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MIKE DAVIS' BESTSELLING BOOK, "ECOLOGY OF FEAR," - - - - - - - - -
BY D.J. WALDIE | "Killer pulses" from a 9.1 earthquake, wildfires, space invaders, survivalist hordes, megalomaniac dirigible pilots, hypertrophied crabgrass and man-eating mountain lions -- by the end of Mike Davis' "Ecology of Fear," a 484-page catalog of real and fictional Los Angeles apocalypses, it's tempting to join New York magazine critic Walter Kirn in dismissing the book as a "biblical trumpet call" from a "slightly crackpot" historian who has Jeremiah too much on his mind. Naturally, for a book that exhaustively imagines L.A.'s destruction, "Ecology of Fear" became No. 1 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. The book's popularity exactly mirrors 150 years of ambivalence about the glamour of living in Los Angeles, expressed locally as a weird kind of Schadenfreude -- glee not at someone else's misfortune, but at (potentially) our own. There are some L.A. residents who claim to get an adrenaline rush from these reminders that the worst could happen to them at any moment. Every copy of the "Ecology of Fear" sold in the city should be stamped: Get out now, while you can! But, before you go, have a cool time! Davis' apocalyptic sermon about L.A. sells books the same way booster pitches about "health and happiness in the sunshine" once sold suburban lots to dazzled Midwesterners (and still sell suburban houses to dazzled Middle Easterners). At times in "Ecology of Fear" the effect is cruelly funny. Davis counters each booster cliché with its demonic double -- L.A.'s climate is actually lousy (tornadoes today and drought tomorrow), the landscape is lethal (when it isn't burning or shaking, it's crawling with fauna that has a taste for white meat) and its famously laid-back residents are nasty and brutish (rich and poor alike prey upon each other). Beneath its irony, "Ecology of Fear" is so hopeless, so Puritanical, in its vision of L.A.'s decimation that you can sense something else, some emotion stronger than the desire for sound environmental policy, at work. In 1990, Davis wrote a bitter, brilliant and scholarly study of these themes in "City of Quartz." That book's principal contribution was redefining L.A. as a "carceral city" -- a place of prisonlike vigilance awaiting violent confrontation between the city's immigrant underclass and a malevolent power structure, personified as the Los Angeles Police Department. Davis' prediction came true in 1992 as poor families ransacked the city's most famous department store (and the brassiere museum at Frederick's of Hollywood), and suburban cities bulldozed dirt and concrete barricades across access roads to keep freeway-close looters at bay. In the sooty aftermath of hundreds of fires (whose intensity was registered on surveillance satellites miles overhead), Davis became L.A.'s most quoted critic, and "City of Quartz" became the standard textbook on L.A. and its discontents. Parts of "Ecology of Fear" read like Davis trying to top his inadvertently horrific success at prophecy. The sequel to "City of Quartz" is a litany of more exotic terrors, more like a late medieval bestiary of actual and fake monsters: chipmunks infected with Black Plague, terrorists with H-bombs and coyotes with hantavirus waiting in the sagebrush. Some of these may turn out to be true, in the way the Rodney King riot fulfilled the warnings in "City of Quartz." But Davis expects more than fire from Los Angeles the next time; he anticipates a combo-apocalypse: tornadoes and earthquakes and the burning of Malibu and suburban skinhead race war. The idea may appeal to an imagination that longs for an ultimate, cleansing disaster, but it's a vision so dismal that it's ultimately paralyzing.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Besides living in L.A., Mike Davis and I share some experience with two historically deterministic faiths: Catholicism and Marxism (although I imagine the balance of our experience is different). Both faiths tell a story that explains current miseries. Both stories have a happy ending. Because despair leaves no room for the happy ending, the Salesian teachers at my Catholic high school hinted that despair was the only unpardonable sin. "Ecology of Fear" fetishizes L.A.'s fictional Armageddons -- according to Davis' strict accounting, writers and filmmakers over the years have wasted L.A. with 49 nuclear strikes, 28 earthquakes, 10 "hordes," six floods and 35 other forms of destruction. The book commandeers our reveries about the city and leaves no room for hope. It's nearly a pornography of despair. Like pornography, it invites our contempt for its subject. And, what of us who live here, in a place Davis portrays as so dangerous on so many fronts that it ought to be leveled and restored to wilderness? De-engineer Los Angeles into its original sunshine and dirt and there's no place for the small houses of