-Caveat Lector-
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The following is from Salon, about the recent flap about alleged faulty work
by Mike Davis, author of "City or Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear". Little is
said of Jill Stewart, the villanous right-wing hatchet women of the so-called
"alternative" LA New Times (she's a George Will in training, albeit with a
slight bit more masculinity.)
I am looking for more info on the Davis story, and hopefully will speak to him
soon. Needless to say, whatever his faults are, the attack has nothing to do
with truth but with ideology: Davis' not-so-hidden Marxism (albeit a
relatively benign brand of it) is anathema to shrill apologists for LAPD
fascism and Dick Riordan's happy New Los Angeles like Stewart and the turgid
LA New Times. And considering her history of spin and deceit, I'd take Davis'
alleged flaws over hers any day of the week.
PS - As I am contemplating doing a vicious smear of Jill "The Sewer" Stewart
next year, I'd be happy if anyone can help me dredge up some slime, like many
have been so kind about James Randi.
Robert Sterling
I S M I K E D A V I S ' L O S A N G E L E S all in his head?
He's been lionized
as a prescient Marxist
prophet of end-of-
the-continent doom and
gloom. But a growing
number of critics
charge that the
author of "City of Quartz"
has feet of clay.
BY VERONIQUE DE
TURENNE
There's a lovely
fountain at the top
of the Bunker Hill
steps in
downtown Los
Angeles, and that's
where Mike Davis and
I are
spending Sunday
afternoon. The
broad staircase, a
welcoming sine
wave that links Hope
and Fifth
streets, faces the
city's rebuilt
Central Library. A never-thinning crowd all but
obscures the
library's heavy doors. Behind us, scores of people
wander the
patchwork of lawns, plazas and fountains that
connect Bunker
Hill's skyscrapers. I'm holding "Ecology of Fear,"
Davis' 484-page
haymaker aimed at the soft white underbelly of Los
Angeles. It's a
chronicle of apocalypse, a study of a racially
Balkanized city beset
by natural plagues of biblical proportions: world-
record rains,
devastating fires, consuming floods, whirling
tornadoes and
disease-crazed squirrels.
"You weren't exactly honest when you described
Bunker Hill, were
you?" I ask gently, opening the book. Davis
portrays Bunker Hill,
a formerly rundown area that was redeveloped in
the '60s, as an
example of the sterile, repressive urban spaces
created by the racist
Angeleno ruling class. Davis bites his lip. "You
wrote about
walled, whites-only fortresses, with bulletproof
steel doors, no
pedestrian access and security cameras on every
corner. I don't see
that. Do you?"
Davis puts down his carnitas burrito from the
Grand Central
Market, draws on a smoothie from the juice bar
near the Water
Garden and starts pacing. A Latino family seated
near a Robert
Graham sculpture watches, bemused. "I'm not wrong,
I just
tweaked things for effect," he insists. "You will
find metal doors --
OK, they're on the parking garages downstairs.
There are lots of --
OK, two -- pedways in Bunker Hill, and one of them
does have an
electronic door. It's truth the way I see it."
It was an enlightening interview, but it had one
problem. I made it
up. I was on Bunker Hill that day, but Davis was
in New York.
The conversation didn't take place. We've never
met.
Still, Mike Davis can't complain. He can't fire
off an angry letter
calling for my head because I've violated the most
basic rule of
journalism. Because, as poet and environmentalist
Lewis
MacAdams revealed in last week's L.A. Weekly,
Davis has done
the same thing himself. It turns out that in a
1989 cover story for
the Weekly, Davis invented an entire conversation
with
MacAdams, complete with vivid outdoor setting.
Faking one interview doesn't put Davis in the
league of notorious
fiction writers like former New Republic
Wunderkind Stephen
Glass, but the acclaimed author of "City of
Quartz" and "Ecology
of Fear" now faces accusations that reach beyond
this journalistic
lapse. A growing number of critics claim that
Davis' scholarship
and reporting are so inaccurate and biased as to
border on the
deceitful, that he sifts and picks his facts to
fit his dark Marxist
vision. But unlike journalistic outcasts like
Glass and Boston Globe
columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, whose
fast and loose
dealings with reality led to disgrace and
dismissal, Davis has paid
no price for his freewheeling ways. In fact,
ironically for a
Marxist, he has profited. Until now.
