From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, images of fires ravaging

Southern California filled the news. The devastation was news, impossible to look away from.

But according to Mike Davis, historian at the University of California, Irvine,

it wasn't new. What was new was the tone of disaster coverage post-Katrina.

For the last couple of days, at least the local TV and newspaper coverage in San Diego,

has been one long celebration. And pointedly, it said over and over again, one phrase

used was, we've had a civilized evacuation. This is the opposite of Katrina, making the point,

here we are in Qualcomm Stadium, you can get a back rub, a yoga lesson, or a gourmet sandwich.

The governor said, everybody's happy.

What you're going to see, I believe, in San Diego County, at least, is a rather

extraordinary outpouring of federal relief.

And I'm sure people in New Orleans and other areas affected by Katrina are really wounded

by the contrast, not only between the response, but between the characterization,

the images that are being presented here, that we're dealing with two Americas, two different

kinds of humanities.

Now, you've also argued that Los Angeles is prone to a whole slew of cyclical disasters,

and so it's not a question of if, but when they occur.

Well, we live in a classical Mediterranean landscape. Earthquakes and fires and floods are just

the normal metabolism of the landscape, but we deliberately almost keep putting ourselves

in harm's way. What could be more stupid than to keep rebuilding the same mansions in Malibu

at the mouth of a canyon out of which blowtorch like San Ana winds carry fire punctually every 10 or 20 years?

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