Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State

Tariq Ali
26 October 2022

Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis, the pioneering historian of the US working class and fierce critic of the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general.

I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. Thanks to California’s aid-in-dying law, I have control over the final act. But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — fighting. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.

Mike Davis, 2022

Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis. He had been ill for many years, but that never really softens the shock of actual death. A feeling of loss. This was especially true in Mike’s case. He never stopped writing essays and notes. Close to the end he took his own editorial duties very seriously, exchanging mails with NLR commenting on recently submitted articles. And he was usually persuadable to transform a blog or a private communication into a text, short or long. Intellectually always vigorous, he was very generous with his time.

Many of Mike’s essays and most of his books were published in the New Left Review and by New Left Books/Verso from the early Eighties onwards. His style varied. He could be didactic, lyrical, funny, truculent, ferocious when he needed to be, but his principal target was usually the same: the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general. (Late Victorian Holocausts was a devastating critique of the British in India). Several weeks ago, rumours spread on the social networks suggesting he was dying. There was an outpouring of affection and respect and many articles: premature obits. The breadth of the tributes surprised and pleased him.

There will be others as time passes, for his was a remarkable life. He was an American working-class intellectual, radicalized in the Sixties by the US Communist Party and later moving leftwards, without ever denigrating the women and men in the CP who had educated him. His life was lived on the Left and he both learnt from others and educated many more. Together with his friend and comrade, Michael Sprinker, he set up a US-specific list in Verso (Haymarket) linked to the American Socialist Yearbook, published annually between 1985 and 1988. The intellectual quality was high. His classes at UC Irvine and other institutions were popular with students. How to convey wisdom without being patronizing or incomprehensible; how to remind the young of the fine fruits of past experiences without making them feel ignorant. These were always his concerns.

His many books will always live. We were very proud to publish and work with him. Our condolences to his partner, the Mexican artist Alessandra Moctezuma, whose regular emails kept us informed of the various stages of his illness. His four children – Róisín, Jack, and the twins James and Cassandra – he loved dearly and this inspired him to write a work of fiction that treated kids as intelligent humans.


He would have liked this poem by Brecht:

EPISTLE TO THE CHICAGOANS

The laughter on the slave markets of the continents
Formerly confined to yourselves
Must utterly have shaken you, the cold in the regions of the fourth depth
Will have soaked into your skin.
So you still love the horse thieves’ blue eyes?
But when you’re taken into the old people’s home
I shall examine your backs to see
If the winters have marked you.
Your children
Will hear from me, on the evidence of your dead wrists
Whether you stood in the rivers
Between the ice floes and the black fishes
And learned something about this planet.
Oh, in reality there is nothing
But
Deceivers and deceived.
See?

Fire in the Belly: Mike Davis (1946-2022) Ciarán O'Rourke remembers the work of Mike Davis: "One of the many charms of Davis himself, and of his writing, was his combative irreverence, often literally incendiary."

Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist After losing a coveted niche in the trucking industry, I started UCLA as an adult freshman, attracted by rumors of a high-powered seminar on Capital led by Bob Brenner in the History Department.

The American Earthquake: Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster Adam Shatz's classic profile of Mike Davis from 1997. Shatz touches on the writing and success of City of Quartz, Davis's time working at New Left Review, and his general refusal to uncritically follow the postmodern trends of class-skeptical left intellectual life into the late 20th century.

TRIBUTES TO MIKE DAVIS

The Nation: Mike Davis: 1946–2022 Los Angeles Times: Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies NPR: Writer, truck driver, meat cutter and prophet of compassion Mike Davis dies at 76 The New Republic: Los Angeles Has Always Been Burning: Remembering Mike Davis Kirkus Reviews: Author Mike Davis Dies at 76

A fiercely elegant and wide-ranging history of L.A.’s Dickensian extremes and Pynchonesque conspiracies “As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies.”   – Dana Goodyear, New Yorker DOWNLOAD CITY OF QUARTZ AS A FREE EBOOK

Late Victorian Holocausts
by Mike Davis


Ecology of Fear
by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream
by Mike Davis

The Monster Enters
by Mike Davis

Buda’s Wagon
by Mike Davis

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis

Set the Night on Fire
by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

FROM THE ARCHIVES I RECOMMEND MIKE DAVIS BOOKS AS GREAT READING COVER STORY

The American Earthquake Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster By Adam Shatz

PHONING MIKE DAVIS is a good way of getting acquainted with his answering machine. It is a virtually futile way of getting hold of the celebrated author of City of Quartz. Before arriving in Los Angeles, where Davis lives and writes, I'd had no luck reaching him. Sitting on his porch on a warm evening this past June, I understood why: The phone rang incessantly, and Davis never once rose from his chair.

The calls last from morning to midnight. It might be the photographer Richard Avedon or the architect I.M. Pei with a request for one of Davis's legendary tours of L.A. It could be Backlash author Susan Faludi, whom Davis has introduced to young gang members for her upcoming book on masculinity, or former Crip leader Dewayne Holmes, a Davis confidante who works in state senator Tom Hayden's L.A. office. It might also be a Danish curator mounting an exhibit on the postmodern city, an organizer with the hotel workers' union, a student at UCLA's Cesar Chavez Center, or (very likely) a Hollywood screenwriter. What this motley crew has in common is a belief that Mike Davis holds the keys to understanding the city of Los Angeles, and much else. In his writings on Southern California, the American working class, and the lives of the dispossessed, Davis offers dark parables of a post-liberal America poised on the brink of ruin.

Mike Davis's reputation rests largely on City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Vintage), his 1990 chronicle of the city's history from the socialist cooperative of Llano del Río to Blade Runner­style capitalism. The book appeared at a serendipitous moment: A full decade of Reaganism had remade American society in the image of Southern California, with its volatile mix of squalid inner cities and gated communities. But City of Quartz had merits of its own: Here was an urban history that took to heart Lewis Mumford's admonishment that rebuilding a city "involves the larger task of rebuilding our civilization." In arresting meditations on homeowners' revolts, Daryl Gates's police department, Frank Gehry's aesthetics, Anglo-Latino conflicts within the Catholic Church, and the death of the steel industry, Davis took the reader on a kaleidoscopic tour of contemporary L.A. Even as he offered vivid street-smart reportage (and frequently breathtaking prose), Davis projected a distinctive historical vision, a New Left Marxism infused with working-class nostalgia--and apocalyptic rage.

