[Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller. ]
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MIKE DAVIS ON DEATH, ORGANIZING, POLITICS, CLIMATE CHANGE  
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Sam Dean
July 25, 2022
Los Angeles Times
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_ Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller. _

Mike Davis in his San Diego home on July 12, 2022., Adam Perez / For
The Times

 

In late June, I wrote to Mike Davis to see if he’d be up for an
interview.

His reply: “If you don’t mind the long trek to SD, I’d be happy
to talk. I’m in the terminal stage of metastatic esophageal cancer
but still up and around the house.”

Davis does not mince words. Still, he can tell some stories. Like this
one: Born in Fontana, raised in El Cajon, he spent the ’60s on the
front lines of radical political movements in Los Angeles, where he
joined the Communist Party alongside Angela Davis. In solidarity, he
gave her a car — a cherry of a ’54 Chevy. A month later, at a
Party meeting, he asked how she liked it, only to hear that the
battery had supposedly blown up, and a “kind” mechanic had agreed
to take it off her hands for free.

Or this: In 1970, he marched on wildcat Teamster picket lines
alongside union brothers with sawed-off shotguns under their
trenchcoats in the summer sun. Then there was the time he fled the
phalanx of sheriffs that descended on Belvedere Park during the
Chicano Moratorium.

But the story that put Davis on the cultural map, laid out in his 1990
bestseller “City of Quartz,” is the story of Los Angeles. The
book, required reading for anyone who wants to understand the city,
detailed a history of L.A. as a corrupt machine built to enrich its
elite while the white supremacist LAPD served as attack dogs to beat,
jail and kill troublemakers. It also warned another conflagration,
Watts 2.0, could be on the horizon. Eighteen months later, in April
’92, the city exploded. Davis looked like a seer, though he said the
simmering rage was obvious to anyone who got out of their car. He
became a minor celebrity. He also started working alongside the
leaders of the gang truce to advocate for reinvestment in South L.A.

An astonishing run of more than a dozen books followed, oscillating
between critiques and histories of the American West and sweeping
historical analyses of how climate disaster, capitalism and
colonialism have ground the global poor between their gears and set us
up for future calamity (including global viral pandemics, predicted in
2005’s “The Monster at Our Door”). Recently, he returned to L.A.
as a subject with 2020’s “Set the Night on Fire,” an
encyclopedic history of L.A. in the ’60s told through social
movements.

In person, Davis, 76, is very funny, unfailingly generous and seems,
above all, to love people. His home is stuffed with books (he reads
“500 pages a day”), pet reptiles and a collection of leftist art
and artifacts shared with his wife, artist and professor Alessandra
Moctezuma. Our conversation lasted from midday until sunset. Davis
regaled me with stories of unfinished projects and outlaws he’d
known, dangerous students (arsonists, stalkers) and endangering
students (a Fijian prince was stabbed during a class assignment to
“hang out in L.A. at night” but thanked him for it), and what he
considers his true passions — the dying ecology of California and
igneous rocks, which he’s traveled the world to collect and store in
his converted-garage office.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

SAM DEAN: You’ve decided to stop chemo treatments for your
esophageal cancer. What are you thinking about, day to day?

MIKE DAVIS: First of all, I have plenty of distractions. I read maybe
500 pages a day — military history, exploration — and in the
evenings I cuddle with my kids and we watch some crime show.

I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older
sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. I intend to not
let [my family] down, to be just as solid as they were. I’m not
depressed. The major thing in dying that I was worried about — my
father had an especially agonizing death, the trauma of it’s never
quite left me — was the thought that it might be so traumatic for my
kids that that’s what they remember of me. But 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 — you know, fighting.

SD: You were slapped with the label “prophet of doom” after
“City of Quartz” came out in 1992 — in which you did seem to
anticipate the ’92 uprisings in response to the Rodney King verdict.
But you’ve described yourself as a “neo-catastrophist,” in the
more narrow sense of believing that history, from geological history
to human political history, happens more in violent leaps like
earthquakes and meteor impacts and revolutions than in gradual shifts.
Do you still think of yourself as a catastrophist today?

