UNNATURAL ACTS: It’s not the heat; it’s the stupidity.
It’s an old line, admittedly, one that I stole from myself. But as we are currently witnessing right here on Planet Earth, it’s the heat, too.
Donald Trump celebrated the Fourth of July by signing his Big Bad Bunker Buster of a budget bill — blowing up the health insurance for some 17 million people and killing off every federal green energy subsidy he could find. Even nature stood up and took note.
It’s not just “Drill, baby, drill,” anymore. It’s “Coal, baby, coal.” Up by New Cuyama and the adjacent Carrizo Plains, an errant spark shot out from the underbelly of a poorly maintained car. Or perhaps it was a smoldering cigarette butt thrown jack-assedly out the window. What started as a small, containable fire morphed into an 80,610-acre nightmare. Right now, this incident — dubbed the Madre Fire — is by far the biggest in California, where the experts have long warned about the long, hot summer to come given this winter’s decidedly subpar snowpack.
For the record, no, I am not blaming Trump for the Madre Fire. Just as I am also not blaming him, per se, for the hundreds of people we can only hope died mercifully sudden deaths along the Guadalupe River in Texas. Flooding in that part of Texas is as natural — and inevitable — as fire is here.
When a get-the-hell-out warning is sent at 4:03 in the morning for a river that’s just risen 26 feet in less than two hours, maybe there’s no escaping what’s been described as “the pitch-black wall of death.”
But thanks to the eviscerating cuts inflicted on the National Weather Service back when Trump and Elon Musk were still butt buddies, the nearest weather service office had lost its key people in vital positions: The senior hydrologist, the staff forecaster, the meteorologist-in-charge, and, perhaps most critically in my book, the warning coordinator meteorologist were all gone. They all took early retirements rather than face certain professional decapitation at the hands of DOGE.
Santa Barbara learned the hard way just how tragically essential communication and coordination functions are in such disaster moments during our still-very-recent debris flow that cost the community 23 lives and who knows how many millions in property damage.
Not to belabor a point, but who can forget Trump’s delusional grandiosity when dueling wildfires were ripping through Los Angeles this January, killing 30 people and wiping out 15,000 homes and businesses? Trump’s solution at the time was to release 2.2 billion gallons of water from two damns in Tulare County and then preen like he was the second coming of Moses — striking the rock with his staff to bring forth the raging waters of the desert — to put out the fires in Los Angeles.
The problem with natural disasters is that they’re not TV “reality” shows. You actually need to know how to do things. Waving your arms about like a windmill and hating Mexicans will not suffice.
And such shortcomings were immediately apparent even to Trump admirers. First, no pipes exist to carry those billions of gallons of water anywhere near to L.A. Second, for the farmers who rely on that water come springtime when their crops are in the ground, Trump just flushed their lifeblood down the toilet.
Who was that masked man?
The Madre Fire broke out on July 2 and quickly mushroomed out to 80,610 acres. By that time, 40 percent of the state’s National Guard normally assigned to fire fighting units had been re-assigned by Trump to Los Angeles where their orders were to “protect” heavily armed ICE agents, allowing them to yank anyone wielding a weed whacker from their trucks with impunity. | Credit from left: U.S. Forest Service; Carlin Stiehl, ‘Los Angeles Times’ via Getty Images
Getting back to the Madre Fire, it’s worth noting that, when it started, Trump had just assigned no fewer than 40 percent of the California National Guard members who otherwise are typically assigned to firefighting support units to occupy and “protect” the City of Los Angeles from rioting.
This was yet another of Trump’s imperial solutions in search of a problem. There was no evidence the LAPD couldn’t handle the sporadic rioting on its own or that it needed any help. In fact, it was the arrival of the “help” — 4,100 National Guard members and 700 Marines — that helped trigger much of the rioting.
And what were they doing?
Protecting federal thugs wearing masks taking down anyone wielding a weed whacker?
Oh, that’s right; weed whackers start fires.
Who was that masked man?
But I digress. My aim here is not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. And for the 17 million people — mostly Medicaid recipients — who will now find their health insurance imperiled by the passage of the Big Bunker Buster of a Budget Bill, that would be a blessing.
Budgets, we are told, reflect our values. If that’s true, we as a nation have grown morally grotesque. With the unerring accuracy of a heat-seeking missile, the bill seeks to afflict the already afflicted in order to comfort the already comfortable. It shreds the safety net for the poor in order to give added bounce to the trampolines of the wealthy.
The fig leaf of semantic denial seized upon by those Republican senators and congressmembers who voted for the bill is that it does not “cut” Medicaid funding, (called Medi-Cal in California) but only imposes work requirements on recipients and then requires them to re-sign up every six months.
But according to Marina Owen of CenCal, which administers Medi-Cal in Santa Barbara and San Luis counties, 90 percent of all recipients already work. The single biggest occupation is a retail clerk working in small businesses that are not required to offer insurance to their employees. And what about people who take care of their ailing parents or sick children? Or are struggling to get addiction treatment?
Up in mid-county, Lompoc Valley Community Hospital is looking at cuts of $21 million. The budget passed included $50 billion to help “rural” hospitals like Lompoc, but according to hospital CEO Yvette Cope, it’s unknown how much of that money California will ever see and how that will trickle down. At Sansum/Sutter, Medi-Cal recipients represent 9 percent of the clinic’s volume. At Cottage Health — with its three hospitals and emergency rooms — we’re talking 69,735 visits by Medi-Cal patients whose continued coverage depends on their ability to run eligibility gauntlets engineered specifically to winnow out all but the most determined and competent. That, by the way, represents 20.9 percent of Cottage’s total visits.
You do the math. That’s a lot of people who will have a hard time staying covered. Where will they go if their visits are no longer covered? The emergency room? And what impact will the collision of this fiscal comet have on our local health care institutions and infrastructure?
Food stamps? Same thing. In Santa Barbara County, that’s 55,000 people who will have to jump through even more strenuous hoops more frequently. Twenty-two thousand of them are children.
Like many of you, I am one of those fools wondering why the number of homeless people keeps increasing despite the vast outlays of money spent on efforts to get them inside. It turns out the fastest-growing population on the streets are those 50 or older. In the last year, the number of homeless people in California 65 or older increased by 166 percent.
Up in Santa Maria, 31 percent of Marian Medical Center’s patients are covered by Medi-Cal, as are 33 percent of Lompoc Valley’s, 65 percent of the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics’, 70 percent of the county Public Health’s, and 82.6 percent of American Indian Health Services’. The message from Trump and everyone who signed that bill is loud and clear: Hurry up and die, already.
As I write this, I am wearing a T-shirt I made bearing the biblical quotation “Pick up your bed and walk.” For good measure, I added the signature “God” just in case anyone wasn’t clear who said it. I made the shirt in a moment of personal bitterness and frustration. Never in my most depraved dreams would I have imagined it would become national policy.
I know many of the people who signed this bill claim to be card-carrying Christians. Jesus should sue for defamation. To them, I would say simply this: “Go to hell.”
Like I said, it’s not the heat; it’s the stupidity. But it’s the heat, too.
Correction: The Madre Fire started on July 2, not July 4, and the photo caption has been corrected.
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