"Contemporary urban America," he flatly declared, "is more like Victorian England than Walt Whitman's or La Guardia's New York. In Los Angeles, once-upon-a-time a demi-paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and 'cruising strips,' genuinely democratic space is all but extinct. The Oz-like archipelago of Westside pleasure domes--a continuum of tony malls, arts centers, and gourmet strips--is reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariat who live in increasingly repressive ghettoes and barrios.... Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe, they are being erected all over Los Angeles." Two years after the book's publication came the L.A. riots, lending Davis's analysis a luster of prophecy.

A more curious aspect of City of Quartz's appeal was its design, marrying postmodern cool and Bogartian machismo. Robert Morrow's photograph of the eerily glamorous turquoise observatory of the Metropolitan Detention Center graced the cover, while William Gibson's back-cover blurb proclaimed the book "more cyberpunk than any work of fiction could ever be." Although Davis--with his boyish frame, liquid-blue eyes, and gently weathered face--lacks any hint of menace in person, his mug shot on the inside jacket radiated tough guy: arms folded defiantly, dressed in black, glowering at the reader. He was described as "a native son" and "former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver" who incidentally "teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture." The packaging paid off. City of Quartz became a cult hit, appealing to readers far beyond its target audience of left-leaning urban geographers and historians--including Bruce Willis, a big donor to Newt Gingrich, who was recently glimpsed reading the book in a New York Times Magazine feature.

Meanwhile, the man who blasted suburban escapism and took us down L.A.'s mean streets has turned his attention to the furies of nature, a move that may puzzle many of his admirers. The Ecology of Fear, which will be published next spring by Metropolitan Books, is a richly eccentric study of the social and political significance of natural disasters. Treating environmental history as a window into "larger class struggles," Davis argues that justice and ecology amount to the same thing in the Land of Sunshine. Unchecked urbanization has not only laid waste to democratic public space but "transgressed environmental common-sense," thus inviting nature's revenge. A work of distinctly millennial cadences, The Ecology of Fear conjures up a catastrophe-prone landscape governed by a geological "dialectic of ordinary disaster" and visited occasionally by cougars, snakes, and killer bees. The fire next time, it seems, may come from the sky as well as the streets.

IN THE PAST few years, Davis has retreated from the public-intellectual circuit, rarely granting interviews. "I'm really not that interesting," he protests weakly. Coming from a man so attentive to the creation of his literary persona, the self-effacement can ring a little hollow. But behind it lies the defensiveness of a proud outsider uneasy with celebrity. "Mike is a very romantic guy who has this image of himself as a working-class revolutionary," says journalist Alexander Cockburn, a longtime friend and admirer of Davis. For the better part of his adult life, Davis has been on the road: He was still making ends meet as a truck driver long after many of his friends on the left found permanent sanctuary in the academy.

With City of Quartz came the fruits--and the bruising ironies--of mainstream recognition. L.A.'s poor have seen little improvement in their lives since the riots, while Davis, who took up his pen to dramatize their plight, has acquired a small piece of the California dream, the very idea he set out to debunk. He received a $50,000 advance for The Ecology of Fear. He won a Getty Fellowship. And he entered the ranks of L.A. homeowners, the vanguard of complacency in City of Quartz, moving into a modest gray-stucco house in Pasadena, just south of the San Gabriel Mountains. (He lives there with the Mexican political artist, Alessandra Moctezuma, his fifth wife.) "Ever since I got a mortgage, I've been corrupted," Davis half jokes. "I've been dreaming about my lawn and worrying about my property values."

That said, he still has to hustle to make a living. A tenure-track position continues to elude Davis, who averages five adjunct courses a semester at various schools. "Mike is a brilliant loose cannon and also a kind of wonderful political journalist, and neither of these would be accepted by peers at a major university," says Davis's friend and erstwhile employer, Ed Soja, a UCLA geographer.

Davis, who never completed his Ph.D. in history at UCLA, has his own misgivings about the academy. As the father of two school-age children, he needs the security of a steady income, but he has not made it easy for departments to bring him on board. This spring the University of Southern California nearly offered him an endowed chair in American history. Davis, who had spray painted the university's walls with anti-Vietnam graffiti in 1965, was thrilled but warned administrators, "You'll have intractable problems if you hire me." When friends in the food-service workers' union informed him that the university was contracting out the jobs of its cafeteria workers, Davis assailed the school in the L.A. Weekly as "the most reactionary institution in L.A." A top administrator accused him of slander, and the job was given to someone else.

Even when his extracurricular politics are not the issue, Davis's pedagogical practices might well cause a university to think twice about tenuring him. Once, while teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he devised an experiment to prove that one could feel reasonably safe in any neighborhood in L.A. in the middle of the night. One of his students, a crown prince of Fiji, decided to test this idea in Hollywood. There he met a handful of drug dealers, and they ended up having a marvelous time--until they were jumped by another group of dealers, who stabbed and nearly killed the prince. Davis recalls: "When I visited him in the hospital, I told him how sorry I was, but he said, 'No, Mike, I'll never be able to thank you for this. I would never have experienced anything like it in Fiji.'" Even so, Davis was almost fired over the incident. "I had to lie low for a while after that," he says with a smile.

THOUGH DAVIS may have become an angry messenger from the streets of L.A., he doesn't originally hail from the city. "I'm a white, middle-aged working-class guy who grew up in the far outer suburbs that turn out into the desert," he says. "That's my existential relation to the metropolis."