MD: Yes. But I mean catastrophist in two ways. One, in resonance with
Walter Benjamin, is the belief in the sudden appearance of
opportunities to take leaps into an almost utopian future. But of
course, catastrophist in the other sense too, of, you know, events
like plagues. Now, in my fading days, I sit here with wonderment and
read the paper, and people are saying you gotta have more coal, gotta
have more oil, a year after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change report made clear
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that we are without question entering at least a 3-degree-Celsius
world. Which is almost unimaginable. And what I’ve tried to write
about
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and convince people of is that this is an already anticipated
genocide. A large minority, the poorest people on the planet, are in a
sense doomed.

And as for the old thing of, well, flying saucers will land and
humanity joins in a common cause — look at the bodies piling up on
borders and the walls being built. Environmental refugees will simply
die.

SD: Your most recent book, “Set the Night on Fire,” covered the
movement history of L.A. in the ’60s — and how the LAPD and
Sheriff’s Department, along with the FBI, brutally suppressed
activist groups.

MD: The LAPD in my mind is unreformable. But the Sheriff’s
Department is absolutely frightening. They’ve always been, to some
extent: I was in the Chicano Moratorium and Belvedere Park, in all the
big Eastside demonstrations in the ’70s, when the sheriffs would
just come in shooting. But they’ve never been so wildly and
completely out of control as they are now.

The problem is the culture and the cadre. The older sheriffs, like
many of the older [LAPD], are simply unreformable. The real solution
is just fire them en masse, take over the academies, break up the
gangs and, very importantly, require people to live in the areas they
patrol, or at least within city limits. There’s no way that you’re
going to have an acceptable Police or Sheriff’s Department in a city
so full of class and economic contradictions as Los Angeles. That’s
not a reason not to reform, but it’s a reason to be realistic about
the limits of it.

SD: You’ve spent much of your life on the front lines of struggles
for social justice and political change, from CORE [the Congress of
Racial Equality] and SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] early in
your life to labor activism and international solidarity movements in
later years. The act of organizing seems to rest on hope for changing
the world, but your books paint a grim picture: ecological collapse,
political corruption, white supremacy, the continuing immiseration of
the global poor. How do you hold on to hope?

MD: To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category.
And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of
hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always
wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To
me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly
and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a
city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so
important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see
fascism. 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.

SD: In interviews in 2020, you did express some optimism about the
energy you saw in the streets during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Two years on, where have you seen that energy go?

MD: I’m old enough to say with some authority that this generation
is different from any other postwar generation. The combination of
seeing rights stripped away on one side and facing declining economic
ability on the other has radicalized them and has given struggles over
what some people denounce as identity politics a very material force.

Kids are looking at their future. Before I retired from teaching at
[UC] Riverside, I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with
kids who were just agonized. They’re the first to go to college in
their family, and suddenly their parents lose their jobs and they
don’t know where to turn because there’s so many expectations and
so many sacrifices been made to get them into university that this
will somehow pan out into a real future. And that wasn’t happening.

But the biggest single political problem in the United States right
now has been the demoralization of tens of thousands, probably
hundreds of thousands of young activists. Part of the problem is the
lack of organizational structure, particularly of organizations of
organizers. There’s no leadership to give direction.

I mean, I’m a supporter of Bernie Sanders, but the Sanders campaign
held up this idea that we use movements to build electoral politics
and electoral politics to build movements. If you look at the history
of popular movements in relationship to electoral politics, that’s
hardly ever been true. I mean, Bernie and AOC and so on, they’re on
every picket line and they’re always for the right thing, but
they’ve allowed the movement in the streets to dissipate, and kids
or young people are so demoralized.

SD: What could be happening instead?

