Nostalgie de la Smog

Remembering the Los Angeles Basin before pollution controls spoiled everything.

The French speak of nostalgie de la boue, literally “nostalgia for mud,” to describe an attraction to degradation. You’ll pardon me if I’m feeling a little nostalgie de la smog. When my family moved to Los Angeles in June 1970, the city’s carbon monoxide concentration was 35 parts per million. The Environmental Protection Agency was still a few months away from being created, and while air quality is still lousy throughout the Los Angeles Basin (because it’s a giant bowl with too many cars inside belching exhaust), smog was much worse back then. Moving to L.A. meant I could no longer enjoy snow days that kept me home from school, but I quickly learned that smog alerts performed an equivalent function. During smog alerts, children were ordered to remain at home because outdoor air was deemed too dangerous to breathe.

Today there’s a sort of smog alert on in Washington, D.C., because smoke from the Canadian wildfires has drifted down here. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was in Los Angeles in 1970, or even in New York City yesterday, and, to tell you the truth, if I didn’t know anything was amiss I wouldn’t notice that everything is the tiniest bit yellower, like a faded color photograph from 1952. It’s a wee bit hazy, but the sun is shining. Still, one is not supposed to exert oneself out of doors, so one does not. Not a huge burden for me, because I’m an indoor cat.

Meanwhile, the House GOP’s line on the Canadian fires is pretty much the same as its line on school shootings: It’s indecent to politicize such tragedies by discussing ways to avert them in the future. “This isn’t the moment to lecture people about the science of climate change,” said Rep. Marc Molinaro (R.-N.Y.) on Fox News. Do let me know, Rep Molinaro, when that moment arrives.

House Republicans are more focused on reducing the deficit, which is why they spent the past four months threatening to put the United States into default unless they could get a lot of cuts to the parts of government spending that aren’t growing very much (i.e., the parts that exclude Social Security, Medicare, and military spending, including spending on veterans). In the end, the House GOP had to settle for much less in deficit reduction than it asked for. That was one week ago. Now it’s grown bored with reducing government debt and is reverting to type by looking for ways to expand government insolvency in the hallowed tradition of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, which is to say, by cutting taxes. That’s the topic of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here. Its particulate content is zero parts per million, unless read out of doors. But it may elevate your heart rate. Indeed, I hope it does.