Davis was born in the dusty California town of Fontana in 1946. (The same year, a group of Fontanan motorcyclists founded the Hell's Angels.) The Fontana of Davis's childhood wasn't paradise, but there were plenty of decent jobs in Henry Kaiser's steel mill and in trucking. The unions were strong, and management relatively liberal. Mike's father, Dwight Davis, worked in town as a meat cutter. Fontana looms large in the Davis imagination, largely as a place of lost possibilities: Over the ensuing years, Fontana's steel industry was gutted, and what replaced it were inflated land prices and untrammeled development. Indeed, remembering the fate of his hometown inspires Davis to turn toward extravagant metaphors of disaster. As he wrote in the final chapter of City of Quartz, "The former primary steelworks itself looks like Dresden, Hiroshima, or perhaps the most fitting image, Tokyo in April 1945 after three months of concentrated fire-bombing with Kaiser-made 'goop.'"

Davis's family eventually moved to Bostonia, a hamlet east of San Diego--and the crucible for the writer's catastrophist sensibility. A number of residents of this military town imagined themselves on the brink of annihilation, thanks to rumors spread by the John Birch Society that an elite unit of Chinese troops on the Mexican border was poised to invade San Diego. On the weekends, families would go to the Marine recruiting depot to hear fiery anticommunist oratory and watch soldiers toss flamethrowers into the sky. Davis joined the Devil Pups (the Marines' answer to the Boy Scouts) and counted the days before he would "go somewhere in Asia to kill people." For a while, he was "a real Cold War fanatic."

When a heart attack left Davis's father temporarily disabled, his mother took her sixteen-year-old son out of school and put him to work at the Bostonia meat factory. And there he might have stayed had it not been for a black civil rights activist named Jim Stone.

The husband of Davis's cousin Carol, Stone cut a bold, charismatic figure. In 1962 Davis accompanied Stone to a demonstration against the all-white San Diego branch of the Bank of America. It was a kind of conversion experience conducted under the most harrowing conditions. "A group of redneck sailors drenched us with lighter fluid, and one of the guys started flicking his lighter," he recalls. Under Stone's tutelage, Davis transformed himself into a political activist, working at the San Diego offices of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He finished high school and landed a full scholarship to Reed College.

His stay in Oregon, however, was short and unhappy. Painfully aware of being a working-class kid among the children of doctors and lawyers, he became belligerent, ultimately getting himself expelled for living illegally in his girlfriend's dorm. So Davis returned to full-time activism. In 1964 he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spending the next three years organizing sit-ins and protests on the West Coast. As the Vietnam War escalated, he grew further radicalized, eventually joining the Communist Party. For nearly two years, he managed the party's bookstore in L.A., not far from FBI headquarters.

In 1969, after being fired by Dorothy Healey, the regional party leader, for hounding the Russian cultural attaché out of the store--Davis despised the Soviets and didn't like them snooping around--he enrolled in a teamsters' opportunity program. For the next four years, he hauled 240-foot trailers filled with Barbie dolls out of L.A., acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of the city as well as of Western geography. In his spare time, he tried to master Marx's Capital and Sartre's Search for a Method and paid visits to Herbert Marcuse. Fellow left-wing truckers were rather hard to come by. "At night we'd go out to topless bars, and I'd blurt out, 'I'm a communist,' and they'd say, 'Dick's a Jehovah's Witness. Let's have another drink.'"

One day, Davis decided he had had enough and that he wanted to resume his education. A particularly jolting experience clinched his decision. "I had this job with a bus-tour company when suddenly this insanely violent strike broke out. A strikebreaker ran a bus over one of our guys, and next thing I knew I was in a room with forty guys voting on whether each of us is gonna put up $400 to hire a hit man to kill the head of the strikebreakers. I said, 'Hey, guys, this is just crazy,' and made the best speech of my life. I was outvoted thirty-nine to one. I thought to myself, 'Typical American workers'; I think I said 'pussies.' Instead of coming up with a political strategy, they reach for their guns as soon as they see a scab driving their bus. And here I am about to become a freshman at UCLA, and I'm going to get arrested for criminal conspiracy." Ironically, Davis was saved by the L.A. Police Department, which apprehended the hit men for drunk driving and seized their guns. The Westwood campus started to look like a pretty good alternative to trucking, given the dues the Teamsters union seemed to require of its members.

READ ON 

REST IN POWER

Mike Davis’s Many Contributions to Building a Better World Will Live On

No leftist writer can compare to Mike Davis — not in clarity, breadth, generosity, or ironclad commitment to the working class. Davis has died, but his ideas will continue to find life in generations of leftist activists and thinkers to come.

Madison Square Garden's interior filled with thousands of striking garment workers in 1958. A banner reads "On with the strike — on to victory!" Mike Davis remained resolute in his belief in labor's collective power. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

BY  BARRY EIDLIN
10.29.2022

 Jacobin 

Our mentors are dying.

At one level, this is a banal statement — an inevitable consequence of the forward march of time. But for those of us on the Left, there are historical and political factors that give it additional weight.

One consequence of the past several decades of defeat and demoralization for the Left has been a lack of generational replacement of leftist leadership and mentorship. Not only have there been fewer people available to serve as potential new leaders and mentors, but those of us who came of age politically between the 1980s and 2000s have had fewer and smaller movements upon which we could cut our teeth and develop as leaders and mentors ourselves.

As a result, it has fallen to veterans of the movements of the 1960s and ’70s to carry much of the weight of keeping the Left alive through difficult decades. That means that, as these veterans inevitably pass from the stage, the loss is that much more painful, their absence that much more deeply felt.

While we can appreciate this sociological observation about generational replacement at an intellectual level, it doesn’t change the fact that each individual death still feels like a gut punch. Knowing the history and sociology does little to soften the blow.

That is certainly the case when speaking of a figure of the caliber of Mike Davis, who died on October 25 at age seventy-six. We all knew this moment was coming after learning that he shifted to palliative care for his cancer a few months ago. But that didn’t prepare us for living in a world deprived of his prolific and penetrating insights.

Reading the tributes and remembrances that have flowed in over the past few days, it is hard not to be awed by the scale and scope of his reach. There is of course his immense body of writing, in which he managed to speak with authority, clarity, and insight on a dizzyingly vast array of matters without slipping into dilettantism.

From droughts and pandemics to urban development and resistance to labor history and politics, socialist strategy, and so much more, few others combined his careful research, clear-eyed analysis, political commitment, and eerie clairvoyance, all wrapped in dense yet riveting prose.