MD: Why is it that the right, the extreme right, owns the streets and
not the left? It’s not like Europe, where in a lot of countries
youth activism is quiescent or on decline. There are millions of
people like [my 18-year-old son], but who’s telling him where to go
to fight or what to do?

Who’s inviting him to the meeting? All they get instead, and what I
get every day, are 10 solicitations from Democrats to support
candidates. I vote for those candidates. I think they should be
supported, but the movement’s more important. And we’ve forgotten
the use of disciplined, aggressive but nonviolent civil disobedience.
Take climate change. We should be sitting in at the headquarters of
every oil company every day of the week. You could easily put together
a national campaign. You have tons of people who are willing to get
arrested, who are so up to do it. Nobody’s organizing that.

The biggest single political problem in the United States right now
has been the demoralization of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of
thousands of young activists.

— urban theorist, scholar, activist and historian Mike Davis

SD: You say aggressive, nonviolent civil disobedience is necessary.
But what about political violence? You wrote a book about the history
of the car bomb, “Buda’s Wagon.” You also lived through both
L.A. uprisings, you were a Friend of the Panthers, you lived in
Belfast during the Troubles. Are you ever surprised there isn’t more
political violence happening in the U.S.?

MD: I remember at the height of the scare about the Black Panthers, I
would tell people: What is so remarkable is there’s so little
Black-on-white violence in American history compared to the relentless
white violence against people of color.

But we’ve not seen the kind of violence that’s coming from the
right, nor have we seen — because we haven’t been dangerous enough
recently — what will happen when all the new repressive powers of
surveillance, all the antiterrorist legislation, comes down on
progressive movements. The Democrats’ reaction to the war on terror,
on most crime bills, has been to reform a little bit at the edges but
never attempt to dismantle it.

SD: You recently wrote about
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Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and concluded by saying, “Never has
so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so
few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of
Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable
Sholem Schwarzbard.” All were assassins or attempted assassins,
right?

MD: Did you look up that last name? He killed [Symon Petliura,] the
great hero of the Ukrainian independence movement. He shot him on a
Paris street, and a Paris jury found him innocent once they heard the
story of the pogroms and so on. Kind of like the Angela Davis jury
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Great character.

One of the major book projects that I never finished, though have been
interviewed about it and was published as a separate book in French,
was a project called “Heroes of Hell,” looking at violent
revolution in the 19th and early 20th century. Bolsheviks were always
opposed to individual acts of violence, because Russia had so much
experience with that before the revolution — the Leninist argument
was that you’re substituting the heroic deed for mass action, the
heroic sacrificial individual for the class. It made a lot of sense.

To me political violence is something to be judged much more
rationally than morally. And there are instances: After the death of
Franco, the Francoist transition to preserve the regime had all been
set in place. [Luis] Carrero Blanco was the anointed successor to
Franco, and a group blew his car over a cathedral. It totally
disrupted the succession, and made relative democratization possible.
We know on the negative side that if Fanny Kaplan hadn’t shot Lenin,
Stalin might not have happened. To me it’s an open question
depending on context and conditions.

I, by the way, never supported the Weathermen. In fact, I profoundly
hate the Weather People. Those people did exactly what cops would’ve
done, and now they’ve reinvented history to make themselves heroes.
To me, they’re just rich kids, along with some ordinary kids,
playing “Zabriskie Point” for themselves.

SD: You didn’t decide to go to college until you were nearly 30, and
your first book, “Prisoners of the American Dream,” came out when
you were 40. Had you always wanted to write?

MD: No, learning to write is the most difficult thing I’ve ever
done. It involved sometimes a whole ream of paper on an electric
typewriter just to get the first sentence. It was absolutely brutal.

SD: So why did you want to do it?

MD: Because I was such a miserable failure as an organizer and
speaker. The first speech I ever gave was an antiwar rally in
Stanford, 1965. I was working on this crazy SDS project in Oakland. I
succeeded in driving away three-quarters of the crowd within about
five minutes. I’ve spent years in tiny little groups trying to
regroup with even smaller groups, going to every demonstration, trying
this and that. And writing became the one skill that was useful for
political activity, for the movement.