In a brilliant and controversial career as Los
Angeles'
self-appointed scholar of doom, Davis has earned
worldwide
praise. 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 -- which
became a selling point with affluent leftist
readers impressed by his
blue-collar mystique. His political evolution
began with
memberships in Students for a Democratic Society,
the Teamsters
and the Communist Party. At age 28, Davis attended
UCLA and
studied economics and history. He moved to London
in 1981,
where he became an editor of New Left Review and
completed his
political transformation into a Marxist. Now 52,
Davis teaches
urban theory at the Southern California Institute
of Architecture,
and he's a sought-after speaker on the lecture
circuit. This spring,
when he received a $315,000 MacArthur Foundation
grant for
"exceptionally creative individuals," a friend
from his trucking
days called to see whether Davis would finally be
buying the rig of
his dreams. Not likely.
Davis first earned notice with "City of Quartz,"
the opening
volume of his Los Angeles trilogy. In that book,
Davis parses the
city's power structure to unveil a police state
rife with class
warfare, ruled by corrupt politicians and planners
bent on
preserving an all-white status quo. His prediction
in "Quartz" of
widespread violence, two years before the 1992
riots that followed
the Rodney King verdicts, earned him prophet
status and helped
make the book required reading in many college
classrooms. It
also gave him carte blanche to continue his highly
personal
scrutiny of Los Angeles.
"Ecology of Fear," his 1998 portrayal of Los
Angeles as an
"apocalypse theme park," reiterates Davis' social
critique of
racism, elitism and class struggle, and adds to it
a new vision:
natural disaster. Just as Los Angeles' white
ruling class,
sequestered away in gated, guarded communities,
ignores the rage
and simmering violence of the city's oppressed,
zoned-away,
largely minority poor, Davis argues, so too it
ignores the
doom-laden geography of the city itself, replete
with flood plains,
fire zones and earthquake faults. Davis' Los
Angeles is quite
literally dancing on a volcano.
"Ecology of Fear" catapulted Davis from fringe-
leftie-intellectual
status to the cultural mainstream. It won many
favorable reviews
(with some dissents, including D.J. Waldie's essay
in these pages)
and was on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list
for 12 weeks
(joined during the same period by "City of
Quartz"), peaking at
No. 1.
By rights, Davis should be basking in his success.
But recently a
gadfly has appeared in the ointment -- a gadfly
named Brady
Westwater. Westwater is a Malibu realtor -- an
almost laughably
perfect occupation for a Davis nemesis -- and
third-generation
Angeleno who has cast himself as "Ecology's" post-
publication
fact-checker and Davis' personal tormentor.
The eccentric Westwater is an unlikely catalyst
for the growing
questions about Davis' scholarship. In fact,
Westwater isn't even
his real name; he adopted it years ago as a nom de
plume and
declines to reveal his real name. Co-workers say
he can be found
in his office at all hours, often working on his
computer or leafing
through his voluminous files on L.A. Westwater's
interests range
from art and architecture (he loves the modernist
architecture
Davis despises, and is obsessed with defending it)
to the history of
the city.
I asked Westwater to take me on a walk (a real
one) through
Bunker Hill, the redeveloped area that Davis cites
as a scary,
"Prisoner"-like model of urban-planning
malevolence. Westwater
delights in pointing out the inaccuracies in
Davis' account. He
waltzes up to each glass-sided building and fairly
sings, "No metal
doors! No locks! No pedways!" On a ride up Angel's
Flight, the
short funicular railway that connects Bunker Hill
with the mostly
working-class shopping district at its bottom,
Westwater happily
points out that, contrary to Davis' assertion that
Bunker Hill was
created to exclude unruly people of color, he's
one of the only
white people in the car.
