When it’s allowed, criticizing presidents or anyone in power is as common as you would expect. Their power and authority prompt those of us who have less influence on the course of historic events to second guess them. That is as it should be. The current president is different in that he provokes genuine and legitimate opprobrium almost every day from almost every quarter. He’s like a human advent calendar of outrage.
As I write this, Donald Trump’s legal problems and the prospects of his presidency are playing out in the news, and we are all weighing in on social media, op-ed pieces, holiday table talk and letters to the editors. This column is not about any of that. Not really.
Almost a year ago exactly I wrote a column about my good-natured differences with my west coast family members. I was grousing about their climate chauvinism that crops up every time winter rolls around. I continue to argue that we have weather while they have calamities. When the weather gets colder, I tell them, I put on a coat. When seasons change for them, they have to evacuate to a school gym or hide in their bathrooms.
This year … that’s not so funny.
I flew out to northern California for Thanksgiving with my left coast family this year. The unprecedented California wildfires were still claiming lives and destroying whole communities when I landed. Emerging from the San Francisco Airport onto the BART was like stepping into a post-apocalyptic dystopia. The air and ambient light rendered everything in sepia. People’s eyes, the only features one could see over their white medical masks, were fixed on an undefined distance … the thousand-yard stare of trauma. Just breathing normally for a brief period was enough to induce dry hoarseness and a wet smoker’s cough. The Bay Area recorded the worst air quality on the planet for close to a week. The notion that the air we all need was suffused with the aerosolized remains of lives, pets, books, old family photo albums, cars, clothes, swing sets, and toys induced a brooding melancholy among those of us who took our reluctant, anxious, toxic breaths. Shock was the gestalt.
The pervasiveness and ubiquity of fires in California requires a protocol for baptizing each conflagration. They are usually named after the point of suspected origin. This year the Woolsey fire burned through the tony neighborhoods of LA County, where celebrities’ lavish homes burned as democratically as hovels.
But the fire that resulted in the greatest loss of life was dubbed the Camp Fire. A perversely quaint tag for a vicious disaster, to be sure. The fire was propelled by 80 mile an hour winds through the community of Paradise (another cruelly ironic name) and burned over 150,000 acres, killing 85 people with 11 still missing as of the most recent count.
To put this in terms we can relate to, the combined acreage of Amherst, Hadley, Northampton and Easthampton is just under 34,000 acres. The population of Paradise before it was reduced to char was 27,000 souls. Northampton has just over 28,000 residents. Nine years ago Northampton was terrorized by a series of 15 arson fires that killed two people. Try and recall the feelings inspired by that violence. In that context, consider the horror of the entire city of Northampton being destroyed in a matter of hours and the loss of 96 neighbors. It is literally unimaginable. How does a community recover from a catastrophe of that enormity?
Presidents, whether they like it or not, are expected to serve as providers of solace when disasters afflict a portion of the nation they preside over. They are representative of a country that shares in the grief, and they are expected to extend the comfort and support of the nation. Obviously, some are better at it than others. In modern times, Ronald Reagan and Barrack Obama come to mind as compassionate emissaries. George W. Bush responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001 with an initial grace that he didn’t sustain, and then failed completely with his response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But no president or leader of any ilk has performed this humane mission as callously as Donald J. Trump. From blithely tossing rolls of paper towels to the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria to glibly commenting about a boat washed up onto the property of a family whose home was demolished by Hurricane Florence, he has consistently displayed a deep flaw in what I will generously call his “character.” He clearly is congenitally devoid of the human traits of caring, kindness and shame. Perhaps someday there will be an actual diagnosable pathology that will explain his demeanor. I really don’t care.
So, our president took some time out of his busy schedule to reluctantly fly to the scorched earth site of the Camp Fire and did his perfunctory walk around in his Presidential windbreaker. While surveying the horror, he commented that the president of Finland told him that they avoid fires by raking the leaves in the forests. (The president of Finland later insisted that he said no such thing because, essentially, that would be stupid). And then our president stepped before the cameras to deliver his scattered impulsive thoughts to the gathered news crews:
“You don’t see what’s going on until you come here. And what we saw, at Pleasure… what a name, [Crowd: “Paradise”]. We just left Pleasure [Governor Jerry Brown: “Paradise”]… or Paradise. And what we just saw at Paradise is just…it’s just not acceptable.”
He couldn’t even bother to get the name of the eradicated town right, and he couldn’t even muster an abashed apology when he was corrected.
While I watched with embarrassment and shame, I thought about how I would feel if that unimaginable fire happened here, and Donald Trump came to shuffle around the remains of my home and then declared that what happened here in … um … “Nottingham” was just not acceptable and suggested we could have avoided this mess if we raked our leaves like they do in Finland.
I would be uncharitable, I suspect.
Bill Dwight is a Northampton city councilor and a pie wrangler at the Florence Pie Bar.