D: Who influenced your writing the most? What were you reading that
made you want to write?

MD: I’ve never read much fiction, so the fiction I did read had a
lot of influence, starting with “The Grapes of Wrath.” The kind of
biblical cadence and language of Steinbeck. Then the New Left Review
was an early influence on my writing, and in some ways a bad one.

One of my most profound literary and intellectual influences was the
Welsh Marxist named Gwyn Williams. He had come out of the communist
historians group, [had] been the first to write an article in English
on Gramsci, but above all had this command of Welsh history on so many
different levels. So to some extent I wanted L.A. to be…

SD: Your Wales?

MD: Yeah! And then of course, in natural history the great influence
of mine was my friend Steve Pyne. He’s the fire historian, and just
a great all-around character. He was a firefighter and went to
Stanford on a baseball scholarship. I picked up his book when I was
very homesick in London and read his social history of fire in
America. And suddenly I wanted to write the environmental history of
L.A. as political and social history.

But the real core of my writing was storytelling. I told one of my
colleagues at Riverside, I’m not a writer’s writer at all, but I
am a damn good storyteller. And I have been around some of the best
storytellers on the planet. You know, in Belfast pubs and logger bars
in Butte, Montana, I’ve heard magnificent stories.

SD: What are some of the most surprising reactions you’ve seen to
your work?

MD: After “City of Quartz” came out, I became close friends with
Kevin Starr. We were set to debate. _[The L.A. Times described Starr
and Davis as “Dueling Prophets of Next L.A.
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in 1994; Starr published a rosier L.A. history book at the same time
as Davis’.] _He was so charming and nice that I started seeing him
for meals with his wife, and he was a regular attendee of Bohemian
Grove. So he invited me to Bohemian Grove.

SD: Really?

MD: I said, “What? They’d never let me in Bohemian Grove in a
million years!” He said, “Oh yes, they will. The only problem is
you can’t film or record or ever write about it.” And so I said:
“Too bad.” Friends of mine were angry at me. Everybody wanted me
to go to Bohemian Grove. But all that happens at Bohemian Grove is
that George Shultz and a bunch of billionaires run around peeing on
redwood trees acting like 7-year-olds.

I’ve turned down other invitations that really aggravated my
friends. I got an invitation to the Vatican.

SD: Who invited you to the Vatican?

MD: The office of Francis. Based on “Planet of Slums.” And I
decided not to do that.

SD: Before we wrap up, are there any, I don’t know, exhortations,
calls to action, that you want to share?

MD: Uh, no. I’ve resisted various things, one of which is the
writerly idea that you have to write something profound about your
termination. I have no intention of doing that, nor any compulsion to
write some mock-heroic thing. When my older sister died, I became
certain I was gonna die too. Though I didn’t know it would be of the
same cancer that she had. And I wrote two poems that pretty much sum
up my view of life, just straightforward poems. I’ll leave those
behind.

I think people who read my stuff pretty much get it. One of the
reasons this “aid in dying” is important to me is that it also
ensures I won’t lose my sense of humor. But what my older sister
taught me when she got the final verdict — and she was just as
straightforward and brave as she was in everything else in her life
— was that it’s an opportunity to teach your children not to be
afraid of this. To be sad but not fear it.

I’m just an ordinary person going through what every ordinary person
eventually goes through under circumstances that aren’t especially
tragic at all. Except maybe for some of the family.

But no need to make, you know, ponderous statements. It’s been more
fun just watching Golden State play or Scandinavian mysteries or
reading books, above all relaxing and hanging out with the family.
I’m so lucky to be cocooned in all the love I have here.

Sam Dean is a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the
technology industry in Southern California. He has previously worked
as a feature writer for a number of publications including Newsweek,
the Verge, 538 and Lucky Peach.

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* Mike Davis; Los Angeles;
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