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Back in 1990, reviving the Old Testament as a relevant social text, ersatz leftist Mike Davis warned that the degenerate cities of the plain would soon be pelted with fire and brimstone.
"In Los Angeles," he wrote in the book City of Quartz, "there are too many signs of approaching helter-skelter: everywhere in the inner-city, even in the forgotten poor-white boondocks with their zombie populations of speed freaks, gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate, cops are becoming more arrogant and trigger-happy, and a whole generation is being shunted toward some impossible armageddon."
And then Rodney King met Larry "Gorillas in the Mist" Powell, and "some impossible armageddon" turned out to be entirely possible. Davis instantly became an urban-affairs Babe Ruth, credited with having called the shot a couple of years before the Foothill Division took its 58 swings at the pitch. In that climate, a couple of interesting realities went unnoticed. For one thing, it took quite a few years before anyone really bothered to do any sort of fact checking on Davis' .357 magnum opus.
That fact checking, however (as predicted in these pages a few weeks back), has begun in earnest. And it's not pretty. Bizarrely enough -- and, we can't help thinking, tellingly enough -- the gumshoe work was started by a local realtor pissed off at Davis' unrelentingly nasty view of his stuccoed and landscaped product; after years of gushing praise from media organizations like the LA Times (which presumably has an office somewhere in the city), it took someone with no inside-media enculturation to bother asking questions like, "Is it true?"
And quite a bit of it pretty obviously wasn't. But, as we say in Lotusland, duh. City of Quartz is so full of self-contradiction, laugh-out-loud reasoning, and rank hyperbole that just about anyone could have instantly seen through it, had they been so inclined. Here's Davis' entire account of a crime that augured the '92 shitstorm: "In Pasadena, some Chinese high-school dropouts -- unwilling to spend lifetimes as busboys and cooks -- ambushed and killed a carload of crack DEA agents, before they too were cut down by a vengeful posse of nearly a hundred cops." Be it resolved that murdering federal agents turns out to be an ineffective strategy for transitioning out of the food-service industry. Note also that the angry Chinese busboy-dropout-ambushers appear in the paragraph that directly precedes that prediction about the "impossible Armageddon" (page 316 of the Vintage paperback, for those of you who are playing along at home). And this, of course, explains why Chinese rage boiled over after the verdict in Simi Valley.
In the last few weeks, where the matter of factual reporting is concerned, Davis may have permanently lost every ounce of cred in his possession. The LA Weekly, a consistently silly alternative newspaper, ran a long profile on Davis, one of its own consistently silly longtime contributors -- and assigned the subject of Davis' past reporting to write the thing.
Lewis MacAdams described a story Davis wrote in 1989, in which MacAdams himself was quoted at length; he and Davis had never met. "I was amazed to discover he'd fabricated an entire interview with me," MacAdams helpfully explained. "We were standing together at the Fremont Gate entrance to Elysian Park, a place I'd never been...."
Once again, we cheerfully obsess on the subject of paragraph order: The paragraphs describing Davis' fabrications ("Davis is the first to admit that he won't let a fact get in the way of a good story") follow, many paragraphs below, a slightly more-than-glowing description of the fabricator in question.
"No longer an obscure iconoclast pushing a contrarian view of the social state, Davis has emerged as the single voice able to capture and articulate the darker weaves behind the glass curtains of modern Los Angeles. Following a century of boosters and civic cheerleaders, City of Quartz redefined LA almost overnight."
The Day of the Locust, it turns out, was some sort of glass-curtain tourist pamphlet.
Which leads us to interesting reality No. 2. You might wonder if painting a city as a place in which "gangs are multiplying at a terrifying rate" might help to create -- or at least reinforce and justify, to use phrasing that will shortly become kind of enjoyably ironic -- a social climate in which cops would be permitted, by a frightened elite, to become "more arrogant and trigger-happy." To explore that idea further, continue to follow along with your study copy of City of Quartz. "The social perception of a threat," Mr. The-Gangs-Are-Breeding-Like-Rats tells us, "becomes a function of the security mobilization itself.... Sensationalized accounts of killer youth gangs high on crack and shrilly racist evocations of marauding Willie Hortons foment the moral panics that reinforce and justify urban apartheid."