In both "Ecology of Fear" and "City of Quartz,"
Davis portrays
Bunker Hill as an inaccessible fortress where
guard staff command
consoles that operate bulletproof roll-down doors.
He based his
portrayal of the hill on his experience during the
1992 riots, when
he was there -- but he leaves the impression that
the 1998 Bunker
Hill is the same place. (Even during the riots, it
seems more likely
that Bunker Hill escaped the rioting because it
was unfamiliar --
and elevated -- terrain than because of remote-
controlled gates.)
I saw a different place. First, we couldn't find
any bulletproof
doors. It turns out Davis isn't referring to the
building entrances,
but to metal doors in the ground floor parking
structures -- not
quite as "Metropolis"-like. Bunker Hill's
skyscrapers were wide
open, even the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It was a
holiday
weekend, and Bunker Hill was humming. Dozens of
Latino
families, their shopping at Grand Central Market
complete, rode
up Angels Flight to wander the lawns and
terrraces, their children
playing beside them. A group of 50 German tourists
lingered near
the Water Garden, an outdoor amphitheater that is
often filled with
live music and dance. A well-to-do Anglo couple
pored over the
brochure of a downtown walking tour. Bunker Hill
is indeed
elevated, but it's not segregated. Far from being
a walled fortress,
it's a cluster of skyscrapers connected by public
space.
Westwater insists it's his love of L.A., not his
vested interest in
promoting the city, that underlies his obsession
with debunking
Davis. Whatever his reasons are, however, there's
little question
he's obsessed. Westwater blasts off repeated faxes
to editors,
accusing Davis of everything from changing his
story about where
he was born to mistaking the location of the Los
Angeles Times. In
a 23-page missive, which often reads like those
religious tracts you
find tucked under your windshield wiper, Westwater
virtually
challenges Davis to a duel, claiming that "of the
heavily footnoted
and researched facts" in "Ecology of Fear," "not
just a handful, not
just a few dozen here and there, but many hundred
(and hundreds)
of them -- were simply made up."
Westwater scoffs at Davis' claim that Los Angeles
is battered by El
Niño rainfalls of "unrivaled" ferocity. He
disputes his claim that
the Westlake area of L.A. has the highest burn
rate of any city in
the country. He challenges Davis' definition of
tornadoes, the
subject of the chapter "Our Secret Kansas." He
mocks Davis' gaffe
in "City of Quartz" in which, during a discussion
of the battle
between the Jewish Westside and the Gentile
downtowners, he
identified Howard Ahmanson, a right-leaning
Christian, as Jewish.
(Davis says he has admitted the mistake.)
Perhaps most significantly, Westwater claims
Davis' version of the
history of Bunker Hill is false. Davis presents
the new financial
district as the work of the Committee of 25, a
star chamber of Los
Angeles power brokers whose sole mission was to
keep out the
lower-class rabble who rioted in Watts in 1965.
But Westwater
says the committee was well-known and was formed
in 1952, well
before the Watts violence. Even more damningly,
Westwater
claims that Davis got these facts right in a much
earlier essay, then
changed them for his new book.
Most journalists passed on Westwater's manifesto.
But Jill Stewart,
a columnist for the alternative weekly New Times
Los Angeles,
adopted the cause. In an essay titled "Peddling
Fear," Stewart
presented Westwater's allegations as fact. She
matched Davis'
pugilistic style jab for jab, calling him a "city-
hating socialist
raised in a remote desert town so small it no
longer exists."
After Stewart gave Westwater's rantings a public
voice, the
Internet got sucked in. A piece about Westwater's
critique on the
Web site Suck has ignited a raging flame war about
Davis'
scholarship. "I can barely express my feelings on
the whole Mike
Davis fiasco," a subscriber wrote. "I've had
nightmares about it. I
bought into 'City of Quartz' so thoroughly, and
then was blown
away by 'Ecology of Fear' -- when in the latter,
there were lies I
should have immediately spotted based on facts I
myself knew!
