In his , much-discussed item on the Los Angeles fires , at The Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a tale basis. In his , book , Ecology of Concern, Woodhouse information, Davis “argued that the place between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains just never should have been developed. These rocks will lose, and the homes we erect upon them are only so much ignoble, no matter what precautions we take to stop it. Malibu and the Palisades, the area of painful life. That’s why so many rich and famous people , lived there: because it was so essentially wretched and risky.
Mike Davis was whole of sh-t for 30 years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened individuals who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the” Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.
Furthermore, Sierra Madre has animals. The Los Angeles cities are a place of horror and hardship, because they up into the hills, where blood-clawed wild creatures go and stem and murder. Areas where life is mainly grim and macabre, genetics. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the places around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A mountain cat again devoured a poodle in Bradbury as companions squirmed in fear.
These are current , real property listings , in Bradbury, a gated mountain community incorporated as an independent area in the San Gabriel Valley with a community of about 900 individuals:
How then may ye endure for horror, oh pilgrim, to survive so amid for blood and death? How cruelly dost thy exist on this planet?
Notably, in 1999, the , Los Angeles Times, which used to be a paper, ran a , long story , examining Mike Davis and his perception of Southern California. It’s full of words like this:
- ” Los Angeles ‘ most provocative cultural critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in ‘ Ecology of Anxiety,’ his latest, grimly themed operate on the metropolitan area he claims to love”.
- More than a third of the time, his work had verifiable issues, according to his statement.
- ” Davis concedes the problem”.
- ” Davis does not say where he got this piece of information”.
- ” ‘ I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,’ Davis said”.
- ” Some of Davis ‘ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote”.
- ” Davis attributes the false phrase to a mix-up”.
- Next, he takes visitors on a limited fantasy flight.
- According to an analysis of the Malibu Times content,” Davis made up the parts about the diamonds, the hair coloring, the kayakers ‘ activities, the proof of their cruel classism, and the nationality of their girls.”
- ” Davis is playfully obstinate”.
- ” Davis even merges fact and literary fiction, without confirmation, while arguing that Pomona, like another older, inner suburbs, is dying”.
And so on.
The , Times , concluded that Davis could be read as” a polemicist, who makes cogent, sharp claims on large styles”, but not as” a writer who is expected to be reliable, yet on information”.
Los Angeles has disasters, yes. It burns, and we have earthquakes. Your cats will eat you, coyotes. Your hot tub will absorb water from bears.
But , ease , is the actual point of the place, an argument Davis advanced while he made up a bunch of dumb sh-t about the agony and the horror. Comfort is our rock. Yes, people begin to wear wool hats, gloves, and parkas when the temperature drops into the 50s. The current weather is a bit colder than we’re used to for early January, but we’re enduring.
If you live in Los Angeles for 30 years, or about 10, 957 days, depending on how many leap years you pass, you’ll have about 10, 950 days of extremely comfortable days and a few days when you’re on the roof with a garden hose, watching the embers, or surfing the shifting foundation of your home as the tectonic plates grind.
My wife had a New York childhood and says that , hell no , she’s not going to ever again live where it snows, she moved to Los Angeles after college FOR A REASON, thank you very much. We’ve all lived in this place of absurd comfort, which occasionally goes wrong because we manage the small risks by using crazy tactics like having strong fire departments and clearing the flammable brush, which have all failed to be addressed.
In place of the flammable creosote-coated wooden poles that are currently igniting the Palisades fire, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power tried to install fire-resistant steel poles in their place, but environmental activists halted the effort.
A significant portion of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s fleet, which is unusable and sitting unattended in a city repair yard, has been laid off in order to save money for social justice programs.  , We knew this before the fires:
- Forty fire engines are no longer in use as a result of the city’s destruction.
- Ohhh, the , landscape , of ruin!
The point to make about the landscape is not that it is inherently likely to burn; rather, we stopped preparing and jumped into the comfort of the place on a raft made of luxuries.
I know the places that have burned. I’ve driven and walked the streets that are no longer. I’ve watched the building’s foundations burn, restaurants we visited, and stores we visited. My favorite memory of Pacific Palisades, a sort of small town that lived as an island of comfort in a declining city, Mayberry RFD for the well-to-do, was the time I stood behind a middle-aged woman at Noah’s Bagels who was interrogating the staff about each bagel, at great length, as the line spooled out behind her:” Now, tell me about the , blueberry , bagel …”. She wanted a deep dive on ingredients, grams of carbohydrates, grams of protein, sugar content, baking , technique. The staff pulled out a binder to , consult , on the matter. I eventually gave up and looked for breakfast elsewhere on the block. It’s the place where extremely comfortable people pursue what they want, oblivious to surroundings.
This is the kernel Mike Davis got right, and it’s the reason the place has failed.  , Everywhere , burns or shakes or freezes or blows down. The susceptibility to natural disasters isn’t the least bit a distinctive feature of Los Angeles — zero, nada, none, not at all. It’s the universal human condition, mitigated by action. Or not mitigated by action.
The fault isn’t in the land. Don’t look for it there.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack,” Tell Me How This Ends”.
Chris Bray has a PhD in history from the University of California Los Angeles and served as an infantry sergeant in the United States Army. He is the author of” Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond”, published last year by W. W. Norton.
