All over the world tonight America is burning. In St. Petersburg, in Rome, in Cairo, in Athens, in Bagdad and Peoria, America is burning money to fuel the flares that make the Persian Gulf the brightest show on earth when seen at night from outer space. America is incinerating the consumables, combustibles, and collectables that it hordes in lockers, trunks, sheds, garages, attics, and basements where objects spontaneously combust like kerosene-soaked flags thrown into oil cans. America is burning from its toxins, solvents, and dioxins buried in landfills brimming with disposables, dispensers, cartridges, latex, vinyl, Naugahyde, foam rubber, bubble wrap, polyester, formaldehyde, Styrofoam, Tupperware, and particleboard. “Global warming through organic chemistry” the jingle rings. Consumers in utility vehicles flock to shopping malls and designated cooling centers for forced air conditioning, fueling demand for gas they can’t afford to guzzle. America is burning oil on the Niger Delta, and in Angola the water is so thick from refining crude, children catch cholera playing in it. America is burning from exhaustion spewed into its urban island heat sinks, its ozone trapped under greenhouse emissions expelled from smokestack industries and methane ventilators as another carbon-based life form bites the slag heap. America is burning from the inside out—its neon signs illuminating vacant parking lots and automobile wrecking yards. America is on fire from petrochemicals that swamp its wildlife refuges as desertification turns grasslands into dust bowls. Snow packs sublimate under rock glaciers and tundra turns to marshland as melting permafrost releases trapped methane, further raising temperatures in a negative feedback loop whose plot points project a hockey stick on graphs of the immediate future. America is on fire from prescribed burns in its designated wilderness areas as deforestation wrought by defoliants used to clear rain forests for cattle to feed its barbecues returns to haunt it. Temperatures are in the low hundreds as tumbleweeds burst into flames crossing interstate highways. Retirees expire in their oven-baked motel rooms and sunbelt mobile homes for want of circulation, while the dispossessed lean over tenement fire escapes watching gun lobbyists burn rubber peddling automatic firearms to street gangs like arms merchants supplying war lords. The heat index drops temporarily into the nineties and waste heat emanates like radiation from reconverted cogeneration plants. At refineries across the nation sigalerts warn residents to stay indoors while the terror threat is raised to yellow and the fire danger to extreme. There is no forecast for the day after tomorrow, when the weather turns to climate change.
America is burning from its military-industrial forges, from its own branding mechanisms, which imprint multinational logos onto the backs of its hired hands willing to work for wages Americans can’t live on. The American Sun still rises in the Mideast and sets in the Midwest, where somewhere a farmer grows corn for biofuel alongside a missile silo and another starts a prairie fire because wheat futures are down. Tyre and Sidon burn like Sodom and Gomorrah as cluster bombs and experimental laser weapons terrorize local populations. In Qana, where Jesus turned water into wine, olive oil turns to blood, and in Nazareth, where Jesus wept, rockets set lawns on fire. America’s demand for energy will never cease, which is why white phosphorous flares sear the skins of Lebanese villagers and in Tikrit oil falls like rain into cesspools of tarcrete. Television’s Tower of Babel is toppled and the ruins of Babylon ransacked while fire devours the cedars of Lebanon. O God, the pride of man. Skyscrapers crumbled into dust again. From the burning sands a heat wave rises into a perfect firestorm of hate. How much further to Megiddo? asks the servant of the merchant before exploding in the Baghdad bazaar. America will keep its appointment in Samara, government officials reassure the peace conference. In Khandahar the marriage of East and West is consummated in the bombing of a wedding party. Meanwhile the late-night TV host jokes, “It was so hot in New York today they had to call back the fire brigade from Iraq to hose down the rioters.” During roiling blackouts no one can chill in the power outrage; up and down Broadway theaters fall dark, while in the Capitol, they’re burning down the House; flames lick the sky with overtures of 1812. Senators ask, “Is that all there is to a fire?” while the president fiddles with intelligence. Next door a five-year-old with attention deficit disorder runs around the cocktail party screaming “fire in the hold!” trying to attract the attention of adults to a newscast depicting flames destroying the children of Lebanon. “You know,” a guest volunteers, “humans exhale carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas.” On TV the host signs off: “That’s all the time we have for tonight—join us again tomorrow when we ask “Will there be a fire next time?” as the station breaks for the nightly weather update: Fires throughout the West remain out of control fanned by a fierce sirocco.
