Los Angeles
Leftist intellectuals are always prophets with honor, no matter how dishonorably they behave. Consider professional Los Angeles-basher and Marxist social commentator Mike Davis. His book Ecology of Fear, which made it to the top of the Los Angeles Times bestseller list last fall, turns out to be fable as well as journalism, but his fans are unappalled. Like Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan leftist activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner whose much-lauded "autobiography" was exposed as full of fiction -- without distressing her many academic admirers in the least -- Davis is apparently exempt from the ordinary author's obligations to the truth because of the political usefulness of his work.
Davis is a so-called native son, "born in Los Angeles" it says on the flap of Ecology of Fear, though he in fact hails from the small California desert town of Fontana, not even in Los Angeles County. His past is a blend of lumpen- and highbrow-prole. He's been both a truck driver and an editor of the New Left Review -- a dream set of credentials combining practice and theory. He professes contempt for effete intellectuals, preferring the company of L.A. street gangs. And he's a MacArthur Foundation-certified "genius" -- the recipient last year of a $ 315,000 grant to pursue his work. Mother Jones called his 1990 swipe at Los Angeles, City of Quartz, one of the 20 books of the past 20 years everyone should read.
A grim social history of L.A. framed as a story of the white power structure vs. embattled minorities, City of Quartz could be seen as prophetic after the 1992 Rodney King riots, and reporters from across the country acquired the habit of going to Davis as an expert source on the supposed dark side of L.A. In his new book Ecology of Fear, he builds on that reputation, casting himself as an end-of-the-century Jeremiah, with vivid predictions of fire, flood, and plague in the Los Angeles basin. His project is to unmask what he calls "the social construction of 'natural' disaster." And those sneer marks around the word natural are crucial. In Davis's telling, the damage done to L.A. by wildfires, floods, and earthquakes is less an act of God or of Mother Nature than the fruits of capitalism. As Davis puts it: "Market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense."
Some of the book is so unsurprising it's merely tedious -- you mean Los Angeles is prone to earthquakes? But a lot of it is surprising, and not necessarily true. Indeed, a rumble has begun to spread, if not yet to earthquake proportions, that Davis is an unreliable scholar. This is largely thanks to the work of Malibu realtor Ross Earnest Shockley, who moonlights as a one-man anti-Mike Davis truth squad under the pen name Brady Westwater.
Westwater's success as a debunker is a testimony to the ability, in these days of mass e-mail, of one very energetic layman to call the mass media's tune. He's already garnered stories in local L.A. papers, a couple of Webzines, and in the Economist. Westwater's crusade began in November with an 18-page essay on Davis's errors that he e-mailed to magazines across the country, especially those that have praised Davis's work. Since then, day and night, sometimes seven days a week, Westwater has pursued his quarry -- searching and downloading articles from the Web about Davis or about the various alarms raised by the book -- cougar attacks, rainfall, tornadoes, fires.
Fact-checking Davis is a chore -- he footnotes heavily but omits publishers' names for books and page numbers and headlines for his newspaper citations, leaving any interested researcher to thumb through entire issues of a newspaper seeking verification. But Westwater has caught Davis on some obvious points:
P Davis insists that a popular downtown gathering area known as Bunker Hill was redeveloped by sinister white power brokers after the Watts riots as a futuristic high-security fortress to keep out dangerous blacks. In fact, the redevelopment plan went into effect before the Watts riots, and the resulting area is a fully accessible public gathering place usually filled with more Hispanics and blacks from nearby neighborhoods than whites, and free of the grim rolldown bulletproof doors blocking all business entrances that Davis describes.
Davis writes that L.A.'s Westlake District and adjacent parts of downtown have "the highest urban fire incidence in the nation." He then ties this vague claim down to a year by saying the two area fire stations had 20,000 calls in 1993. In fact, in 1993, that area had the lowest number of structure fires (195) of any council district in Los Angeles, much less the nation.
P Davis devotes a whole chapter, "Our Secret Kansas," to the preposterous notion that L.A. is being continually battered by twisters -- and that local media cover this up. He makes much of the supposed fact that when a tornado struck in 1930, "the Times could not say the forbidden 'T word,' so its headline merely noted that 'Roofs Go Flying in the Hawthorne area.'" Leaving aside the obvious flaw in this evidence -- newspaper headline writers are mainly concerned with fitting informative and alluring words into tight spaces -- the very article Davis cites contains the word "tornado," which the Times allegedly "could not say," six times, including in a photo caption.