Instead I was thinking, 'Wow, I must be
remembering wrong.'
There's an important lesson here about hero
worship, I suppose."
What may turn out to be the most damaging story
about Davis,
however, was a sympathetic one: the L.A. Weekly
piece that outs
Davis for fabricating an interview. MacAdams
sounds surprisingly
genial about the journalistic breach. "We were
standing together at
the Fremont Entrance to Elysian Park, a place I
had never been,"
he writes. "Though we never actually talked, the
words he put in
my mouth made me sound like I knew a lot more
about the L.A.
River than I actually did. I told him to go ahead
with the piece just
the way it was."
Whether MacAdams' account of this is just a
coincidence, coming
as it does on the heels of Stewart's denunciation,
or an attempt at
spin control ("Oh that Mike, we know how he likes
to exaggerate
to get the story"), the Weekly piece swiftly
joined the New Times
tirade in fax machines and e-mail servers far and
wide; admirers,
detractors, acolytes and academics have joined the
debate. There's
a definite political tinge to the discussion: The
reputation of one of
America's few avowedly Marxist writers is at
stake.
Getting to the bottom of the controversy isn't
easy. Certainly
Davis' fabricated interview does not inspire
confidence. But an
admittedly cursory examination of some of the
points at issue leads
one to the conclusion that while Davis is highly
selective in his
research and sometimes out-and-out wrong, he is
not the utterly
incompetent (or unethical) figure presented by
Westwater.
Whether the larger worth of Davis' work is
invalidated by his
tendentious approach is a question that readers
must answer for
themselves.
Let's start with Westwater's assertion that Davis
is wrong when he
says that Los Angeles County's San Gabriel
Mountains have
recorded the highest rainfall in the world.
Douglas Sherman, a
USC professor with expertise in natural disaster,
backs Davis up.
"He's right," Sherman said. "The San Gabriels have
measured the
highest-intensity rainfall in the world. When the
rain lasts long
enough, it flushes into the L.A. Basin and has
very serious effects."
Westwater's more important criticism, that Davis
got the entire
history of the Bunker Hill development wrong, is
harder to
evaluate. Westwater may be right that Davis got
some of the facts
and chronology wrong, but several experts in Los
Angeles history
and planning pointed out that Davis' deeper
analysis is not
susceptible to a simple factual debunking. The
jury remains out on
his Bunker Hill analysis.
But there's no question that Davis makes, shall we
say, an
imaginative use of facts. Take his alarmingly
elastic definition of
Los Angeles. At times, he's talking about the city
itself. Other
times, he includes terrain stretching from
southern Orange County
all the way to northern Ventura County. To a New
Yorker, this
could well be Los Angeles, but Davis knows better.
He also says
there are 2,000 gangs in L.A. The Los Angeles
Police
Department's gang unit counts 400. Even Los
Angeles County,
which includes 88 cities, falls 150 gangs short of
Davis' figure.
Davis claims L.A. has 2,000 gated communities. The
city's
Department of Planning says 100. And Davis talks
about violent
crime without ever reporting the five-year decline
in such crime
countywide. In fact, the murder rate in Los
Angeles has dropped
50 percent since 1992. You won't find even a
footnote for that in
"Ecology of Fear."
Even the photographs in the book take liberties. A
shot of New
Hampshire Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard does look
like a ghost
town -- unless you know L.A. Shadows falling on
Wilshire
Boulevard suggest the photo was taken just after
sunrise, when
even Times Square might look deserted.
Do these errors and distortions raise serious
questions about Davis'
whole project -- or are they relatively
unimportant details? "I think
it is fair to say his book is a work of
imagination," says Kevin
Starr, California state librarian and himself the
author of
numerous books about the state. "I'm not saying it
is false, but
when you present materials transformed by
imagination as fact,
then you'll be liable to the kind of corrections
he's getting. I am
not surprised that an anti-Davis faction would
rise up."
Starr does praise Davis for creating a new way of
thinking about
Los Angeles: "He makes us look at the environment
of Southern
California in a different way. Mike slows down the
clock and says
we've only been here for 200 years -- we don't
know the sequence
of events yet."
