City of frauds

AP

A Davis day

WHEN the world wants to know about Los Angeles, the first person it turns to is Mike Davis. His 1990 best-seller, “City of Quartz”, correctly predicted that Los Angeles was about to be torn apart by riots, earning him the reputation of a seer; and his latest book, “Ecology of Fear”, is solidifying that reputation by insisting that the city's ecology is every bit as fragile as its social structure. For Mr Davis, LA is not just a “junkyard of dreams”, balkanised by race and class, ruled over by cynical white bosses, and kept in order by a paramilitary police force and a gigantic system of private surveillance. It is also an ecological disaster, rocked by earthquakes, ravaged by fires, doused by torrential rains and plagued by killer bees and man-eating coyotes.

Mr Davis's dystopian vision has turned this former meat-cutter and long-distance truck-driver into one of the country's most celebrated Marxist academics. His books have been almost universally praised. His growing list of honours includes a fellowship at the Getty Centre (which, no doubt to Mr Davis's relief, is built to withstand a massive earthquake) and a $315,000 MacArthur Foundation grant for “exceptionally creative individuals”.

The problem is that Mr Davis may be a little too creative for his own good. Brady Westwater, an estate agent in Malibu, has been so enraged by what he regards as Mr Davis's anti-LA animus that he has examined his work with a fine-tooth comb. “Of the heavily footnoted and researched facts”, he concludes, “not just a handful, not just a few dozen here and there, but many hundreds (and hundreds) of them were simply made up. Or, if not made up, twisted, rationalised and distorted until they bear as little relation to the truth as does President Clinton's definition of sex.”

Mr Westwater can come across as a trifle obsessed. But his case has now been taken up both on the Internet and in the local free press. Jill Stewart, a columnist with the New Times, claims that many of Mr Davis's “key anecdotes and major facts” are “fake, phoney, made-up, crackpot, bullshit”; a long essay in the current Salon asks whether Mr Davis's Los Angeles is all in his head. To make things worse, a recent issue of LA Weekly, a source that is normally sympathetic to Mr Davis, reveals that, back in 1989, he made up an interview with Lewis MacAdams, a poet and environmentalist. (Mr Davis admits the fabrication, but justifies it on the ground that he was “trying to figure out how to write journalism”.)

One of Mr Davis's key points, first made in “City of Quartz”, is that LA's public spaces are being progressively sealed off from the populace, with 2,000 “gated communities” and an epidemic of security cameras and armed guards. His prime example is Bunker Hill, a downtown district that Mr Davis describes as “a fortified redoubt”, complete with bullet-proof steel doors and a “totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements”, designed to “reproduce spatial apartheid”.

But the city's department of planning says that LA has no more than 100 gated communities. Far from embodying the “archisemiotics of class war”, Bunker Hill is one of the most accessible corners of the city, lavishly provided with lawns, plazas, fountains and even an open-air amphitheatre for performing artists. It is regularly full of tourists and “people of colour”. In fact, greater Los Angeles has seen a flowering of public spaces in the past few years: Santa Monica and Pasadena have created pedestrian precincts, and Venice Beach and Melrose Avenue are sometimes as crowded as mid-town Manhattan.

Mr Davis's contention that, thanks to its fragile ecology, LA is an “apocalypse theme-park” is equally off-beam. It is true that, as this piece was being written, a wind storm knocked out the power in your correspondent's office; but LA is not the only city to be built in an earthquake zone, as the citizens of San Francisco and Tokyo can testify. The weather is much less hospitable in most of the rest of the United States: this summer's heat-wave took 100 lives in Texas, for example. Mr Davis's contention that LA is plagued by killer bees and fierce animals (“man-eaters of the Sierra Madre” as he dubs them) borders on the eccentric. Mountain lions and coyotes, though indigenous to the region, have not claimed a single life in the past 200 years; killer bees, though a serious problem in Mexico city, have not yet reached LA.

Why has Mr Davis been allowed to get away, up to now, with conjuring up an image of Los Angeles so obviously at variance with the facts? After all, if a prominent British academic portrayed Piccadilly Circus as an urban fortress, designed to keep the people at bay, he would not have to wait several years to be corrected.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the New York publishing establishment has a weakness for books that portray the upstart city of the West, its chief cultural rival, in the worst possible light. Part of it lies in the fact that LA's universities are full of left-leaning scholars who regard their host city as exhibit number one in their case against capitalism. (Michael Dear, the head of USC's Southern California study centre, for example, argues that LA presents “a superficial gloss of striking beauty, glowing light and pastel hues, which together conspire to conceal a hideous culture of malice, mistrust and mutiny.”)

The biggest reason for Mr Davis's free ride, however, lies in the self-dramatising tendencies of ordinary middle-class Angelenos. These love to pretend that they live in one of the world's toughest urban jungles, beset by warring gangs and malevolent Nature, when, in reality, the biggest danger they face is that the person behind the counter at Starbucks might mis-hear their order for a double tall, decaf, non-fat latte with a vanilla shot and make their coffee with full-fat milk by mistake.