Climate Chaos In Walmart Nation
Tent City, survivors of Paradise Lost – Visual Metaphor of our times
(Source: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Sorry, I lack the words. My thoughts are a jumble of ideas, visual images, and absurd metaphors. [Update: 11/19/18 – NY Times takes a tepid look, notes reliance on “the kindness of strangers”]
And I thought we were all merely Climate Refugees and that the Dust Bowl was an apt metaphor. Looks like I undershot by orders of magnitude, not imagining incineration by wildfire.
After having been on the road now for 18 months, one thing I am sure of and can assure you is that there is far more dignity in individual roadside truck camping than in a degrading mass stranding in a Walmart parking lot with elderly and infirm people suffering with little organized government response.
I’m having a really tough time getting my head around the surreal reality of a place called Paradise (as in “Lost” and “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”) incinerated by a wildfire called “Camp Fire” (why not “Wire Fire” for the real PG&E’s cause?) and the mostly old and infirm survivors holed up in a Walmart parking lot, passively and gladly accepting charity from private citizens, while government seems AWOL and having a tough time with basics, like keeping track of people (e.g. the missing list just underwent a 5 fold expansion).
Not surprisingly, there is little media reporting of the climate chaos causes of the fire – a striking contrast with the feeding frenzy on Trump’s “mismanagement” tweets and the myths about “excessive fuels buildup”, the need for”forest thinning” and blaming radical environmentalists for blocking “forest management” (logging) (Sect. Interior Zinke even called enviro’s “terrorists”.).
And there’s been no coverage of the liability bailout of PG&E just so recently passed by the Democratic Party controlled Californian Legislature and signed into law by “progressive” Gov. Jerry Brown
BBC reported this morning a surprising lack of anger or resentment, just positivity.
Glad I absorb this suffering exclusively on the radio, and have not been exposed to what must be barbaric Tee Vee visuals.
The visual metaphors I am imagining are an absurd melange of people stranded on NoLA rooftops to old folks hunkered down in tents at Walmart.
How sick can it get? Welcome to Walmart Nation (TM)
Am I the only one that imagines these continuities? Is it Surrealism or DADA?
Will we perish by a Bang, or a Walmart whimper? (Cascade’s wilderness fire)
On the positive side, good on all those kids pushing Pelosi – and now Frank Pallone – for a Green New Deal.
Keep Hope Alive!