Yeah, pretty much. Tell us again about the terrifying gang explosion and all those zombie speed-freaks?
All of which leads us to suggest an answer to the questions behind reality curtain No. 2: Mike Davis' more hysterical fits have been taken seriously precisely because of their usefulness in the reinforcement and justification of the status quo in a city that finds the threat of Armageddon useful. In which case the subject of factuality is beside the point, since Saint Mike of the Apocalypse turns out to have been servicing a faith for people who were plenty willing to believe. And who, in this context, are the faithful?
Newspapers are supposed to help us understand the cities they cover -- and sometimes they screw up badly enough to do precisely that. In May of '92, for example, the Los Angeles Times defined LA well enough to make alert readers flinch. On 7 May, for a good first example, the newspaper ran a breathless story on what was called, in a headline, the collapse of the "Illusion of Sanctuary." ("And the city's wealthy watched and waited, transfixed in uncertainty and horror....")
Even if the Times couldn't quite get a whole lot of actual wealthy people to participate, the idea was there: Stock characters included the "frantic chiropractor's receptionist in Beverly Hills" whispering "Are they coming this way?" into the phone, and the shoe store manager who finally realized that the rioting was serious "when the Beverly Center closed for security reasons."
"In the end," the paper concluded, "compared to the battle zones to the south and east, the damage to the Westside was minimal. But the psychic shock will linger. To the list of casualties of the days and nights of social upheaval, add one more: the notion that the Westside is a sanctuary from the urban ills that beset the rest of Los Angeles." Casualties in the rest of the county included 4,000 fire-damaged buildings and several dozen dead human beings, but we really do mourn for that notion of sanctuary. Incidentally, the Times did explain -- on the very same day -- why damage on the Westside turned out to be so minimal, psychic shock aside. The cops were all over the place like white on -- well, like white on the Westside, come to think of it.
"Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood emerged remarkably unscathed by the riots," the paper explained. "In some cases, the looting and arson came right up to the borders of the smaller cities, then stopped -- almost as if the communities were gated."
Well, yes, very much, as if the communities were gated; in all of those cities, police deployed in force literally along city limits. Inside city borders, the Times added, cops treated every call "as if it augured the downfall of the city.... Response time was often less than a minute."
Still, if they escaped with a little less damage than the rest of the city, LA's white upper-middle class appeared to have missed the part of the movie where things turned out pretty well for them. A Times reporter surveying the damage immediately after the violence stopped wrote about people trying to "reclaim" preriot rituals, for example, and get back to normal. "For many of this city's well-heeled residents," the story went, "normal on Sunday means brunch."
Among those battling for normalcy in the mean old city "was a woman who eats breakfast at Campanile every day -- by interrupting that routine, she said, the riot had reduced her to tears." Another family taking breakfast at Campanile allowed that the riots had changed their lives forever: "While the city was under siege," the Times explained, Jason and Gail Asch were "forced to cook at home."
Which paints a pretty ridiculous picture, and creates a strong urge to grab people by the lapels and forcefully explain that they live at a level of enforced safety that most people in the rest of the world envy -- and will never come close to having.
Just one problem: Los Angeles, it turns out, is a city threatened at all times from all sides. Gangs are exploding; zombie speed-freaks clutter the suburbs; tornadoes scour the ground; wild animals hunt in the streets; fires gut buildings by the box lot. It's a city that sits constantly on the edge of anarchy, poised for an apocalyptic fall. And so, to everyone who lives in it, the same points for toughness and perseverance accrue. Topanga Canyon is a hell, as is -- in precisely the same measure -- Adams Boulevard. Suffering and fear spread across Coldwater Canyon and Vermont Avenue; strong people occupy the neighborhoods around Ventura Boulevard as they do the neighborhoods around Slauson Boulevard.
And in a city like that, who can afford to undo the locks and step into the open? Isolation and insulation -- as ecologists of fear understand -- are the only defenses that come to mind in a place of perpetual danger. We have Mike Davis to thank for some of the more effective depictions of Los Angeles as that place.
