The fires in Los Angeles have been brutal. Billions, if not trillions, will be needed. And the posh Getty Villa in posh Malibu, originally owned by and named for climate destruction activist, became a giant, vacuum-sealed symbol. It raises complex questions.
I was born in Los Angeles. And while we lived in Pacoima when I was born, most of my childhood was spent in Beverly Hills, within 20 minutes of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Brentwood, the Santa Monica Mountains. A lot of that is gone now.
My hometown, for all intents and purposes, is gone now. Or at the very least, unrecognizable.
Just like me.
Reflex: I know you think Beverly Hills is as ridiculously, grotesquely elitist as any town in America. Back then, half of it was. I lived in the other half: south of Wilshire, north of Olympic, five blocks from the high school, in the area nicknamed “The Flats.”
That said, just about everyone with whom I grew up is embarrassed to say they were raised in Beverly Hills because of what you’re thinking right now. They usually say things like “on the Westside,” “near Century City,” or my sobriquet of choice, “West LA.” It was wealthy, and I was quadrillion-to-one lucky to have lived there. But because I didn’t earn the money it took to live there, it’s more than a little embarrassing.
And of course, with my luck, my Beverly Hills parents were the only ones not involved with the entertainment industry at all. Nor did they know anyone. So, no nepo baby help there.
Still, that was my home. I am a BHHS Norman, and the high school was in Zip Code 90212.
Many of the areas near Beverly Hills — Brentwood, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades — burned down last week. People died. Block after block…gone. Entire neighborhoods and business districts…gone. Damage might run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. And because the state didn’t vote for Donald Trump, the federal government is loath to provide any safety nets or assistance. Not that pettiness should get in the way of government assistance or anything.
There’s a famous African proverb: “Whenever an elder dies, a library burns down.” But what happens when the library burns down? And the houses? And the schools? Dozens of people represent the libraries that burned down in the fires, right? Are they more or less important than the institutions?
Architectural Digest listed some famous “landmark” structures that were in danger, are in danger, or have been destroyed in some way. Among them were the Hollywood Sign, the Eames House, and the Getty Villa. The Villa is not the Getty Museum, which is in an evacuation zone; it is located at what used to be J. Paul Getty’s mansion in Malibu. The mansion was donated to the city in 1974, but is managed by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
According to The Guardian, “Fire prevention measures at the Villa include water storage on-site, with irrigation immediately deployed throughout the grounds on Tuesday morning, [Getty Trust CEO Katherine E.] Fleming said, adding: ‘Museum galleries and library archives were sealed off from smoke by state-of-the-art air-handling systems. The double-walled construction of the galleries also provides significant protection for the collections.’”
Did J. Paul Getty, dead since 1976, contribute to the ferocity of this fire in 2025? Arguably, yes.
His wealth — he was reputed to be the richest man in the world at his death — came from pulling oil out of the ground. The combustion of oil is one of the major causes of global climate crises that have turned routine Santa Ana wind brushfires into 100-mile-per-hour firestorms in the United States. Like Rockefeller, Hammer, and Pickens, Getty has his grimy fingerprints all over today’s litany of tornadoes, hurricanes, filthy air, retreating glaciers, mass extinctions, and rising ocean temperatures.
It could easily be determined that the irony is as thick as carbon monoxide when it comes to protecting the Getty Villa.
Getty collected art. Toxic people have collected art for years, but that’s not what this article is about. It’s about the Neutron Bomb effect.
In 1977, funds to start building an enhanced radiation nuclear warhead (aka “Neutron Bomb) were requested, the request having been uncovered by the Washington Post. Here’s how the Post described the weapon to be developed:
The new warhead is the first practical use of the so-called neutron bomb theory which government scientists have been working on for many years. According to one nuclear weapons expert, the new warhead “cuts down on blast and heat and thus total destruction, leaving buildings and tanks standing. But the great quantities of neutrons it release kill people.
Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 5, 1977
Kills the people but keeps the building standing. This raises the question, “Why keep the buildings standing if the people are all dead?”
So the Neutron Bomb effect — the idea that the buildings have artistic and sentimental value and need to be spared the ravages of catastrophe — comes into play with the Getty Villa and other threatened landmarks, whether discussing the fire in LA or other disasters past and yet to come.
This is where it gets squishy. If nonprofit arts organizations and institutions cannot prove worth without a structure, then how can they prove worth with one? In other words, if the Getty Villa were to burn down with all the art destroyed as well, then some rare antiquities would be lost forever. Could the collection be presented on the road in nontraditional venues all over LA? If so, why hold on to the mansion at all, except for vanity?
Further, if the resources required to fireproof/save the Getty were instead spent on, say, artist housing, would those antiquities even be there to be burned? What if these rare antiquities were no longer to exist? Wouldn’t they just join the thousands of antiquities that already don’t exist?
Lastly, the kicker: if one person — a library, as the proverb goes — were to die because they were protecting antiquities whose civilization had already died out, how could that be just?
I love art and I think about history a lot, so antiquities mean something to me. I love visiting the Getty Villa; it’s a peaceful, artful place when not ablaze. But then, I’m in the privileged group that doesn’t think all that much about the achieving the core levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, namely physiological or safety and security needs.
If the man who funded the Villa is responsible for (or at least culpable of) creating the environment that caused the billions of dollars’ worth of damage, namely global climate change caused by the burning of the fuels that made him wealthy, how should that affect the financial burden of building a new city of Los Angeles? Or at least West LA?
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