Seen on social media earlier this week:
Confirming this, Chris Bray talks about current reporting on the wildfires in and around Los Angeles:
In his much-discussed piece on the Los Angeles fires at the Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a narrative foundation. In his book Ecology of Fear, Woodhouse notes, Davis “argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.” Malibu and the Palisades, the land of hard living. That’s why so many rich and famous people lived there: because it was so inherently miserable and dangerous.
Mike Davis was full of shit for thirty years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened survivors who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the “Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.
Also, Sierra Madre has bears. The Los Angeles suburbs are a place of horror and agony, because they back into the mountains, where blood-clawed wild animals prowl and stalk and slaughter. Places where life is especially grim and sanguinary, pgs. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the areas around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A poodle was eaten by a mountain lion in Bradbury once, as neighbors gaped in open-jawed terror, YET STILL DO FOOLS ENDURE THE HORROR OF LIVING IN SUCH A PLACE.
Current real estate listings in Bradbury, a gated hillside community incorporated as an independent city in the San Gabriel Valley with a population of about 900 people:
How then would ye endure such horror, oh pilgrim, to live thus amid such blood and death? How bearest thou brutal existence upon this land?
Famously, in 1999, the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a long story examining Mike Davis and his vision of Southern California. It’s full of sentences like this:
- Los Angeles’ most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in “Ecology of Fear,” his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love.
- … more than a third of the time there were factual problems with his work.
- Davis concedes the error.
- Davis does not say where he got this piece of information.
- “I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,” Davis said.
- Some of Davis’ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote.
- Davis attributes the false quote to a mix-up.
- Then he takes readers on a partial flight of fantasy …
- An examination of the Malibu Times article shows that Davis made up the parts about the jewels, the hair color, the kayakers’ occupations, the evidence of their callous classism and the ethnicity of their maids.
- Davis is mischievously unrepentant.
- Davis also merges fact and literary fiction, without acknowledgment, while arguing that Pomona, like other older, outer suburbs, is dying.
And so on.
The Times concluded that Davis could be read as “a polemicist, who makes cogent, incisive arguments on big themes”, but not as “a historian who is expected to be reliable, even on details”.
