The LA Fires from 29,000 feet, the height my plane attained as I was flying to Phoenix last Friday. We were at least 100 miles out to sea before turning back to California coastline....but we couldn't see anything. Not the ocean, not the land, not anything at all but a sort of dirty blonde haze covering everything. The haze of course was the smoke from either five or seventeen fires burning out of control. Then something else appeared. It was as if a painter decided to create a still life of a fire that he created from one he could actually see on the ground. A glorious painting of multi colored smoke rising to about 20,000 feet that just sat there presumably spreading in the stratosphere doomed to expand slowly forever. It was the "Harris" fire in San Diego County (or was it Southern Orange County or San Bernardino County?) burning without any human intervention destroying everything on the ground. There is something to be said for a view from 29,000 feet but I don't know exactly what it is other than to try to explain the detachment from the death and destruction. A scene that makes us think of great painting, which is moronic. Moronic interpretations of what we see is what happens to those of us who separate from reality. Meanwhile the people on the ground were not the pissing and moaning liberals of Katrina fame seeking government handouts from day one and complaining because "Bush" ignored them. Our government here worked. Various community fire departments were there immediately as were fire fighting crews from at least seven other states, there only because the planning for disasters had been done years before. Nobody on the ground expected the Feds to come running other than the asshole reporters for various media always eager to blame Republicans for everything. The fires are mostly out now and the rebuilding will take place, hopefully in fire proofed state of the art developments like the Stevenson Ranch which was undamaged in the middle of one of the blazes. We'll see. The Democrats will have months in which to blame Bush and the Republicans.