But he adds an ominous warning. "There is
something in Mike that
might have made him, 50 years ago, a good priest
-- helping the
poor, outrage that the poor could be neglected --
but he doesn't
have an adequate theology or ideology with which
to deal with
these things," Starr said. "He can't find any
symbols of redemption
-- he has no modes of atonement. All sorts of
people around him
are not seeing what he's seeing, and if he doesn't
watch it, he'll
become a crank. It's a fine line. I have
compassion and concern for
him, but what's the difference between a prophet
and a crank?"
The difference could be unbiased scholarship.
Author Carolyn See,
whose novel "Golden Days" takes a drubbing in
"Ecology's"
chapter about Los Angeles fiction, says she has
never seen anyone
work as hard as Davis. "I was at the Getty with
him," she said of
their time together on a fellowship. "In
researching books on
disaster in L.A., he turned up things I had never
heard of. I
thought I had seen it all, and he found stuff no
one else has ever
found. On the one hand, he is capable of really
hard work, but his
research is flawed because he has come to his
conclusions ahead of
time, and if the facts don't fit what he wants to
see, he doesn't mess
with them."
Seismologist Wayne Thatcher was surprised to hear
what Davis
had concluded about California earthquakes from
Thatcher's own
work. Davis refers to Thatcher's "chaos theory of
earthquake
frequency," and declares that future quakes cannot
be predicted
from previous quakes. The problem is, Thatcher's
writings refer
to much larger quakes, such as the great Alaska
earthquake of
1964, which was 1,000 times larger than the 1971
Sylmar quake
Davis cites in the book. "Well, even scientists
have been known to
exaggerate a bit," Thatcher said, laughing. "I
suspect that's what
this gentleman has indulged in."
There's no question that Davis' work is in the
long tradition of
doomsday predictions and fictions -- not a few of
them involving
L.A. Certainly the popularity of "Ecology of Fear"
may be due, in
part, to a kind of haunted-mansion appeal. But not
everyone views
Davis' apocalyptic bent kindly. Some worry Davis
robs ordinary
people of the ability to judge the risk in their
lives accurately:
Should they forget about counting fat grams if a
killer tornado is
on the way? Others find it suspicious that Davis'
bleak view dooms
the city just as Los Angeles' traditional
minorities are taking
power.
"I object to the way he treats Latinos -- they
have been fodder for
his Marxist fantasies," says Gregory Rodriguez,
associate editor
for the Pacific News Service. "I think it's
condescending. I tend to
tie Mike Davis into a whole Anglo-apocalyptic
school. There's a
generation of whites who are growing older, and
they have a sense
that the end is near. The era in which their
preeminence was
unique is over, and Mike Davis feeds into that. At
the same time,
this is the moment other groups are going to get a
piece of the pie,
so Davis is dooming our world at the very moment
we are taking
our place in it."
It would be easy to dismiss Westwater's critique
as the harpings of
a crank -- although even eccentrics can raise
valid questions. But
Davis has more formidable adversaries. Perhaps his
harshest
serious critic is Philip Ethington, a professor of
history at the
University of Southern California. A Getty scholar
at the same
time as Davis and See, Ethington recalls Davis'
ability to grasp and
memorize information -- but questions his
objectivity.
"He retains everything he's ever read," Ethington
said. "He has a
photographic memory. But he has one way of seeing
the world,
and he filters what he learns through that view.
It's always a classic
Marxist analysis." In an upcoming piece for
Southern California
Quarterly, Ethington takes a particularly tough
look at Davis'
research technique, focusing on a pair of
footnotes Davis uses to
support his claim that one-third of the Los
Angeles area has been
paved over. One footnote refers to an author who
himself cites
only a 1973 Time magazine article; the other is
based on
information provided by Davis himself. "There's a
pattern of poor
scholarship bordering on deception," Ethington
says. "He uses
secondary and tertiary sources, which can mislead
the reader. They
don't falsify the larger thesis, yet they make it
difficult to either
build on his work or engage him in a meaningful
debate."