So far criticisms of Davis seem to have had a curious effect: His "genius" reputation is barely diminished, and there has been a spate of counterattacks defending him. Both lefty columnist Marc Cooper in the L.A. New Times and the Webzine Salon quote University of Southern California professor Douglas Sherman supposedly verifying one of Davis's more striking claims against Westwater's debunking: namely, that a spot in Los Angeles County's San Gabriel Mountains holds the world's record for highest one-minute rainfall. Westwater points to standard sources like the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which tells us that the greatest recorded one-minute rainfall (1.23 inches) was nearly twice as high as Davis's "world record," and in Unionville, Maryland, to boot. What's more, Sherman tells me that he never said what Salon and Cooper quoted him as saying. He merely confirmed that, yes, the San Gabriels are prone to some of the world's heaviest rains. Neither the recorded one-minute, five-minute, one-hour, one-day, nor one-month rainfall maximum was in the Los Angeles area.
Occasional freak storm or no, this dispute over rainfall points to a larger absurdity in Ecology of Fear. Even if Davis were right about the record, so what? Anyone who lives in L.A. and considers rainfall a problem is looking really hard for something to complain about -- which pretty much sums up Davis's Los Angeles oeuvre. As if aware of this, Davis tends to use hyperbolic adjectives to deflect the reader's eye from the actual numbers: He refers, for example, to the "extreme storminess" and "extraordinary tornado-genesis" in L.A. due to El Nino. Look at the chart on his next page, though, and you see that the "extreme storminess" is a jump from five thunderstorm days a year to ten; and from no tornadoes to six. Our secret Kansas, indeed.
The most curious defense of Davis was in an L.A. Weekly cover story, run just as Westwater's critiques began to attract attention elsewhere. The story didn't even mention the brewing controversy. But it did contain the first public admission -- in a strangely admiring context -- that Davis tends to, well, make things up. The author of the Weekly story, Lewis MacAdams, a local expert on the L.A. River, relates how when Davis was writing a story about the river for the Weekly a few years earlier, Davis manufactured an interview with MacAdams, at a place MacAdams had never been, and claimed to have shown Davis a document MacAdams had never seen. MacAdams also quotes Davis saying -- twice -- that "I was stunned to find out that something I said turned out to be true." MacAdams offers this all-purpose defense of Davis: "Those who argue with his facts must still grapple with his argument."
So Davis's defenders end up at what you might call the core doctrine of Menchuism: Even if the author's wrong, he's right. (A recent defense of Davis in the Nation by Jon Wiener also takes this tack.) But the truth is the opposite. While Davis certainly is often wrong, even if he were right, he'd still be wrong. That Los Angeles is prone to earthquakes and fires is news to no one and hasn't stopped the population from swinging up again after the early '90s recession. Since Davis never gives comparative risks for the horrors he describes -- comparing, say, the ten mountain lion attacks this century in the entire state of California (only one in Los Angeles County, and none in the city), to which he devotes a hysterical 73-page chapter "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre," with the thousands of motorists who collide with deer in the Midwest and in eastern suburbs -- it's impossible to take counsel from his fearmongering. It's a typical modern leftist maneuver. Lacking a believable vision of positive social change, Davis becomes a hysterical town crier warning of unrelieved doom and gloom everywhere he looks.
Remarkably, Davis also imagines that he is a defender of oppressed minorities against the depredations of wealthy whites. In fact, an L.A. that was a small, wealthy, white enclave would have less sprawl, and would suffer less earthquake, fire, and tornado damage, than the real Los Angeles. Davis praises early 20th-century planners who would have kept development tightly controlled -- and excluded most of the more recent Hispanic arrivals. He condemns supersprawl without admitting that fighting sprawl means fighting the dreams of people who want to live in a city like Los Angeles -- in most cases, with a pretty good understanding of the dangers involved. And a serious risk of being eaten by animals or killed by tornadoes isn't among them.
As I sat on Malibu beach recently reviewing my notes on this story, on a winter day with temperatures in the mid-70s, lovely swimmers frolicking in the surf, dozens of surfers gliding over the waves, a mellow Kool-Aid light on the hills, the newspapers filled with plummeting crime rates, it was clear that, the occasional racial conflict or growling cougar notwithstanding, L.A. is okay. But it doesn't take a genius to tell us that.
Brian Doherty is the Warren Brookes fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.