Since the wildfires (which, in my California childhood and girlhood, used to be called “forest fires”) broke out last week in Los Angeles, I have been living in a kind of anguish. It is not, of course, thankfully, the material agony faced by the millions of people now in a hellscape that used to be a paradise, or the unimaginable agony faced by the tens of thousands who have lost their homes and belongings. Mine is an intellectual misery, rather, as I watch something unfold that is clearly, to me at least, the latest Pearl Harbor in our history. It...