It won him a devoted readership across wide swaths of the US and global left, while also commanding respect in some of the halls of academia and the more mainstream public sphere. Few other thinkers occupy such a central place in graduate seminar syllabi and socialist reading groups while also being influential enough to attract the attention of the MacArthur Foundation and the ire of real-estate developers, along with attempts at exposés from the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Economist, among others. (The Los Angeles Times, for its part, shifted to more appreciative profiles of Davis later on).

On its own, Davis’s writing would be more than enough to be remembered as a giant of the Left. But he combined this with a lifetime of activism, organizing, and engagement, from his early years organizing with Students for a Democratic Society to participating in wildcat strikes as a truck driver and meatpacker to mentoring new generations of socialists in recent years. He was also generous as an academic mentor, taking the time to read, comment, and inquire about the work of graduate students and junior scholars just finding their way. Again, I am hard pressed to think of others who combined these qualities to the degree that Davis did.

Unfortunately, I cannot add any personal remembrances of Davis to this piece, as I never had the good fortune of meeting him myself, though I have long been in his orbit. I was first exposed to him as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, where politics professor Chris Howell kept a copy of Prisoners of the American Dream on reserve at the library for his students. Later, when I went to work for Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Davis’s writings on labor and the Left became a critical part of my political education, which I read alongside those of Kim Moody, Mike Parker, Jane Slaughter, Bob Brenner, and others.

When I made the transition from labor organizer to labor scholar, Davis stayed with me. I assigned his work in my social movements class and my seminar on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.” This ensured that I would have the privilege of revisiting and reengaging with his writing year after year. I never ceased to be amazed at the new insights I gleaned from each additional rereading and new ideas that would come to me after sitting with his work.

It reinforced for me not just how insightful Davis was as a thinker but how generative he was. He provided a jumping-off point for countless other scholars to take our own deep dives — even if we might never get as deep as he did.

Indeed, as I posted on social media back in 2018, as I was preparing to teach “Why the US Working Class is Different” in my seminar, “I’m amazed at how [Davis] can casually toss off ideas for about five dissertations in a single paragraph.”



Many of my students had similar reactions to his work, consistently mentioning it as a highlight of the course. Likewise, for me, teaching his work has been a highlight of my life as a professor.

I did come very close to meeting Davis this past September. I had wanted to interview him about his time doing rank-and-file organizing as a Teamster and meatpacker in the 1970s for a book I’m working on with Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht about the Left’s “turn to industry” in that period, when members of socialist organizations took jobs in factories for organizing purposes. It’s a part of Davis’s life that was often mentioned in various profiles but rarely explored.

After I learned of his shift to palliative care, I figured that I had missed my opportunity, but seeing several profiles of him based on lengthy interviews published in the following months made me think that I might still have a chance. So I emailed him and was surprised to receive a reply almost immediately. He was happy to talk but could likely only handle an hour-long interview. We made plans for me to travel down to San Diego the following week, with the caveat that I should check with him the day before.

As scheduled, I wrote him the day before and received a reply: “I had a visit from my end-of-life physician this morning and she bluntly told me cancel all interviews or visits from friends. Apologies.”

While we had to cancel the visit, I was at least able to share with him how much his work influenced my own, how much my students get from reading him, and to thank him for his contributions toward building a better world.

Those contributions may now have come to an end, but they will live on in every student and organizer whose world will make a little more sense, and whose path to changing it will be a little clearer, thanks to Mike Davis.

Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MIKE DAVIS 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/10/mike-davis-1946-2022-enemy-of-state.html

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LA Asks: Was Mike Davis Right?

As Los Angeles burns, the writer Rosecrans Baldwin hears echoes of the furious, compassionate late intellectual.

GQ

 January 12, 2025

Rosecrans Baldwin


Getty Images

One of the last times I spoke to the great Los Angeles writer Mike Davis was during the Woolsey fire, in 2018. Before this past week, Woolsey was the last megafire to blast Los Angeles. It burned nearly a hundred thousand acres around Malibu, destroyed more than 1,500 structures. I asked Davis back then what he expected to see once the flames died down. “Bigger mansions,” he said. “What tends to disappear is rental properties, trailer parks, people who don’t have adequate insurance.”

“The fires are like gun violence,” he added. “You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”

To live in LA, even if you never leave your neighborhood, is to live in Greater Los Angeles, to know you reside in one of the world’s largest megacities, a mountainous, immense plaited landscape—Los Angeles County alone constitutes 88 separate cities, from Beverly Hills to Azusa—that unfurls in all directions. And one that also burns recurrently. Since the last time I checked the news, 16 people were dead. Tens of thousands of acres torched. More than 12,000 structures destroyed, with several of my friends and relatives burned out of their homes, and a bunch of my favorite restaurants reduced to ash. What’s different this time, compared to Woolsey, is the fires’ bandwidth. We have the Palisades and Kenneth fires to the west. Eaton and Creek in the east. The Hurst and Lidia fires up north. All we need now is Disneyland to go up in flames (we do not need this) and we’ll be surrounded.

The first night of the fires, I spent two hours helping friends and acquaintances sign up for emergency alerts, encouraging them to download the Watch Duty app, which tracks burns. But the person I wanted to speak to most was Davis.

Davis died in 2022, at 76, from complications linked to esophageal cancer. In person, he was a sweetheart—a cheerful man with a buzzcut and an oddly high-pitched voice. As a thinker and writer, though, he was strident, both intellectual and street-smart—Davis was a truck driver and Marxist activist way before he was awarded the so-called MacArthur “genius” grant. Of course, Los Angeles has plenty of other great chroniclers—Carey McWilliams, Lynell George, Octavia Butler through her fiction—but it’s Davis I turn to when I’m confused, especially when things are aflame.

