Welcome to Fireland.

A few days ago, a hot but welcome breeze blew some smoke from the San Fernando Valley catch basin, so I strolled the neighborhood with my five-year-old on my shoulders.

Up in the hills above Burbank, always, the enormous plume of thick smoke bubbling up from the massive Station Fire was constant reminder that about 130,000 acres of the most scenic and accessible timberland in Southern California, the Angeles National Forest, now was hanging in the sky above us.

"We're under the volcano, daddy," and I couldn't argue with her, sampling Malcolm Lowry;  the smoke cloud emerges from behind the Verdugo peaks so distant it seems motionless, pasted in mid-air, an eruption without lava by day, and by night, a poor man's sunrise glowing angry red in the eastern sky. Smudgy, gunsmoke-grey near the ground, it fumes into the inversion layer where its heat and churning energy become real clouds - snowy tufts of pyrocumulous.

It would be beautiful if it didn't make the air hundreds of square miles around almost impossible to breathe, if it didn't gulp life and beauty from every nearby green thing in its hyperthermal vampire appetite.

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Picture a factory, chugging along, churning out desireable product lapped up by an affluent and vast emptor class. Workers show up every day, punch in, and take their places on the line, pleased at least by knowledge their labor earns food on their tables and fire in hearths.

This was, for years, the American dynamic. The country was an industrial giant, fearsome example to the rest of the globe that resources, smarts and their attendant wealth could achieve any goal from curing disease to putting men on the moon and returning them home to earth alive and cheery. Like the Pharoahs' practical motives for building pyramids and sculpted monoliths of ancient Egypt, it also broadcast abroad implied "don't even think about f*cking with us" significance. Hear ye friends and foes alike: If we can do this for ourselves, think of what we can do to you.

When America was a technological and manufacturing powerhouse, we aimed lip-service worship at the lunchpail strata that achieved our bounty. Factories were too grimy and toxic to elevate as symbolic cathedrals of our burgeoning production cult, but the workers themselves were celebrated. Labor Day is a holiday echo of that hammer-and-anvil age. After paying their dues in blood and horror, unions achieved for American laborers a standard of living unmatched in the world. Sipping a beer, union-brewed, out of a can, made of ore union-mined and stamped by lords of a machinists local, an average joe could doff his blue collar a moment and enjoy a life with the comforts, if not social-anthill status, of middle class.

That horizontal affluence was just too expensive for our captains of industry, however. Little by little, America has been deindustrialized as factories relocated to foreign shores, where those troublesome environmental laws and selfish unions, always angling for their measly "living wage", were nowhere to be found. Friendly, if somewhat brutal, anti-democratic and murderous regimes were happy to see their nations play host to our new "globalization" hocus-pocus. It's one big, happy blue marble, after all. You're still thinking in terms of your own backyard? Dinosaur. What are you, a nationalist? Everything can be outsourced - even man-bites-dog scoops in your local newspaper.

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