Below are comments on a review of Mike Davis's latest book. For the entire review, go to http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=50041074061302)
H-Net Reviews wrote:
H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (September 2003)
Mike Davis. _Dead Cities and Other Tales_. New York: The New Press, 2002. viii + 432 pp. Illustrations. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 1-56584-844-6.
Reviewed for H-USA by Lisa Magloff, Department of Geography, King's College, University of London
Doom, Gloom, and the Marxist Apocalypse
Mike Davis has had a brilliant and controversial career as Los Angeles's self-appointed scholar of doom, in the process earning worldwide praise for his politically correct view of a world where cities are a roiling foment of greed, race-riots, and bunker-mentality architecture, of bullet-proof doors and transportation designed to separate whites from the sight of black and Latino neighborhoods.
Davis certainly has the scholarly and political creed to back up his Marxist views. The son of a meat cutter who helped found his local union, Davis left high school to become a meat cutter himself when his father became ill. He then learned to drive big rigs--a big selling point with affluent leftist readers impressed by his blue-collar mystique.
Affluent leftists? I've never met one myself, unless by "leftist" you mean somebody who lives in a Park Avenue penthouse while paying dues to some Trotskyist sect. I don't think any such person ever existed. I always admired the fact that Davis had real jobs, but then again I think I have a real job as a computer programmer.
His previous book, _Ecology of Doom_, was a best seller, and Davis was lauded as prescient for predicting the LA riots of 1992 two years before they happened.
But the failure of the city to burn to the ground in 1992 and the rebuilding of large chunks of LA seems to have upset Davis's Marxist hope for a fiery proletarian revolution. Anyone familiar with the controversy over _Ecology of Doom_ would not be surprised that he is still skewing the facts to fit his apocalyptic vision.
First of all, the title of the book is "Ecology of Fear", not "Ecology of Doom" and you must be referring to the hatchet job mounted by the bourgeois press, most of which are inspired by a LA realtor named Brady Westwater. Mostly, they are intended to present a "sunny" and positive view of Los Angeles, which is obviously understandable from the point of view of somebody who sells real estate for a living. You can read all these attacks and responses at:
http://www.vcsun.org/LA/davis.html
One of the best defenses of Davis appeared in the LA Times.
Friedman, for example, contends that Davis' errors begin almost immediately in his new book. "On 'Ecology's' first page," Friedman writes in his column, "Davis claims that it rains harder in L.A. than anywhere else."
Actually, Davis claims something slightly different. Here's what he wrote: "When the billowing, dark turbulence of the storm front collides with the high mountain wall surrounding the Los Angeles basin, it sometimes produces rainfall of a ferocity unrivaled anywhere on earth, even in the tropical monsoon belts."
Clearly, a claim that Los Angeles receives the hardest rain in the world would be false. But a claim that the San Gabriel Mountains receive occasional, unrivaled bursts of rain may be true. I say "may" because no one has yet proved otherwise.
http://www.vcsun.org/LA/davis/lat2.html
Even worse, _Dead Cities_ reads as both hasty and sloppy. Davis repeats himself, and many of the facts used in the book are only validated by reference to other works by himself. Then, there is Davis's throwaway use of hyperbole and poorly checked "facts" to create a sense of drama. A passing remark about "American fighter pilots [dropping] cluster bombs chalked with the names of dead Manhattan firefighters on the ruins of Kabul" (p. 18) is unreferenced, and for good reason. Davis is in fact referring to an isolated incident involving a single Tomahawk, not a cluster bomb, and not dropped on Kabul.
Should we interpret this as an endorsement of real estate values in Afghanistan?
Another throwaway remark, that "Tokyo, according to a 1998 Earth Council report, requires for its sustenance a biologically productive land area more than three times the size of Japan" (p. 363), sounds disturbing, until you realize that it is merely a dramatization of the obvious. Cities need agricultural land, big cities need lots of land, and small countries with big cities need lots of imports.
What a banal observation. For all of your easy dismissal of Marxism, it is obvious that you have not come to terms with the ecosocialist critique--which on these questions is rooted in Marx's examination of soil fertility. Following Liebeg, Marx posited the need to reintegrate the town and the countryside in order to resolve a "metabolic breach". This analysis also appears in the work of Donald Worster, who has shown how American cities that rely on hydroelectric dams, transported water, remote monoculture farm products, etc. are not environmentally sustainable. Your facile approach to the problem reminds me of the Frank Furedi cult. You haven't been dipping into Mick Hume, have you?
There are specious juxtapositions. "In March 2002, while crews were still excavating the remains of dead firefighters and stockbrokers from the crater that was once the World Trade Center, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica suddenly collapsed" (p. 414). Is Davis suggesting that terrorism affects the ice shelf? Or that we are destroying the world in so many myriad ways it is hard to keep track anymore? No, he is linking ecological damage with modern life--toxic agriculture, global warming, use of fossil fuels, and pollution. All of these things do have a huge and negative impact on the environment, but does stating the obvious in a strangled and manic tone, as Davis does, really get us anywhere? Rather than looking for answers, Davis seems anxious for the end of the world to hurry up and get here and prove him right.
Well, if the answer is not in socialist revolution, what else can it be? The problem for academics like Magloff is that they want to appear reasonable, but capitalism is an insane system. Davis alienates such people because he has the guts to point this out.
Similarly, I doubt New Yorkers would recognize their city in Davis's description. It is true that twenty, or even ten, years ago a blackout in New York meant looting, fear, anger, and collective angst. Yet last month's blackout (the first major blackout in many years, which occurred well after Davis's book was published) was accompanied by mass campouts and sing-alongs, barbeque picnics on the sidewalk, and a distinct lack of looting.
Actually, real looting did take place. Tens of thousands of small proprietors lost their perishable goods. The power companies will never pay for their neglect and profiteering. In any case, the issue is not whether looting takes place or not. It is whether a more rational approach to natural resources can be envisioned. With only about 30 to 50 years of fuel reserves, we are in desperate need of a different approach. Los Angeles would not be possible without the massive highway system and suburban housing that private automobiles and piped-in water allow. By identifying this malaise, Davis has shown himself to be a true visionary, unlike real estate agents like Westwater and his co-thinkers in the intelligentsia.
In fact, Davis's political agenda seems to have overtaken his sense of vision entirely. He remains strangely unwilling to acknowledge that cities can rise from the ashes, can remake themselves in a new image, and that the process of urban decay is reversible. Reading _Dead Cities_ is at times like listening to a raving lunatic on a street corner ranting that the End of the World is Nigh, or watching a 1950s-era movie about an asteroid colliding with the earth and destroying all life as we know it.
And reading you is like listening to John Stossel.
Everything he writes is filtered through the lens of social Marxism. Latinos, blacks, and the poor become martyrs to Davis's vision of the ecological destruction of the city. Yet Davis never considers that people may not be willing to be martyrs to a race war or Marxist revolution or that some of us still have ideas about making the world a better place.
What is social Marxism? Is that like social Darwinism? And what exactly is your idea about "making the world a better place"? Investing in the Calvert Fund? Buying shampoo from the Body Shop?
Indeed, reading _Dead Cities_ is an eerie experience, but not for the reasons Davis hopes. For the rest of us do not inhabit the same eerie dead landscape in which Davis lives. The rest of us inhabit a sick landscape which we strive to improve. No, _Dead Cities_ is eerie because it marks the descent of a brilliant and prescient mind into a morass of doom, gloom, and hope for a Marxist revolution that will never come. Try as Davis might, he will not convince that the apocalypse is here.
Pathetic liberal pap.
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