The book he’s best known for is City of Quartz, a dense, controversial opus from 1990. In it Davis showed LA to be both utopian and dystopic, a sunshine-soaked fortress of capitalism-sodden concrete, from vile prisons to the private, gated real estate that fuels so many Netflix shows. Quartz is both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable, which is why I sooner recommend his follow-up, 1998’s Ecology of Fear, which is easier to dip into. That doesn’t mean it’s any less provocative, though, especially the chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

Davis’s argument in “The Case” is forcible, and kinda obvious: It chronicles the region’s fire history to show Southern California as a place that ignites regularly. Making the point that to live here, alongside the Santa Monica Mountains, in the flightpath of Santa Ana winds, is either to accept fire as part of the ecology, as natural as the Pacific’s waves, or to live in denial. Because the fires don’t care, but that doesn’t seem to stop celebrities from building mansions in fire-prone zones, or the city, county and state to continue blowing taxpayer money to protect and rebuild them. As a result of the cyclical, ever-expanding builds and rebuilds, Davis wrote, “our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.”

On a personal level, it’s an extremely tough argument for me to endorse, especially this week. My mother’s cousin, my first cousin once removed, just lost her adorable, petite hillside home, where she raised her children and survived multiple fires. I enjoyed many beautiful Easter and Thanksgiving meals on her deck while Malibu’s storied sunsets turned everything to rose. Last I heard, she’s staying with friends, she’s okay, but what is okay in this scenario? No one is sleeping well. Everyone is extremely stressed. Last week’s incessant faulty evacuation notices didn’t help. One day I spent the morning volunteering at a food bank, the afternoon clearing brush from a friend’s hillside, knowing the work is only just beginning—because with battleships of smoke on all horizons, it’s hard to guess when this will end. I cry daily for people I know and people I’ve never met; my Instagram stories are one Gofundme after another. So when I indulge my rage toward politicians controlled by lobbyists, toward climate crisis deniers, toward real estate developers who build unaffordable housing in unwise spots, I think Davis was broadly right in his polemic—as Angelenos, we live in Mike Davis’s world—even if he was slightly trolling. “I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” he once told me. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”

I bet his opinion would be as firm as ever.

There’s a lot of Luigi Mangione in the air right now, and I didn’t sense that during Woolsey. We’re feeling the magnitude of shared suffering—you can live in Hollywood or Pasadena and still experience the destruction of the Palisades like a bat to the gut—but that doesn’t mean we’re blind to the starkly unjust dynamics inside the emergency. Los Angeles is charred, hurting, and angry. Altadena, one of my favorite towns, full of middle class homes that rarely experienced fire, is in ruins. Still, there is a compassionate underbelly to be found in all the mutual aid compensating for our government’s gaps and failures—people shuttling supplies, sorting donations, helping the least protected; I spoke to a bartender Saturday night who makes ends meet cleaning houses, and she’s taking on additional jobs just to give away the extra cash. Yasi Salek, host of the great podcast Bandsplain, lost her Altadena house, with all the material things that make up a life—T-shirts, ticket stubs, books she loved. “I felt so protected and cocooned by these things, grounded in my own history. It’s all gone now and that’s okay,” she wrote on Instagram.

Again, what does it mean to be okay, today and tomorrow, knowing fires are still burning and will return again soon? That the climate crisis will continue to make them worse? In my ideal scenario, each round will make more folks open up to and care more for their neighbors. Because what I value most about Los Angeles is its people—all these open-hearted, striving, oddball, courageous people. I remember Davis saying something similar on the phone one time, and I wrote it down: “Whenever you bring large numbers of people from diverse cultures and they have to live with each other, you can’t have a better incubator or crucible for creating new culture. It’s really in my mind the glory of LA.”



Rosecrans Baldwin is a GQ correspondent and the best-selling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis

1999

Reilly, Michael

Published Web Locationhttps://doi.org/10.5070/BP313113034

Abstract


In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions.

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Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and The Imagination of Disaster Michael Reilly In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis contends that Los Angeles is exceptional in the number of major natural and social disasters it experiences, and that both types of tragedy are intensified through similar types of human (in)action. The former argument largely fails because Davis does not control for the enormous size of LA. Nor does he compare the results of these disasters to other dangers threatening residents. He thus makes pointless an assessment of the overall importance of these avoidable tragedies. Unfortunately, his gloomy tone has led many critics to dismiss him as paranoid and to miss the importance of the latter argument. Here, Davis relates three historical accounts where social and political factors are at least as important as the truly natural in determining the understanding and attempted management of "natural disaster." The unsupported argument that LA is exceptional and the narrative power of the case studies, combined with the rest of the nation's latent contempt for LA, may leave readers fantasizing about the ruin of the City of Angels when, in fact, they ought to be bringing this insightful analysis to bear on their own disaster policy questions. Throughout the book, Davis argues that LA is more prone to disaster than other regions of the US but fa ils to support this with any numbers normalized to take LA's enormous size into account. He admits that "other metropolitan regions ... face comparable risks of disaster," however "none bear Los Angeles's heavy burdens of mass poverty and racial violence" (p. 54). This insistence on the exceptional nature of LA is poorly supported by evidence mostly limited to absolute numbers of people killed or dollars lost. Any argument - especially one where risk figures so prominently -about such an enormous region should include relative measurements that account for the LA region having over I 0 million residents and a larger economy than most nations. The definition of "major" disaster employed by Davis is also weak, because he rarely discusses the impact of these events in relation to the impacts of the host of other problems humans face. The number of people dying from storms or fires each year means little unless it is compared to the number of people dying from Berkeley Planning Journal 13 ( 1999): 133-135


