Just when it seemed that things couldn't get any worse in credit-crunched Los Angeles, the whole place has gone up in flames. Well, not all of it. But if I walk outside my front door, I can smell burning in the air and see a light coating of ash on my car. Freeways are being closed and thousands of people are having to leave their soon-to-be char-grilled hilltop homes.

Yes, October is here again in drought-stricken California, and that means one thing: Armageddon. Last year a million people were subject to evacuation amid a firestorm that wiped out an area 160 times larger than that destroyed by the nuclear weapon detonated over Hiroshima in 1945.

This year the drought is worse. It is so bad that the state's water reserves have almost gone. Nothing illustrates this more disturbingly than recent photographs of an old mining town at the bottom of Lake Shasta - one of the largest reservoirs in the US, and flooded in 1948 - that has started to poke back up through the disappearing waterline.

The question of whether global warming is responsible now seems largely irrelevant: the End of Days is here. It's too late to buy energy-saving light bulbs, give up plastic shopping bags and/or exhale less often. Fortunately, California is prepared for the coming inferno with one of the best firefighting forces in the world. Unfortunately, that same firefighting service is no doubt as broke as every other government-funded organisation in America. And can help really be expected from Washington, which is so deep in the hole that the National Debt Clock just ran out of digits? For Angelenos, it's hardly worth thinking about. At least not while the hurricane-like Santa Ana winds grow stronger every hour, rattling windows and throwing burning embers over the firefighters' defensive positions.

Then again, if everyone escapes safely, maybe it won't be such a bad thing if LA burns. Think of all those foreclosed houses that would be taken off the market.

Cast the first Stone

Speaking of disasters, the US release of Oliver Stone's W. is now only a few days away. I really wanted to like this film. I might not often agree with Stone's politics, but his 1987 movie Wall Street is, in my opinion, a work of genius - and I hoped that W. could become one of those Hollywood career-revival moments, like Bruce Willis's role in Pulp Fiction.

Alas, no. Stone's biopic of America's 43rd President feels rushed, underfunded and ultimately shallow and anticlimactic. Am I the only person to have noticed that the director is just as prone to bloodcurdling malapropisms as his “misunderestimated” subject?

When I interviewed Stone a couple of weeks ago, he told me that Colin Powell was the “antipote” to Dick Cheney. Then I watched Stone's appearance last weekend on Real Time with Bill Maher, during which he referred to someone named Donald Rumsfield and pronounced the title of Maher's new movie, Religulous, with a hard “g”. He talked about President Bush's “unconscious mind”, when I'm sure that he meant “subconscious” (although I understand from Wikipedia that in the psychiatric profession both are acceptable). I noted in my interview with Stone that he and Bush are strangely similar - this just seems to prove my theory.

Perhaps they deserve each other.

Imperial measure

There's always the possibility that Americans' self-loathing is at such a high that W. will provide a much needed form of catharsis. Personally, however, I think that our stateside friends should be delighted with finally losing their global dominance. Empire loss can be liberating - just ask the Brits.

No longer do you have to make consumer purchases based on patriotism. Goodbye Buick Lucerne, Hello BMW M5. And no longer do you have to treat every foreign country as a potential future colony or recipient of aid. Instead, you can dispatch legions of snide and ironically-detached newspaper correspondents to report back on the hilariously straightfaced patriotism and self-belief of the goons now ruling the world. The risk, of course, is that former colonies might begin to purchase what were once your trophy industries - in much the same way as a man who was once mauled by a grizzly might collect bearskin rugs. But as the resident of a post-imperial nation you'll almost certainly be drunk by lunchtime, which means you probably won't care.

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