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Thursday
The horrific fires that are devastating parts of Los Angeles are prompting some to invoke Raymond Chandler’s 1938 novella Red Wind. You need only to read the famous opening paragraph to understand why:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Just as anything has been happening to Santa Monica homeowners, so does anything happen on the novella’s first page, when detective Philip Marlowe, enjoying a quiet beer in a cocktail lounge, witnesses another patron casually gun down another man who comes in looking for a woman. Chandler uses the wind as atmospherics for a story that involves deception, betrayal, blackmail, murder, police corruption, and various sordid relationships. In other words, modern life in America, at least according to Chandler and the noir genre.
Today, the corruption involves the fossil fuel industry and their bought politicians. The oil companies have long known that their products were resulting in the climate change that is leading to these wildfires. Columnist Heather Digby Parton Digby, who alerted me to the Chandler quote, points to a 2015 article in Rolling Stone that explains the science:
The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”
The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”
Now, thanks to the GOP, there’s a concerted effort to make sure the hydrocarbons keep on coming. Trump looks poised to reverse the fight against climate change and his followers appear to be fully on board. To cite one instance, forces in Oklahoma are trying to prevent further attempts to develop green energy there, even though the state has made impressive strides in recent years.
So imagine you’re viewing these attacks on the environment with Chandler’s red wind blowing in the background. Here are a few of his passages to capture the mood:
–The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
–When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full or horror. I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too.”
–The hot wind boomed against the shut windows. Windows have to be shut when a Santa Ana blows, heat or no heat.
–Perhaps the hot wind did something to him. It was booming against my shut windows like the surf under a pier.
–Then I went out to the kitchenette and poured a stiff jolt of whiskey and put it down and stood a moment listening to the hot wind howl against the window glass. A garage door banged, and a power-line wire with too much play between the insulators thumped the side of the building with a sound like somebody beating a carpet.
–“Goddam, thees hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.
–I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.
–[Marlowe is about to be shot by a corrupt cop]: My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.
Trumpism is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Well, except for the fossil fuel industry.
Bob Dylan got it only half right when he said that a hard rain’s a gonna fall. That was true for North Carolina during Hurricane Helene but, for California, it’s no rain’s a gonna fall.
