For once, the people at Fox News and CNN found themselves in complete agreement: something wicked this way comes.
The weather presenters on all networks walked the fine line between balancing their enthusiasm at the prospect of the “event” with the gravity of the situation as they confirmed a “historic” winter storm will blanket vast swathes of the United States this weekend.
With all due deference to Springsteen and Lana Del Rey, it is the chorus of weather presenters who provide the immortal soundtrack to everyday American life. They are always there, on the televisions and car radios and in bars, brightly and passionately explaining why the mercury is hitting one hundred degrees plus out in Phoenix or why the latest tornado might just be about to visit ruin of Biblical proportions on some poor unsuspecting town in Oklahoma.
The scale of this January gathering storm is almost impossible to comprehend. Its origins, one meteorologist explained, are located in the polar vortex, where, as the ice melts, it disperses what he wonderfully described as “fingers of cold air” belonging to the vengeful hand of nature.
READ MORE
Ice storm warnings are flashing from just east of El Paso all the way up to Maine. The southern states are preparing for freezing rain that will immediately harden to treacherous ice, while east coast cities are warned to expect heavy snowfall by Sunday. The result will be the sudden, enforced stilling of a country that is perpetually on the move. Thousands of flights will be cancelled. Shelves are emptying as people respond to warnings that they may be without power for days. But the NFL championship games are going ahead as planned!
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, where it is always cold in January, an Ice storm of a more visceral nature continues. The stand-off between citizen protesters and immigration enforcement agents brought vice-president JD Vance to the city on Thursday to explain why extra troops had been drafted in and warning: “Our plan is very simple. If you assault a law enforcement officer we are going to do everything we can to put you in prison. Most of these protesters, as much as I may disagree with their politics, most have been peaceful. But a lot of them have not.”
His explanation was rejected by the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey.
“We have for years worked with federal agencies to drive down violent crime. On the north side, shootings are at a record low. If this was about safety there would be a whole lot of opportunity to partner and do it. But this is not about safety. It’s not even about immigration. What we are seeing right now is political retribution and it’s causing chaos on our streets.”
This weekend, Minneapolis businesses are taking part in an “economic blackout”, closing their doors and inviting people to avoid shopping. The coming storm may drive them indoors anyway.
In September, President Donald Trump stood before delegates at the United Nations conference and told them that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.
“All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
If he finds himself standing at one of the great windows in the White House on Sunday, contemplating the vista of a snow-blanketed National Mall, the Donald will tell himself that he is right again. The meteorologists will valiantly try to argue the point that climate change is actually the cause of this climate change. Doughtier Americans of a certain vintage will grouse about the fuss and melodramatic warnings over what is, in essence, a belt of winter weather. As usual, neither side will listen to the other.
More than 50 years have passed since the New England winter event, which transformed vast swathes of Connecticut and Massachusetts into real-life ice sculptures. The damage it inflicted was extraordinary and it remains a folk memory.
But from that blast from nature came Rick Moody’s novel, The Ice Storm, and Ang Lee’s film, hailed by Brian De Palma as the film of the 1990s. It presents an austere and lonely vision of white American affluence in the Thanksgiving winter of 1973, when Nixon was in trouble and social mores were fragmenting. But it stands as a representation of the era in the US which Trump depicted in his election campaigning, which lionises a past and promises the return of a paradise lost. The truth was always murkier.
This latest gargantuan weather event seems like a providential opening to the country’s 250th year and a bleak political atmosphere that feels inescapable. And not for the first time.
“It was kind of like we were all waiting for the clock to strike, to turn into something else,” explains Paul Hood, the narrator of the novel.
“Maybe the ice storm was a blessing in disguise.”
