Step, if you will, into my Hades. Step into my nightmare, my vision of the Apocalypse, my world of fires raging through dense chapparal on the sides of mountains, of smoke and flames killing immigrants trapped in city tenements, of earthquakes, of tornadoes and hurricanes and floods and mudslides. My hell is peopled by human evil, by bureaucrats immune to caring, by rich people concerned only with themselves, by businessmen addicted to profit. The victims of evil are twinned - the landscape and the Poor, as they used to be called. In my vision, you need to know, there is no redemption, no escape, finally, no hope.
Still with me? This is Mike Davis's Los Angeles, 1999. He is quite serious about all this, and he wants his readers to take his work seriously. They have. Davis's previous book, City of Quartz, published in 1990, was also a darkly themed book about Los Angeles and its simmering racial tensions. When the civil riots Davis foretold happened less than two years after its publication, Davis was hailed as a prophet, especially by the New York intelligentsia, who routinely applaud each season's latest horrifying theory of rival Los Angeles. Davis won a $315,000 MacArthur grant, got a job teaching urban theory, and his book was nominated for a prestigious National Book Award. No matter. Davis, a Los Angeles resident, still describes himself as a former meat-cutter and truck driver. Though it has been quite some time since he has been hauling sides of beef around the place, it is the kind of credential that a self-described Marxist apparently must have.
In this book, Davis meticulously explores the effect of capitalism on nature, and concludes that Los Angeles is a ticking disaster of biblical proportions. High-rise buildings were not built to withstand the devastating earthquake that is overdue. City planners should never have allowed residential building in the hills of Malibu, which will continue to burn during the fire season.
In fact, in a chapter called "Our Secret Kansas", Davis even argues that tornadoes and hurricanes occur more frequently in California than the evil city boosters would permit you to know.
That Los Angeles is a place prone to denial of its vulnerabilities is no news to anyone who has lived there for some time. But Davis's hyperbole and overwrought prose undermines his polemic. More importantly, from the historian's and social critic's point of view, his book is filled with factual errors that many are now using to discredit it. His earlier work, coming from a relatively unknown author, was not subject to such scrutiny. This one is, and it has not weathered it well.
The Los Angeles Times, at the direction of its editor, selected 45 of Davis's key assertions and assigned a team to fact-check the sources of Davis's 800-plus footnotes. More than a third of his "facts" were wrong, they found. In addition, several academics cited by Davis say that he has misinterpreted their data, reaching conclusions that fit his thesis but conflict with the facts.
A somewhat prosaic but telling example of Davis's style comes in a discussion of the Malibu fires, when he footnotes and quotes the Malibu Times newspaper on page 128 of the book, saying that the Malibu Times celebrated the case of two intrepid housewives, who loaded their jewels and dogs into kayaks and took to the sea, where they were eventually rescued by blond hunks from Baywatch Redondo. Only the fine print revealed that, in saving their pets, they had left their Latina maids behind.
Good tale, but all the details are invented. The Malibu Times s aid two housewives took their belongings and elected to paddle out to sea, didn't take their maids because the maids were afraid of the water, and were picked up by a stranger. Davis conceded to the Los Angeles Times that he made up the details about the jewels, the kayak, the blond hunks, and even the ethnicity of the maids. But he defended his style, saying he has the ability to read between the lines.
This kind of defence in a book that claims to be factual - and reaches serious conclusions based on those facts - is simply not sufficient. While Davis has raised good questions about Los Angeles's environment and its future, his advocacy for his particular point of view and his colourful prose have trespassed beyond the borders of credible reporting, and have placed this book squarely in the more imaginative world of the novel.
Elaine Lafferty is an Irish Times journalist based in Los Angeles