Opinion | Los Angeles is still burning. Where are the leaders?

We received an evacuation alert on Wednesday night. A fire appeared out of nowhere and threatened to engulf Hollywood. I pulled our son out of the tub. We jumped into the car and drove north, past two other fires, through smoke and sirens, gridlock and chaos, flames on the horizon in all directions.

People keep saying that the scenes in Los Angeles look like something out of a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need protagonists. Every apocalypse on screen has a leader. So, where is ours?

The fires destroyed entire communities. Thousands lost their homes. Many more were displaced, and looters ran rampant, taking the personal property of those lucky enough to have it. A steady stream of alerts from Watch Duty, the wildfire monitoring app, is ringing as I write this, new fires starting, existing ones spreading, winds picking up again. Will the last alarm say that our neighborhood, our street or our school is next?

I would love for a deus ex machina to change this story or for real estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his The Grove shopping center. For now, I would settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it will be horrible, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.

As any screenwriter will tell you, the protagonist doesn’t have to be perfect. We actually prefer them to be flawed, as long as they’re ours.

I can’t follow Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after 9/11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the ruins of Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, following widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took office in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré a “John Wayne dude,” who “got off the damn helicopter and started cursing, and people started moving.”

In those dark early months of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was not kind. (I’m not sure he would know how.) But his daily briefings became crucial. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths in nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

Not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From the firefighters and emergency responders to everyone who opened their homes, volunteered and joined the GoFundMe pages, I have never seen such unity. But if leadership is Churchill’s combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles saw neither.

When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously planned trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive press conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to play down a public spat with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley were “in agreement.”

On Saturday, she said on Xu: “Together we will get through this crisis.” During a press conference on Sunday, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”

Will these efforts make things easier for Angelenos? On Sunday, a petition to impeach Ms Bass “for her failure to govern during this unprecedented crisis” had more than 100,000 signatures.

In the viral video, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, wearing aviator sunglasses, looked to me like he couldn’t wait to get back into his idling SUV as a distraught Angeleno told him her community was devastated and begged him for help. He found time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his results and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about saving Los Angeles first?

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, fueled a schoolyard brawl, calling the governor of California “Gavin Newscum” and blaming Democratic politics for the destruction in Los Angeles.

Despite what X would have us think, history shows that Americans are quite forgiving in a crisis. We are willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel that someone is telling us this clearly. But we get neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ashes and we are ruled by childish social media posts and possibly President Biden, but honestly, who knows?

I watched all this furiously, but also out of my mind. Why can’t the city that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, he was The Slap, but he still saved the world) find a main character to try and save us from this disaster? This country loves the charismatic action hero so much that it spawned the Terminator’s political career.

California has always been a beast to be governed, with nearly 40 million people and interests ranging from farmers in the Central Valley to billionaires in Silicon Valley. In the past, the country elected strong leaders. Love them or hate them, you can’t say that Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown didn’t take responsibility. But the dominance of one political party in recent years has narrowed the circle of stalwart public servants.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles, a sprawling multiethnic collection of diverse suburbs, is not known for urban civic engagement. City dwellers become animated about hyperlocal issues like neighborhood zoning and often dismiss issues that affect the greater LA area. Beverly Hills and other wealthy areas operate as municipalities and cannot vote for city leaders.

Unlike New York, where politicians must master the art of retail politics, the city of Los Angeles is so vast — 503 square miles — that local officials communicate with voters mostly through television and radio. They are not forged in the daily press of the tabloid press like the leaders of New York, who are used to receiving daily attacks and then having their eyebrows drawn on. By comparison, Los Angeles elected officials work in Bubble Wrap. Many seem soft-spoken, at the risk of sounding like Yankees fans.

I’m not calling for a bully, but people who successfully navigate epic disasters have a bit of a despot. I suspect that General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, aka Stormin’ Norman, who led with a whiteboard and authority during the Persian Gulf War, would have made his trainees cry. That’s fine. We don’t need cuddles. We are terrified.

Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people died, and it is estimated that around 12,000 buildings were destroyed. Without guidance, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighboring Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s sad.)

Right now I don’t care who did or didn’t defund which water company or fire department or if the stench is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are broken-hearted, suffocating in the poisonous air and crushed under the weight of inaction.

I want someone to step in who cares more about saving the city than saving his career. We need someone who will stand in front of the board with authority and tell us the plan. I’d take Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear before the flames of Eaton and take over. He told us he would be back. At this point, I’d even take Cuomo.

Los Angeles-based screenwriter and executive producer Amy Chozick is the author of Chasing Hillary, which she adapted into the Max series, The Girls on the Bus.

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