Manichean L.A.

Karen Piper Manichean L.A. (on Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster [New York: Vintage Books, 1999]) MikeDavis hasbeen called L.A.'s "Captain Midnight," tirelessly exposing the corruption beneath the city's paradisiacal veneer with an almost heroic zeal. The 1950s TV show opened with the words: "On a mountaintop high above a large city stands the headquarters of a man devoted to the . . . struggle against evil men everywhere, Captain Midnight!" Davis similarly scans the phantasmic city of L.A. from the horizon, finding violence and deception everywhere. Jon Wiener calls Davis an "analyst of the underside of a city built on PR and mythologized from its inception as a kind of dreamwork in the desert" (19). In City ofQuartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles , Davis reveals the intense economic inequity and institutionalized racial violence that exists in L.A. In Ecology of Fear, the underside of L.A. is the often-concealed "social construction" of environmental disasters, which serves to perpetuate these inequities. L.A. "simultaneously imposes false expectations on the environment and then explains the inevitable disappointments as proof of a malign and hostile nature" (8). Some of the "disappointments" that Davis addresses are "killer" bees, plague-infected squirrels, "man-eating" mountain lions, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, and floods. Davis demonstrates how the representation of these natural disasters is geared toward enhancing disaster protection for the rich while ignoring or vilifying the poor as just another "natural" disaster. Some critics have complained that Davis' book is alarmist, unmasking a seemingly-endless litany of violence and terror in L.A. Skimming through the chapter subheadings of Ecology of Fear, his apocalyptic tour-de-force style quickly becomes evident: "Ozzie and Harriet in Hell," "Election Day Demons," "Apocalypse Theme Park," "Monsters and Messiahs," "Doom City," "Waiden Pond on LSD." D. J. Waldie states that Davis "depicts Los Angeles as a new Sodom, awaiting cataclysmic destruction." Though Davis claims he is not "summoning Armageddon" by invoking this plethora of natural disasters, he does suggest that "megacities" like Los Angeles will "stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts" (Ecology 54). Davis may predict that L.A. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang, but he still invokes an ominous future; his critics are right to call him pessimistic. What is interesting about Davis' critics, however, is the way in which they 316 the minnesota review tend to invoke booster rhetoric about L.A. in its defense. By and large, Davis' critics have been shown to have their own interests in protecting the image of L.A. (see Wiener's "LA Story"). In an attempt to restore hope in the city's future, they have generally taken one of three approaches: a) denounce his fearful facts by meticulous attention to possible errors in the footnotes; b) attack his personal life and call him crazy; or c) look at the bright side of living in Los Angeles. In this sense, the history of criticism of Ecology of Fear is almost as interesting as the book itself, and it reveals just as much about the Manichean history of representing Los Angeles. Davis once claimed that "the seeming antinomies of the boosters' 'sunshine' and the debunkers' 'noir'" have ultimately become "a single mythography (a cultural Mobius strip, as it were) of Los Angeles" ("Interview" 3). If Davis tends to brandish noir on one side of this dichotomy, it is no surprise that his critics would respond with "sunshine ." In the firstcamp, Davis has critics like Brady Westwater, a Malibu realtor who has made it his personal mission to debunk Davis. Westwater set up a twenty-three-page Web site, which was quickly picked up by journalists, devoted to citing factual errors in Davis' book. The front page of the LA Times carried a review that described Ecology ofFear as "self-promoting, city-trashing rot." By the time the paperback version of Ecology ofFear came out, Davis acknowledged his critics by adding a disclaimer at the beginning of the "Notes" section, apologizing for any errors. One well-documented "error" is the...