Mike Davis, the Critic, the Intellectual...

The city of Los Angeles invokes images of fame, sunshine, wealth, and natural beauty, juxtaposed with the reality of millions of inhabitants living in this metropolis. As one of the millions, I always viewed Los Angeles as the most beautiful place in the world. Perhaps the fact of being a native, growing up in an affluent suburban middle class community, my views are limited to my experiences. However as I attended colleges in different parts of the city, outside of the valley suburban bubble, I came to realize that my idealistic views of Los Angeles were somehow limited and biased.

Perhaps one of the staunchest and most stimulating critics of Los Angeles is the well-known public intellectual, Mike Davis. Born in 1946 and raised in El Cajon, California, he was the son of a butcher. When his father became ill, Davis had no choice but to quit high school and become a meat cutter to pay for the soaring insurance bills. He later learned to drive big rigs “which became a selling point with affluent leftist readers impressed by his blue-collar mystique.” Davis’ political views began to take shape after he was kicked out of Reed College and became a full time activist for a group called “Students for a Democratic Society.” He remained as a full time organizer at “SDS” till 1967. From 1969 to 1973, Davis “became active in Teamster United Rank and File, a predecessor of today’s Teamsters for a Democratic Union.” Davis continued his education a year later and attended UCLA to study “economics and history.”

The shaping of his political views took a string of several events. During his “hitchhiking trip” with his second wife, Jan Breidenbach, he met the “International Socialists in London, had tea with Viet Cong in Paris”. A windfall scholarship, from his late father’s union, the Amalgamated Meatcutters, enabled him to go back to Europe and study at the University of Edinburgh. There he joined the Edinburgh branch of International Marxist Group. The Marxist identity of Davis was finalized when he was introduced to some of the “New Left Review crowd”. In 1981 he moved to London and became an editor for the “New Left Review.” He ended up staying in London till 1987 and never finished his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. After returning from London, Davis supported himself by teaching at the UCLA planning school part time and working for a furniture moving company. After leaving the working class, two friends helped get him a job at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where he taught for eleven years. Davis became a popular speaker and in 1998 he received a $315,000 MacArthur Foundation Grant for “exceptionally creative individuals.” Currently Davis is a professor in the Department of Creative writing at University of California, Riverside. Davis’ claim to fame comes from some of his contentious works such as “City of Quartz”, “Ecology of Fear,” and “Prisoners of the American Dream.”

In his acclaimed “City of Quartz”, Davis depicts Los Angeles in a very pessimistic light. As an urban theorist and activist, he chronicles how different economic forces shaped the city and how Los Angeles became a city of dichotomies. Davis claims that Los Angeles has been treated as a commodity, parceled and sold as the utopian paradise. However he states that this process and the forces of globalization rendered Los Angeles into a distopic nightmare.

According to Davis, Los Angeles had a major power struggle issue. In the second chapter of his book, “Power Lines,” he chronicles how power shifts within Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century. Davis challenged the Downtown elite, Otis-Chandler dynasty, since they, “set out to sell Los Angeles – as no city had ever been sold” (City of Quartz 25). However as time progressed the power of the Downtown elite began to diminish. During the 1920’s and 30’s the Jewish population on the Westside began to earn a lot of money from the movie industry. More and more Jewish immigrants came to work in the industry, which created the “new rich” (City of Quartz 124). As power became decentralized, Davis referred to Los Angeles as the city “the city with two heads” (City of Quartz 120), which he also called a “beast with two heads” (City of Quartz 125). He then describes the shift in power during the late 1970’s as the “The New Octopus.” This “new Octopus” had three major components, land bankers, community builders, and land intensive industries.” Davis wanted to point out how the new octopus’ intentions were to “monopolize the development of the metropolitan edge” (City of Quartz 131). Overall Davis despises this boosterism of land and wants to reveal how these forces shaped the city into colliding classes of rich and poor.

What is the role of the public intellectual in the American Society?

I personally believe that public intellectuals can play a valuable role as long as they can realistic, unbiased, and eager to help their society. Within Stephen Mack’s article, “The Decline of the Public Intellectual (?),” he refers to John Donatich who claims,

“common citizens are forever childlike and must be led by a class of

experts.”

This view is problematic and I agree with Stephen Mack that it “is politically corrosive and historically dangerous.”

When it comes to the city of Los Angeles, he paints an extremely dark, dangerous picture and his dooms day scenario begs us to think that Los Angeles is a city of extreme poor and rich populations always at the brink of natural disasters, ready to crumble. As a public intellectual I believe he succeeds in creating fear and intimidation through his works. His valid points such as child poverty, diminishing education, and lack of public space, seem to drown in his manifesto like rhetoric.

I believe that the role of the public intellectual is vital as stated in Mack’s article,

“if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling.”

By keeping the “pot boiling” Davis pushed me to see some of the realities of Los Angeles. However, his approach and message creates a scenario of hatred, anger, and panic, while exaggerating some of the problems existing in Los Angeles.