Berkeley Planning Journal other major factors. This fa ilure becomes especially clear when Davis criticizes community (over)reaction to crime without noting that - on a purely statistical basis - such fe ars are more reasonable than fear of natural disaster. The only time Davis does hint at a relative comparison, e.g., while assessing the danger posed by a potential large tornado, contradicts his preoccupation with natural disaster: "The dead and injured, in our secret Kansas, should not be much more than the average Friday night carnage on the freeways" (p. 194 ). These two related fa ilures along with the book's pervading tone of gloom have led many critics to label Davis as paranoid. After all, if LA is really so bad, why do so many people keep coming? How important is it to worry about a theoretical hurricane ripping a 747 from the sky when actual bullets fired by angry residents have hit a number of helicopters over the last few decades? Unfortunately, these distractions have obfuscated Davis' more important argument on the relationship between the natural and the social in determining the impacts of natural disasters. The central part of the book sets up a framework for the interaction of social and political processes with natural disasters. Davis illustrates this with three historical case studies where human factors decidedly condition that which is generally supposed to be natural. "As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets" (p. 9). Each history supports this view by looking at one type of disaster: fire, wind, and wildlife. "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" establishes a connection between the very expensive, high­tech efforts to protect Malibu from naturally-recurrent wildfire and the almost ignorance of policy directed at deadly tenement fires in central Los Angeles. "Our Secret Kansas" recounts LA's twentieth­century tornado history and how the Los Angeles Times and civic boosterism successfully downgraded such occurrences to "freak winds." Finally, "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre" compares policy reactions to the seldom-deadly but much fe ared mountain lion and the cute but sometimes plague-ridden squirrel. Together, these cases demonstrate Davis' considerable skill in integrating complex scientific and social knowledge and provide support for his dialectic. Davis concludes with an interesting but somewhat forced connection between natural and social disaster. He uncovers links between literary disaster and racism where the "invading hordes" or superhuman post-disaster societies are thinly veiled appeals to 134


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Jun 4, 2015 ... PDF | On Jan 1, 1994, Mike Davis published The Ecology of Fear | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate.

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Ecology of fear : Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

Feb 4, 2011 ... Ecology of fear : Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. by: Davis, Mike, 1946-. Publication date: 1998. Topics: Social problems, ...

Academia.eduwww.academia.edu/64577616/Ecology_of_fear_Los_Angeles_and_the_imagination_of_disaster

(PDF) Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

Metropolitan Books, New York. 1998. 484 pp, $27.50 paperback (ISBN 0 8050 5106 6) Since the publication of City of quartz in 1990, Mike Davis has developed ...

Mike Davis on Fellow Legendary California Historian Kevin Starr

Historian Mike Davis was appalled by the horrors California had inflicted on itself, while Kevin Starr was awed by the Golden State's spirit of optimism. In this interview right before his death, Davis reflects on their mutual admiration and tender friendship.

The legendary socialist historian Mike Davis died on October 25, 2022. (Verso Books)

BYMIKE DAVIS
 11.12.2023
JACOBIN

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times published an article contrasting Mike Davis and Kevin Starr, both widely read historians of California. “Mike Davis sees murky decay, while Kevin Starr embraces shiny optimism,” the paper said. The contrast was undeniable, especially to their own admiring readers. “Davis groupies scorned Starr’s boosterism as unfashionably chipper. Many Starr fans dismissed Davis as a left-wing lunatic.”

In reality, Davis and Starr shared a deep mutual admiration and longtime friendship. Starr died in 2017, and Mike Davis died in 2022. When the latter was in palliative care, Jason Sexton approached Davis to record his thoughts about Starr — many of which Davis had never shared publicly — for his book Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation between Davis and Sexton, which took place July 6, 2022, in San Diego.

Davis’s criticisms of Starr are astute and penetrating, but they are greatly outweighed in this conversation by his admiration for Starr as a scholar and a person. Reflecting on an exchange with Starr’s wife Sheila after his death, he said, “She told me after he died that Kevin loved me, and I was incredibly touched by that. But it’s hard to pin Kevin down.” Just shy of four months before his own death, Davis thanked Sexton for the opportunity to talk about his friend, saying, “We’ll never see the likes of him again.”

Ifirst met Kevin Starr when somebody set up a debate between the two of us at a Westside public affairs forum. I went in ready to be critical, but he was so disarmingly charming, so generous — there’s just no way I could debate him in a hostile way. It was confusing to me because I had this image of Kevin as a kind of spokesman for elite genealogy, but we never really dueled. Kevin agreed with so much of what I had to say, and I found too much of what he had to say challenging and fascinating. Besides, there’s nothing I hold in higher esteem than a great storyteller. When I was at another event at USC with Kevin, Mike “the Poet” Sonksen, who was a student of mine at UCLA, got up out of the audience and recited a poem about Kevin and me. And Kevin got up and shot right back at him with an even better rap. Kevin the rapper — a tour de force. I loved that.

On the matter of why Kevin never really addresses the ’60s and the ’70s, I think his silence was similar to Joan Didion’s revulsion. Los Angeles literally made her sick, and so she had to leave. I have a very different perspective on that period, having been a political activist in LA during those years. But I think I also don’t understand Kevin’s whole biography, because the Kevin in his heyday that Peter Richardson writes about, who wrote for the Hearst paper The Examiner, is not the Kevin I knew. Amid the bigotry, including spats over cultural values with San Francisco politicians like Harvey Milk in the late ’70s, there’s a big sea change, or perhaps “spiritual change” I think Kevin would prefer. It doesn’t grow out of his view of the ’60s, I think; it has to do with the research that would show up later in the Depression volume. So the more radical but always ecumenical Kevin that I knew corresponded to the writing of that volume and subsequent volumes. This was not just a result of the early progressives, but Kevin had this kind romantic attitude toward the wild boys, even the Communist Party in the ’60s.

Kevin’s methodology and mine are similar in that they’re modular. We’d take an eight- to twelve-thousand-word essay and then compile them together in a book. And certainly there were many things for Kevin to write about in that period, avoiding some of the subjects he found most distasteful. To me the surprising thing is that Kevin wrote nothing on the rise of LA mayor Tom Bradley. I don’t know what Kevin’s relationship to Bradley was later on. But if you want to find the kind of silver lining in this turbulent, sometimes violent period, you could do it through a narrative about the rise and fall and rise again of Tom Bradley. I am not sure why he had this particular aversion to what other people saw as the most heroic period, at least until ’69.

Kevin doesn’t really pick things up until the ’80s in his chronicle of California, leaving out Proposition 13 and issues that led to it. He does know that race is the American dilemma, and I think beginning with Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, race is present, and genocide is present. I never saw Kevin as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because by the time I had met Kevin I think you’d have to describe him as a solid liberal. You can see this in his embrace of California’s progressive history.

