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A L S O+.T O D A Y T A B L E+T A L K
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Killing the father Introducing the Garner Report The mother of masochism The many voices of Ken Kalfus The artist of death - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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PORNOGRAPHY OF DESPAIR | PAGE 1, 2
St. Agatha's, Sunday morning, 10 a.m. The congregation of St. Agatha's on West Adams Boulevard (on the edge of what the media defines as South Central L.A.) is black, brown and white. At the 10 a.m. masses I've attended, the congregants sway and sing in a hot, crowded and worn sanctuary as the gospel choir belts out tunes I never heard at my parish church. St. Agatha's pastor since 1996 has been a youngish priest named Ken Deasy, who describes himself as "a surfer, a blond, blue-eyed, beach kid." When he took the job at St. Agatha's, he couldn't imagine how his mostly African-American parish would ever accommodate its mostly Latino neighborhood, and he was unaware of the irony that blacks as well as whites are now subject to the city's new wave of displacement. Deasy had arrived, it now seems, at almost the last moment when the parish's old stories of working-class black life might be blended with new, mestizo ones. Deasy also brought with him a remnant of the white, affluent congregation he had led at St. Monica's Church in Santa Monica, not really very far from the working-class neighborhood of St. Agatha's, but worlds away in L.A. To bring these lives together -- an act of real defiance against the L.A. he grew up in -- Deasy says, "I did what Jesus would have done; I threw a dinner," and the stories began to flow. A kind of mestizaje is underway at St. Agatha's. Barbecues, endless talk (including Spanish classes for black and Anglo parish volunteers), Ken Deasy's unmistakable conviction that he doesn't have all the answers and the hallelujahs of the gospel choir are part of it. The parish's hopeful, flawed people aren't looking to build a New Jerusalem but the sort of everyday community that accommodates their weakness and their longing. They aren't ready yet to see it obliterated if it fails to meet these modest expectations. "People are coming out to this area," Deasy recently said, "and discovering it's a holy land."
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Except in "Ecology of Fear," L.A. isn't a perfect dystopia either, although the book's criticisms of hillside development in Malibu, earthquake failure downtown and land use fiscalization in the suburbs are true. L.A.'s shortcomings -- as heaven and as hell -- explain why, having created L.A.'s noir history in "City of Quartz," the author of "Ecology of Fear" has to bring it to an end over and over. The book is the story of Davis' Puritan disappointment with a city that is not good enough or bad enough. Both "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear" make clear that L.A.'s social landscape was deliberately made a mechanism for sorting communities by race, class and income more rigorously than in any other American big city. But, for its preponderantly blue-collar citizens after 1940, at least L.A. wasn't a tarpaper shack at the end of a dirt road in Arkansas or a third-floor walk-up in Chicago or even an architecturally pure tenement in a modernist superblock. It was all the suburban "cities of tomorrow" that were summoned by the longing of the not-quite-middle-class to own a 50-foot-by-100-foot parcel of the future. The L.A. that aspired to be a "Caucasian triumph" over nature, organized labor and lesser races can't be blamed on something as anonymous as sprawl. It was the conscious product of federal housing policy based on home ownership, suburban segregation and the subsidized construction of working-class houses like mine. A hundred years later, we have the regional city we planned for, and we must make something of L.A. together. "Ecology of Fear" -- devoid of any hopeful signs -- begs the question, why even try? The writers who have followed Davis into noir Los Angeles seem to regret the square miles of its not-quite-middle-class suburbs and its working people who get by from boom to bust. The regrets are so totalizing in "Ecology of Fear" that they enforce their own amnesia when it comes to alternative stories of the city, like Ken Deasy's. That's unfortunate, because Mike Davis tells stories superbly. He told one at the end of "City of Quartz" about Fontana, the industrial town on the margin of L.A. where Davis grew up, that is the best thing in the book.
The despairing effect of "Ecology of Fear" is to insist that no story of
our lives together can resist the perfect catastrophes Davis imagines for
L.A. That would be L.A.'s ultimate disaster.
D.J. Waldie, author of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" (W.W. Norton), lives in southeast Los Angeles County. |
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Los Angeles invites endless misreading -- and fury -- as a paradise. It
never was, except in the boosters' brochures. Their L.A. has always been --
and only been -- a sales pitch about palm trees, sunshine and the
possibility of radical self-empowerment.