The readings for this week made me consider again Tucker Carlson, Los Angeles, and a eucalyptus tree.
The Los Angeles Times reported two days ago that the Getty fire—still uncontainted, still billowing smoke, still burning homes—was probably caused by a branch of a eucalyptus tree coming into contact with a power line (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/getty-fire-arson-investigation). Dashcam footage appears to show the fire starting as a flash of light in an otherwise dark night. The article quotes Mayor Eric Garcetti stating that the contact of the tree and line “was an act of god.” Another way of looking at it, considerations of divine intervention put aside, is as a moment of contact between the technological and the natural. If, as Edwards states “[i]nfrastructures constitute artificial environments, walling off modern lives from nature, and constructing the latter as commodity, resource, and object of romantic utopianism and reinforcing the modernist settlement” (26), the cause of the fire may be read as a crack in the wall. It can be read to as a moment of infrastructural failure and of the visible made visible through a moment of contact. Edwards again, “Our civilizations fundamentally depend on them (infrastructures) yet we notice them mainly when they fail, which they rarely do” (2). From Parks “Infrastructure is “seamless in its operation and can be disastrous in its failure” (115). The interruption of this seamless operation, caused by a gust of wind, a tree branch, and a powerline, has indeed proved disastrous. It has revealed, through contact, the invisible operations of a system normally ignored and naturalized. Through the fire’s coverage, though, it has revealed something else—the capability for infrastructures to be operationalized as a racialized political metaphor.
Tucker Carlson stated on his Tuesday evening show that “PG&E strikes me as almost a metaphor for the destruction of the state…Here’s a utility which doesn’t really know anything about its own infrastructure but knows everything about the race of its employees” and tied, later, the preemptive blackouts to a lack of conservatives in California to combat progressives and progressive values.
(https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-and-dave-rubin-blame-diversity-and-woke-culture-for-california-fires). This implies, absurdly, that a more racist (but also a more misogynistic, transphobic), less diverse society and workforce would naturally produce a greater infrastructure and, from that, less fires. It also implies that white workers and companies are more efficient and capable than companies with workers of color. Infrastructure (and, by proxy, “modern” civilization), then becomes the site for a radicalizing call to arms against difference for Carlson and his viewers.
Tucker Carlson and his guest echo much of the coverage of the California fire season by right-wing media. Over the last several weeks, The Drudge Report has shaped their coverage of the fire as a metaphor for California in general—as a state marked by hypocrisy, civilizational decline, identity politics, and chaos. Their links today, for example, read “New California fires burn homes, send residents fleeing,” “Disabled seniors left behind in outage,” and “Los Angeles and San Francisco Don’t Lose Power Even When Their Suburbs Do.” What is implicit in the text is 1. California is in a state of dystopic chaos which is uninhabitable to people, 2. It is a state that claims to care for people but is neglecting its most vulnerable, and 3. It privileges the wealthy and urban and punishes those on the outskirts (reinforcing a narrative of city/suburb division and a divided America). These links fit the pattern of Drudge’s coverage of the fire season as a whole; they have repeatedly molded the strategic outages, the fire itself, and the state’s response to the fires as demonstrative of a state in decay, of modernity under attack by progressives and progressive values, and of the dishonesty of progressive values.
Both examples demonstrate a nostalgia for a white supremacist past, one which orders and controls systems, utilities, and societies and makes its operations naturalized and invisible.
