Fire on the Mountain

The world is ablaze both figuratively and literally. As devastating as the literal fires, of much greater concern ought to be the metaphysical.

Notre-Dame de Paris was a playground for arsonists. Canada was incendiary just 18 months ago–how quickly the memory fades. Lahaina, Hawaii. And now, there is the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and greater Los Angeles.

The City of Angels. I posit that it is of the highest import that one must determine just which angels abound, because it appears that the doomed kind with their corporeal backers have had quite the field day, year, decade and century with Southern California. Included among these cabals range deluded preservationists who long ago abandoned worship of the Creator and Logos for substituted adoration of creation, and themselves within it. There’s a significant collection of incompetents who owe their positions to the State–from fire chief and mayor to governor and president. They have complete buy-in to identity politics. Turns out that fire cares little–in fact, totally disregards–the sensibilities of those who prize the makeup of fire departments with lesbians who reject cis-normative makeup over people, who, you know, specialize in extinguishing large, urban conflagrations. If that weren’t enough; there’s an entire industry founded to confound the Catholic Church and engage in an all out war against decency and natural law. If you are wondering of the exact industry to which I refer, it deals with images in motion, has been run by deviants from the beginning, and is a most powerful oculus for the worst of us. Add for good measure crippling Marxism with its attendant totalitarianism–SoCal was a capital of CoVid masking, jibby-jabs, and propaganda–and you get a place that would get T.S. Eliot to pick up the quill once more. That being said, he was a modernist shit-bag so none of his solutions would work anyhow. Plus, he’s dead, so I’ll pick up the quill of sorts.

Lest you detect that I am engaging in some sadistic delight about the L.A. wildfires, let me dispel that right off. Victims do not deserve this, especially people of good will. There is not an ounce of vindication nor sentiment that all of this is just; that this is what the people there had coming to them. I have friends and family there–and yes, I have friends. The Logos made Flesh made clear long ago, a truth from The Truth, that His Father “who is in heaven, maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45) Fire too.

The miracles that take place in such situations stand out all the more.

Some are inexplicable due to the near non-existent human cooperation involved. Others are quite explicable because human hands work closely with the divine.

A Catholic man says that the only reason his house was spared is because he blessed his home with Epiphany Holy Water and called upon Sts. Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar for their protection. Like the rest of us silly, traditional Catholics still wrapped up in our rigid devotions and supplications as Antipope Bergoglio says, he inscribed the “2025: C+M+B” on his door with blessed chalk. It worked. God worked.

Then, there is the miracle of Rick Caruso.

I have no idea of the faith nor faith life of this former mayoral candidate of Los Angeles. Seems as though–and forgive my vexing understatement here–he would have been a better pick than the serendipitously-mute Karen Bass. A wildfire at home while she was in Ghana got her tongue.

Turns out, Mr. Caruso understood well the eminent danger a wildfire posed to his property. He hired a private firefighting firm to protect his shopping mall in the Pacific Palisades and–voila!–it is one of the last commercial properties still standing, largely unaffected, for miles.

That’s no miracle! That’s just shrewd foresight, you say. Well, St. Augustine declares that, “a miracle is not contrary to nature, but only to our knowledge of nature”; miracles are made possible by hidden potentialities in nature that are placed there by God. (City of God, XXI.8.2) It just so happens that Rick Caruso cooperated with providential grace and natural law.

The free market exists by providential grace and natural law.

You do not need to read volumes by James Buchanan and other public choice theorists to arrive at two profoundly simple yet beautiful conclusions:

1) The State’s essence and operation render it uniquely ill-equipped to provide or produce the good, the true and the beautiful. It is the Golden Calf, the Tower of Babel, the old Temple Veil, and thus, the most Fatal of Conceits.

2) As the great Murray Rothbard exclaimed time and time again: The free market itself is a miracle.

Whereas all of the incentives of self-hagiographied “public servants” always produce various degrees of ruination to that very same “public”, pure free market, voluntaristic capitalism elevates the consumer as king and producers as his dedicated servants. Ludwig von Mises roared in Human Action:

The market economy is essentially characterized as a social system in which there prevails an incessant urge toward improvement. The most provident and enterprising individuals are driven to earn profit by readjusting again and again the arrangement of production activities so as to fill in the best possible way the needs of consumers…” (539)

The alternative is nothing but an elaborately disguised system of command and control in which we are all, both in our productive and consumptive capacities, subject to the whims, true greed, and predilections of a parasitic, officious class. It is not surprising then that Southern California is dominated by politicians/dramatists who are engaged in a theater production of “What To Do When It All Goes to Hell.” Act 1 was all about assuming roles. Act 2 is feigning competence. Act 3 climaxes with wildfires.

Act 4 is being written. If Legions and their disciples get to write it, California will continue its slide toward chaos and injustice. There will be no accountability, no consequence for the wicked. Should Newsom et al. get away with it again, as Californian voters and influencers have permitted them to do for so long, the porcine rush off the cliff will be all the more speedy. (cf. Mark 5:1-20) God does not permit anti-miracles to persist for long. Dies irae.

To marvel then at what is, on one hand, destroyed when man wars against divine and natural law, and on the other hand, that which is made when he cooperates with created order, is a most fitting exercise. It at once satisfies some of our deepest curiosities and keeps us grounded in the best sense of that expression.

The market economy is indeed a great miracle of God, Who in His boundless imagination and charity deigned to have man work with man to free and creative and good ends.

It is right to stand in justified awe of it, no matter how the Hollywood script finishes the play.