There are two things, however, that are missing in Kevin’s opus. One is if you take Kevin as a kind of French Annales school historian, the deep geography is missing. Of course he talks about water, and of course he talks about subregionalism in the state. But the kind of hard natural-history framework is missing. The other thing that’s missing is economic history. He writes a lot about the economy, but for instance in the nineteenth century what made California distinctive was Montgomery Street. This was the only independent pool of capital west of the Mississippi River, west of Chicago. And this is such a vital thing in California’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history — the banks, finance, and the great banking empires.LA is just a branch of San Francisco until the twentieth century, when it becomes a kind of colony of Chicago.

I’m giving away a lot of books, and unfortunately that included all of my Kevin volumes. I don’t recall what he says about people like Harris Newmark or later [Amadeo] Giannini, who I’m sure is in there in some way. But banking and finance are missing, and it’s all important. LA was just a cow town totally dependent on investment, and it didn’t work — recycling, for instance, Comstock fortunes by the Flood family, the Irvines, the Lankershims, etc. in the 1860s. LA is just a branch of San Francisco until the twentieth century, when it becomes a kind of colony of Chicago. For instance, LA has the second scientifically designed industrial district in the country — the first was in Chicago. Chicago investors built a duplicate here, and that’s where you get people like the Wrigleys and so on.

It is in a way totally unfair to level against Kevin the charge that he didn’t do everything. Who can? Still, in Kevin’s own spirit of handing the mantle down to younger historians, these two things are important. A kind of deep environmental history is so necessary with San Diego, for instance. Why was San Diego such a backwater? Two reasons. There was no real route east of here. When [John D.] Spreckels finished the first railroad, it had to dip down into Baja, California. But even more importantly, there’s very little water. LA floats on water. The fundamental geographical fact is that condition, how interurban competition would take place. As for the economic/financial industry: Where did capital come from? Who had capital to dispose? In that sense, San Francisco was a colossus compared to Southern California taken as a whole.

But these are not so much criticisms. I think Kevin would say, “Yeah, you’re right Mike.” He celebrated and was enthusiastic about all the historical work being done by the gang around Bill Deverell at USC. I would say that probably more quality work on LA has come out of the [California] State University campuses than UCLA, for instance. That was the sort of critical school with Deverell, but black studies and Chicano studies among others have kind of moved back around to narrative and what Kevin was doing, which is, to me, a major point.

Kevin looks like simply a great storyteller, in traditional narrative history. But if you were to examine his work epistemologically, it’s far more sophisticated than that. He writes so much about how imagined environments and history were transformed into material facts that became part of a subsequent history. It’s a pretty sophisticated idea with a lot of implications. One of the ideas that I stole wholeheartedly from Kevin when I wrote City of Quartz is that there’s a lot more there.

Of course, he was philosophically well trained. You can’t go through sixteen years of Catholic and Jesuit education without being so. Kevin always considered me a lapsed Catholic. I studied at the University of Edinburgh for a while under the Irish historian Owen Dudley Edwards (not exactly an Irish name), and upon the minute I met him he said, “You’re a lapsed Catholic.” And I said, “No, I’m not. I have the same attitude toward the Church that Robespierre did.” And he said, “Then you’re really a typical lapsed Catholic.” And of course, that was the category that Kevin put me in.

One of the things Kevin did that I always found astonishing was his constant attempt to make connections between people who, if not enemies, were people you wouldn’t expect to be invited to the same dinner table. He even asked me one time, “Why don’t you come to Bohemian Grove with me?” I said, “What, to pee on Redwoods and run around in togas with George Shultz and so on?” He said, “No, you’ll find it utterly fascinating.” So I toyed with that, but then he told me, “You can’t write about it. You can’t document it in any way.” Which gave me an excuse not to go. I’m kind of notorious in that way. I got invited to the Vatican, but I didn’t go. To the consternation of all my far-left-wing friends, I got invited to the Naval War College to speak, and I didn’t go. I’m kind of bashful about rubbing shoulders with some people, even if the individuals turn out to be fascinating people with far different views than you’d stereotypically attribute to them. But this was just wild. Of course, I imagine myself going around with my spy camera at the Bohemia Club, unraveling the mysteries of California’s rulers. But it was typical of Kevin, the reconciliatory kind of vision.

He also had this thing, like Tom Hayden, of really accentuating Irishness. He had this kind of Irish gang, as many people know, that included figures like Robert McGuire — a self-identified Irish group that would meet in the Pacific Dining Car or wherever they all hung out. I was somewhat included on the periphery of this, which isn’t so strange in a way because my two older children are Irish citizens. I lived in Belfast during the Troubles for about a year and a half. But I always found it kind of amusing, because I grew up Irish Catholic in a town where everyone was a Southern Baptist, Mormon, or some form of Pentecostal. I was always fascinated by Irish Americans who came from real Irish-American backgrounds: those with grandfathers who ran bars on 42nd Street. I always found that interesting, and I have a green shirt that has “Unrepentant Irish Bastard” written on it that I put on for special occasions. My ethnic identification extends to stuff that I never heard Kevin talk about, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He may have talked about it all the time, but I was never witness to it. And I never brought it up.

The frequency with which the adjective “baroque” is attached to Kevin is amusing, but in some ways appropriate. It’s not at all hard to see Kevin as a baroque pope. And he was progressive without, as far as I know, ever writing about, say, liberation theology. I never quite understood the religious stuff until Kevin died and I talked to his wife Sheila about how he had this high mass and how important that was to him. But I also saw Kevin somewhat through the eyes of my mother, who’s a Ryan and Mulligan. The most fundamental, primordial distinction she made was between the shanty Irish and the lace curtain Irish. My mother definitely hated the lace curtain Irish — she hated Jackie Kennedy. I’ll never forget: my mother comes in, I’m at my folks’ house in the ’70s and she says, “Could anything be more disgraceful?” I said, “What’s that?” “Onassis gives her $20,000 a year just to spend on lingerie,” my mother says, “Can you imagine that? $20,000 a year for undies and people are starving all over the world?”

