We got the evacuation alert on Wednesday night. The fire came out of nowhere and threatened to sweep through Hollywood. I pulled our son out of the bathtub. We rushed into the car and drove north, past two other fires, through smoke and sirens, gridlock and chaos, flames on the horizon in all directions.
People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So, where is ours?
Fires have wiped out entire communities. Thousands have lost their homes. Many more are displaced and looters run rampant, taking the personal property of those lucky enough to have any. The steady stream of alerts from Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app, ding as I type this, new fires igniting, existing ones spreading, winds picking up again. Will the latest alert say that our neighborhood, our street or our school is next?
I would love a deus ex machina to change this story-line or for the real-estate developer and would-be-mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, The Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.
As any screenwriter will tell you, a protagonist does not need to be perfect. We actually prefer that they be flawed, as long as they are ours.
I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?
In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré, “a John Wayne dude,” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”
In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.
It’s not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and first responders to everyone who has opened their homes, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity. But if leadership is that Churchillian combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles has seen neither.
When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously scheduled trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive news conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to quiet a public squabble with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference on Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley are in “lockstep.”
On Saturday, she said on X, “We will get through this crisis, together.” On Sunday, during a news conference, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”
Will these efforts put Angelenos at ease? On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.
In a viral video, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, in aviator sunglasses, looked to me like he couldn’t wait to get back in his idling S.U.V. as an anguished Angeleno told him her community had been destroyed and implored him for help. He did make time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming the devastation in Los Angeles on Democratic policies.
Despite what X will have us think, history shows Americans are pretty forgiving in a crisis. We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows?
I’ve watched all of this enraged, but also beside myself. Why is it that the town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, there was The Slap but he still saved the world) cannot find a lead character to try to save us from this catastrophe? This state loves a charismatic action hero so much that it birthed The Terminator’s political career.
California has always been a beast to govern, with nearly 40 million people and interests ranging from farmers in the Central Valley to billionaires in Silicon Valley. The state has elected strong leaders in the past. Love them or hate them, you can’t say that Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown didn’t take charge. But the dominance of a single political party in recent years has narrowed the pool of tough public servants.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles, a sprawling multiethnic collection of disparate suburbs, is not known for citywide civic engagement. City residents become animated about hyperlocal issues such as neighborhood zoning and often tune out issues affecting the greater L.A. area. Beverly Hills and other affluent areas operate as municipalities and cannot vote for city leaders.
Unlike New York City, where politicians must master the art of retail politics, Los Angeles city is so vast — 503 square miles — that local officials interact with constituents mostly through T.V. and radio. They’re not forged in the daily crucible of the tabloid press like New York City leaders, who are used to taking daily hits and then getting their eyebrows threaded. Los Angeles’s elected officials, by comparison, operate in Bubble Wrap. Many seem, to risk sounding like a Yankees fan, soft.
I am not calling for a bully, but people who successfully lead through epic disasters have a dollop of despot. I suspect Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a.k.a. Stormin’ Norman, who led with a whiteboard and authority during the Persian Gulf war, would have made his interns cry. That’s OK. We don’t need cuddles. We’re terrified.
Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people have died and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Without leadership, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighborhood Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s bleak.)
At the moment I do not care who did or did not cut funding for which water or fire services or whether the smelt is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are heartbroken, suffocating in toxic air and crushed under the weight of inaction.
I want someone to step in who cares more about saving the city than saving their careers. We need someone to stand with authority in front of a whiteboard and to tell us the plan. I’d take Arnold Schwarzenegger appearing in front of the Eaton blaze and taking over. He did tell us he’d be back. At this point, I’d even take a Cuomo.
Amy Chozick, a screenwriter and executive producer based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Chasing Hillary,” which she adapted into the Max series, “The Girls on the Bus.”
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