I hope Biden finds the time to visit the people of western Maui in the coming days if and only if it makes a difference for them, not for a ...
President Coolidge came down here in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
The President say, “little fat man, isn’t a shame
what the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?”
Tragedy struck the state of Hawaii, on the western side of the island of Maui, last week. Fierce winds from a passing hurricane whipped off across the island, knocking down power lines and sparking a wildfire during a dry season. Wildfires are nothing new on the islands, but the normal warning sirens did not activate — a matter of extreme controversy right now — and thus hundreds of residents of the western peninsula of the island were rapidly engulfed in onrushing flames without warning, caught in “hurricane fire.” The town of Lahaina on the coast (where the fire burnt its way toward) has basically been razed altogether.
If you have the stomach for it, you can read this heartbreaking Associated Press piece discussing some tales from what must have been the pit of hell. It is the deadliest forest fire in a century, so far. For only 96 are confirmed dead as I write this. More — many more — will likely be added to that total. We know from the stories of survivors that people died on the beaches and in the water, fleeing the flames, suffocated by the heat. I have seen ashen-grey videos filmed by survivors on Twitter that look like scenes from Pompeii, circa a.d. 79, or the Battle of Blackwater Bay. If ever any people deserved to occupy a space in your prayers tonight, then surely it is the people of Maui and especially Lahaina. Roughly 1,000 are reported missing; imagine how many of those may remain so. It looks to be one of the worst American natural disasters in modern history in terms of loss of life.
It is the lack of immediate human agency and responsibility that softens, but also misdirects, the blow. There seems to have been no firebug or terrorist act involved here: just fierce winds, misfortune, and an underlyingly shoddy infrastructure to blame (the last is sure to have local political consequences). That has a perverse side effect: Instead, people are left looking for someone or something bigger and easier to blame.
This, of course, naturally brings us to the national political dimension of the discussion. One notable detail is that the fires in Maui actually began (and consumed Lahaina) on August 8, last Tuesday. News of the true scope of the disaster really only began spreading as we headed into the weekend, however. So as the loss of life became known, the issue litigated in the opinion media became President Biden’s seeming disengagement from all of this. He took a long weekend at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. More unfortunately, he has now twice refused public comment on the matter, reinforcing a sense that he is disengaged from the tragedy.
I want to confess something odd: I actually start from a position of sympathy to Biden, and not because I like the man but rather because my political memory extends back beyond the previous Republican administration. It has been political sport for as long as I have been an adult to hit presidents for timing their vacations (or any manner of leisure) inopportunely. In Biden’s case the argument takes on added bite because — there is no sense in dancing around it — Americans have extremely serious concerns about Biden’s age and visibly diminished mental capacity.
But I nevertheless remember George W. Bush saying “watch this drive” as he swung a golf club into liberal infamy during the Iraq War. I remember Katrina and the massive pile-on that ensued. And I insist that presidents are neither soldiers nor firefighters nor riot police nor members of the Army Corps of Engineers, for that matter, and that 99 percent of those shouting at Biden to hop on Air Force One and go for a photo-op in Maui are participating in an ultimately empty gestural politics. You don’t want him to do it (or are criticizing him for not doing it) for them; it’s about you.
I do understand the value of private consolation. The people who have actually suffered here may not mind knowing they have not been forgotten, and the presence of the president sometimes does help. Biden may yet have to fly out and show the colors as consoler-in-chief, especially as this death toll rises. But I am curiously struck by the limits of political consolation. I opened with a quotation from Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” a song about the Great Mississippi Flood that killed an estimated 250 after heavy rains broke the levees. In Newman’s vision of events, President Coolidge trains down to survey the damage and then, standing amid the wreckage and ruin of everything these poor forgotten people will ever know in their lives, solemnly declares “isn’t it a shame” . . . and returns to Washington, D.C. Of what value are these visits to the people who are actually suffering? The value is to Biden’s fans (or detractors). I hope Biden finds the time to visit the people of western Maui in the coming days if and only if it makes a difference for them, not for a pollster howling at him to go “to help shore up his sagging favorables.”
There is, of course, another point that cannot be left unaddressed: the question of whether a notional Republican president who refused comment — whilst sunning himself on holiday, advanced in age and increasingly checked out verbally yet also uncomfortably adjacent to a potential influence-peddling scheme involving his depraved son — would be treated with similar such circumspection by the press. No. Of course not. But it is a boring point. Media bias is, of course, a legitimate source of discontent among intelligent observers, but it is also one so transparently obvious and predictable that it is a commonplace. The media is guilty of it, but beyond that there isn’t very much left to observe about it.
Meanwhile, these people in Maui are dead. Their houses have burned to the ground. The survivors’ lives are scarred yet must go on. This is a story that maddens us as news readers, because it hammers home the brutal reality that neither we nor our president have the power to prevent something like this, and it reveals the limits of where politics end and nature cruelly takes control. Maybe the best thing for people to do would be to try and alleviate the suffering, instead: I donated via the Salvation Army myself, and there are many other options available. It beats cursing the winds.