When I first met Kevin, I thought he was most likely a son of privilege; in fact, he was shanty Irish to the core. Tom Reifer, who writes a chapter coauthored with Cid Martinez in this volume — I was struck by how similar of a background he has to Kevin, going through a series of orphanages and foster homes. Tom spent a lot of time on the street and had a really tough upbringing. But it was a revelation for me to discover Kevin’s background.

On the matter of whether Kevin told an accurate story of California, I think his story changed over time. Kevin evolved like any serious historian or writer would through writing and research, always in constant dialogue with Sheila. She told me after he died that Kevin loved me, and I was incredibly touched by that. But it’s hard to pin Kevin down. There’s certainly a huge contrast between the Kevin I met at the end of the ’80s and ’90s the Kevin of the ’70s whom Richardson writes about, which I thought was being a bit of a big-game hunter in that piece in this volume, and not seeing personal transformation, or the evolution of ideas. Richardson interprets Kevin as a reactionary, part of the elite, which seems to have been his aspiration at one time.

But the Kevin I remember above all is the librarian — the state librarian. Quite frankly, most historians and academics take librarians more or less for granted. Sure, you’ll put them in your acknowledgements, or mentions, or something. But they don’t understand, I think, what the real vocation of a librarian is. As a librarian, or as Kevin would put it, a “civil servant” — he was very proud of that term — he was a fighter for the public sphere and believed in public works. Basically, he saw the capacity of the public sphere for doing good.

It’s funny that I never talked to Kevin about [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, but I assume he had some exposure to FDR. In my case my dad was a founding member of his meat cutters’ local — he was more trade union than he was a Democrat; but of course, he adored FDR. I understand that Kevin had admired one of FDR’s advisors, Father John Ryan, who was definitely a working-class hero. And considering this was the period of Father Coughlin, Ryan really was a progressive figure. It’s always confused me, because I didn’t know Kevin well enough to pull together all the different facets of Kevin, and how he squared his Catholic education with a lot of his beliefs. Now, of course, when you think of Jesuits you think of Greg Boyle and so on, and Jesuits being killed by juntas in Latin America. But in Kevin’s day, that wouldn’t be true. There were German Jesuits who ran the ratline, helping Nazis escape.

I left the Church on my own when I was about twelve because I was totally enthralled with science. I became an atheist without much external influence. Later on, I developed a great interest in religion, beginning with Pentecostals. I used to tell people if they asked, “What was the single most important event in twentieth century Los Angeles?” It would have to be Azusa Street. New religion among extremely poor Italian immigrants, Black people, Mexican track laborers, and so on. I would have loved to talk to Kevin more about that. But then, we’d all love to have another hundred hours with him.

He would often say that I called him a Whig, but I don’t think he is one. But does he practice a kind of Whiggish history? The answer has to be “Yeah,” but qualified by the fact that he also can see the darkness and is always fighting against the darkness of history, whereas I find so much of the truth of history precisely in that darkness. I’m notorious for saying hope is not a scientific term — people find it out of love and anger, not because of some promise that history will pay them.

For Kevin’s final volumes, he turned attention to the Catholic Church, and was deeply affected by its scandals. For working-class Catholics in many parts of the world, the scandals that rocked the Church have been an utter catastrophe. I see that most in the case of Ireland. I remember riding to the airport one time while there, and I started talking to the taxi driver about this. The guy said, “Do you mind if I pull off the road for two minutes?” He just started weeping. He said it just tore his heart out, and that we’re all guilty in a way because we all kind of knew on the margins of our consciousness that this stuff went on.Hope is not a scientific term — people find it out of love and anger, not because of some promise that history will pay them.

I never talked to Kevin as far as I can recall about any of this and how he experienced it. His writing is autobiographical, and his interviews and his writings don’t sound much like the Church, or at least the Irish Church — most of my friends in Ireland, my generation, were educated by the Christian Brothers. They knew the strap and they knew beatings from elementary school. Kevin’s got very nostalgic portraits of his Catholic school education.

I’ve actually always been jealous of Kevin, because more than anything in the world I always wanted to live in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. I never managed to do it. I felt deeply alienated growing up here in San Diego. I think it’s obvious from his biography that he had a tremendous amount of anger around his experience growing up rejected, unwanted by his mother and father, and in San Francisco, in the shadow of the wealthy and all.

One of the people I’ve always admired most is Greg Boyle. He was the only person in the city to get up and say that the issue here is jobs. “Give me one job, I’ll take one gang member and turn them into a member of the working class,” he said, at a time when the archdiocese couldn’t really care less. But Kevin had a far different vision of working men and women, of working hand in hand with one another in order to respect one another and build anew, with protections we had for workers when unions were strong in this country.

I’d like to also point out in kind of a summary that Kevin really believed people can be changed by dialogue with people who have different or opposing views. That’s why he was always trying to connect people from different backgrounds. I’m not sure if that was Hegelian or Roycean idealism; I don’t think scholastics would call themselves Hegelians. One of my closest friends in Ireland — with a PhD in scholastic philosophy at Queen’s in Belfast, from a tough working-class background — we used to fight all night long about these questions, Hegel and Marx versus the scholastics, but this is an area of ignorance for me. Obviously I’m aware of Josiah Royce’s influence on Kevin, but on his ideas I don’t have much of a clue. I know that somewhere Kevin says that Royce was the biggest single influence on him. He talks about Royce and Carey McWilliams as being two major influences, but actually Royce is the more important one.

Kevin’s desire to bring people together he saw as something of a hopeful act, or the struggle for corrective action he would talk about. Kevin also believed in the inherent goodness of people, some who might be deemed inherently evil. Actually the theologians that I’ve read, some of the Russians, left me fascinated with the concept of the apocalypse not as universal destruction and disorder, but as the emergence of the truth of history at the end of time. History is, then, experienced basically by the wretched of the earth, and by persecuted minorities. That made me a big fan of Ernst Bloch, and the whole messianic strand of Jewish Marxism.

I’m very touched to be given this opportunity to share my thoughts about Kevin. We’ll never see the likes of him again.

CONTRIBUTORS
Mike Davis is the author of several books, including Planet of Slums and City of Quartz.

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