injustice
By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff, 10/28/98
PASADENA, Calif. - ''On a morning like this,'' said Mike Davis, the
self-styled ''doom-and-gloom'' chronicler of Los Angeles, ''people say
that people who write books like mine are crazy.''
The smog was thick over Los Angeles itself, a few miles to the southwest, but the season's first Santa Ana-spawned brush fires had burned out and the San Gabriel Mountains were clear - if not sharply so - a mile or two farther
to the east.
Davis is out of the muckraker tradition of the early part of the century, when writers like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Frank Norris exposed the evils they saw in the meatpacking industry, slum housing, and the railroads. Davis's focus has been his native southern California, specifically Los Angeles, whose political establishment he skewered in his 1990 book, ''City of Quartz.'' That has become a cult classic for urbanists curious about a city's political self-destruction. He has now followed that with ''Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagining of Disaster.''
''Any way you look at it,'' said Davis, ''Los Angeles comes out very, very poorly'' - whether it's ''the $7 billion subway to nowhere,'' the brush fires that periodically sweep down the Malibu canyons, the deadly gang warfare on the streets, or a political establishment that to Davis seems to ignore those events when it isn't actually causing them.
''In no other place,'' he says, ''is there the same combination of natural
disasters and social disorders.''
Davis is a crusty 52 with close-cropped graying hair. His habit of tightl folding his arms across his chest as he talks underscores his blunt refusal to
talk about himself. For him, his work, his ideas, his causes, are his story.
He lives with his wife, the Mexican-born painter Alessandra Moctezuma, in
a stuccoed bungalow with a swinging bench on the porch and a faded
photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in direct line of sight from the front
door.
As a teenager in the early 1960s, Davis took part in civil rights demonstrations and, after dropping out of Reed College in Oregon, he worked as a long-haul trucker while doing community organizing in southern California. At 30, he went back to college, studying labor history at UCLA, but it is the dozen blue-collar years that continue to establish his credentials as a social critic.
Most recently, after a half-dozen years editing a Marxist journal in London, Davis has been a part-time academic, teaching at places like the Cesar Chavez Center for Chicano Studies at UCLA and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. A self-described ''activist scholar,'' he often works behind the scenes advising social-action groups involved in everything from negotiating a truce between rival street gangs in Watts to working on strategy with the city's militant bus riders union.
He said his causes involve an awareness of good urban design, credible alternatives to existing problems, ''and a social justice component.'' That same sense of passionate concern carries over into his writing.
A centerpiece of ''Ecology of Fear'' contrasts the millions of tax dollars spent to fight brush fires threatening ''the trophy homes'' of Los Angeles celebrities in Malibu with the city's refusal to inspect the firetrap apartments of immigrant workers.
''The $100 million cost of mobilizing 15,000 firefighters during Halloween week 1993'' - when firestorms burned over 18,500 acres and 350 homes - ''may be an increasingly common entry in the public ledger,'' Davis writes. ''Needless to say, there is no comparable investment in the fire, toxic or earthquake safety of inner-city communities. Indeed, as in so many other things, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal.''
Recasting traditional urban planning models of the socially engineered city for what others would see as free-spirited Los Angeles, Davis locates a ''gulag rim'' beyond the ''gated affluent suburbs,'' an ''outer rim of Los Angeles's ecology of fear.''
Out there is Calipatria State Prison, with what Davis describes as ''the world's only bird-proof, ecologically responsible death fence'' - a 5,000-volt fence designed to guarantee instantaneous death to any would-be escapee. It had to be modified when environmentalists protested that it was killing birds that alighted on it.
That may be southern California at its most bizarre, but Davis soberly recalls visiting Calipatria while researching ''Ecology of Fear.'' ''There are 1,200 murderers at Calipatria,'' he said, ''half of them baby-faced kids who did drive-bys as 15- or 16-year-olds.''
With the recognition that comes from winning a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, Davis has gotten feelers from several East Coast universities, but he says he is unlikely to leave Los Angeles for good.
''For an activist,'' he said, ''this is the most exciting city in America.'' The social struggles involving immigrant workers ''will define the trade union movement'' and ''this is where they are. This is where the kids are who will have to make it work.''
''It's like New York in 1910,'' he said, ''the place where the great social dreams of immigrants are being realized.''
But there is also the perverse delight that Davis takes in the view of Los Angeles that, by his count, has inspired 138 books and films over the past 90 years. ''No other city,'' he writes, ''seems to excite such dark rapture.''
The books and films, he said, reflect ''one of the deep structures of our national personality, the destruction of the evil city.'' Watching ''Godzilla'' in a small-town movie theater in Utah last summer, Davis said he ''felt like I was sitting with Jeffersonian Republicans cheering the destruction of Federalist Philadelphia.''
But watching local audiences of ''Volcano'' laughing as a flood of lava consumes the Los Angeles County Museum, he said, ''I felt proud of Los Angeles, finally developing an underdog sense of humor.''
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 10/28/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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