The facts of Davis' own life have also become a
matter of
speculation. Stewart's New Times essay, following
Westwater,
looks askance at Davis' fudging of his birthplace:
Although his
publisher places it in L.A., he was actually born
in Fontana, 60
miles distant. She also makes much of the fact
that he's been
married five times -- a fact that his second wife,
Jan Breidenbach,
explains in MacAdams' L.A. Weekly piece as "the
triumph of hope
over experience."
Davis' defenders argue that his critics don't
understand his
achievement. According to David Reid, editor of
several California
anthologies (his most recent, "Sex, Death and God
in L.A.,"
includes two Davis essays), Davis has always
angered a certain
group of Los Angeles academics. "They like to
think of Mike as
the unwitting Marxist tool of a cabal of
L.A.-hating New
Yorkers," Reid said. "The fact is, Mike just
dramatizes things.
That's what journalists do. It's a way to get your
point across."
Michael Dear, director of the Southern California
Studies Center at
USC, lauds Davis for a new way of thinking about
the region. "His
greatest achievement is to focus attention on
Southern California
and to show what out problems are -- that's a very
important
achievement," Dear said. "Given that Southern
California is
traditionally regarded as an aberrant exception,
Mike's model for
the future has acted as a catalyst for a
conversation about the
region, and that conversation is long overdue."
What does Davis himself say? In a long interview,
Davis denied
that he was biased, defended his research and
wondered about
critics who bring in his personal life. "Serious
criticism, however
difficult it may be to accept, is the best thing a
writer can hope to
attract," Davis said. "The stuff about political
differences makes
sense -- I'm a Marxist, and as such I have to have
thick skin. But
why is it now expected that authors' personalities
become a part of
the book? It makes no sense, and that is the most
difficult part for
me."
What about the piped 1989 interview with MacAdams?
"You've
got to understand, that was 1989, it was the first
independent story
I had done for the Weekly, and I was trying to
figure out how to
write journalism," Davis says. "I had been
studying other
journalists, who always seemed to start their
stories with these
colorful scenes. So I went to Lewis and said,
'What if we had this
conversation?' That's true, no denial. I did that.
But you get the
impression from Lewis that that's my modus
operandi, and it's
not."
Davis willingly discusses points of contention in
his book, and
while you can't change his mind, he doesn't seem
bent on changing
yours, either. He's surprised to hear that his
book reveals little of
his love for Los Angeles, and he's wounded by the
thought. "I love
Los Angeles," he says. "How can you not see that?
I suppose the
book is, in the end, a failure if it betrays none
of the sense of deep
feeling I have about the city. But that's where
being a radical
comes in -- you also have to rain on the parade."
As for Westwater's objections, Davis calls them a
misunderstanding of his work. "It's fair to say,
'Hey wait, how did
you calculate these costs?' That's fair. But
(Westwater's) objections
seem to be largely made up of misrepresentations
of what I'm
saying. The idea that I'm engaged in some kind of
deception is
ridiculous."
Davis said his third book, the completion of his
L.A. trilogy, will
focus more on the people of Los Angeles, on the
waves of
immigrants shaping the city. Many of his readers,
detractors and
admirers alike, are looking forward to that
"Los Angeles is not only the city as Mike presents
it, otherwise it
wouldn't be working as well as it is," Kevin Starr
said. "He never
talks about an evening at the Hollywood Bowl, an
evening at the
L.A. Opera -- which is marvelous -- or about the
Lakers or the
L.A. Marathon. He hasn't told us about the
millions of people who
are finding a second, third and fourth start in
L.A. and making it a
distinctive city, and he needs to do that. Perhaps
when he does, he
can find balance."
SALON | Dec. 7, 1998
Veronique de Turenne has been a staff writer for
the Los Angeles Daily News, Pasadena Star News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune,
Ventura County Star and Orange County Register. She is now a contributor to
the Los Angeles Times.
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