my blue-collar neighbors or their small victories over fear in living together. Davis (who sometimes sounds less like a Marxist and more like a crude Darwinist) suggests that history has nominated new agents of inevitable revolution, and they're not the working people of Los Angeles, who have exchanged class-consciousness for aspirations to a job, a paycheck and a house like mine in the suburbs. The Davis who despairs of a faithless working class is telling the blue-collar millions of L.A. that they are sinners in the hands of an angry ecology. Davis is aware of how pitiless this sounds, particularly to the people of color who are increasingly the owners of the houses in older suburbs like mine now that affluent, white Angelenos have fled them. When a reporter for Newsday noted this inconsistency, Davis said, "The question is whether there's an element of deliberate exaggeration in what I write, or do I really believe the stuff I say. Unfortunately, I do believe most of it. The truth is, Angelenos -- like New Yorkers -- have a wonderful appetite for hearing bad things about their own city. It makes us seem more heroic for living there." That dismisses "Ecology of Fear" as ironic agit-prop. My neighbors in Lakewood (a racially mixed, blue-collar town built in 1950 on the margin of the Los Angeles plain) don't seem mock-heroic for the ordinariness of sharing their lives together. And they don't think of themselves as performance artists for living here, either, but as people who've taken up the protracted burdens of conviviality, a responsibility for which Davis seems to have no heart (even though he calls his turn-of-the-century bungalow neighborhood in Pasadena "sweet"). My neighbors aren't ironists either, even if they could afford the aesthetic privilege of enjoying all the ironies that lurk in Davis' dystopian L.A. My neighbors, as near as I can tell, know what they've gained and lost in the bargains they've made to live here.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - L.A. is, in its diminished way, precisely what popular and high culture for the past 100 years has presented as America's domestic religion. That faith -- today's immigrants' hope, as it was for my parents in 1946 and my neighbors -- has not failed completely. Its adherents are increasingly African-American, Latino and Asian. In L.A., one in five home-buyers is foreign born. L.A.'s white, Protestant ruling class was always "south of the South" when it came to their fear of backsliding into just such a "mongrel" society. The Los Angeles they captured in 1846 was brown, Catholic, distant from the East and too close to Mexico. White Angelenos exorcised their reasonable fear of displacement with institutional violence -- relegating the city's Native American and mixed-race residents to the stews of "Nigger Alley" (the 1850s and 1860s), lynching its Chinese laborers (the 1870s), displacing its Jews beyond the city limits (the 1890s), making Los Angeles the most segregated big city in the nation (from 1900 to 1970) and allowing it to convulse in the most destructive civil disturbances in the nation's modern history (in 1965 and 1992). Davis is right about one apocalypse that's coming. White L.A.'s feared double is just beyond the gated suburbs. There's a name for it -- mestizaje -- the promiscuous amalgamation of Hispanic, African, Asian and Native American peoples that is characteristic of the mestizo (blended-race) culture of Mexico. The social landscape of Los Angeles -- from the placement of the L.A. River in its current bed to the boundaries of its local governments -- documents an Anglo struggle to define a white metropolis. The L.A. emerging from this landscape supposedly tamed by white, middle-class suburbanization is a mestizo exopolis of 4 million laboring people, of Mayan garment workers, Hmong beauticians, Korean dry cleaners, Armenian hoodlums and Quechua fruit sellers. That's the real cause of the fear eating at the heart of L.A., for which the conversion reaction among affluent Anglos is a sick fondness for all the Armageddons that "Ecology of Fear" imagines. Racism, at least, can be legislated against, and educated, agitated and bred against. As someone from the Irish part of his family surely told Davis, even when no present remedies work, evils are endured until they can be prevented. Killer earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and periodic 100-year droughts cannot be. Davis recently told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that he believes the things ordinary people build here are not allowed to last. "The thing I hate most about Southern California," he said, "is the terrorism against everyday experience." "Ecology of Fear" is a kind of terrorist manifesto against the durability of ordinary things. N E X T+P A G E+| A community that accommodates weakness and longing - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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