People were right that Mike Davis was a prophet, but wrong about what a prophet is. There’s a debased version in which prophets are oracles, like Nostodamus and witches staring into crystal balls in bad movies, equipped with a supernatural ability to see the future the rest of us can’t. Mike had an entirely natural ability, earned through decades of reading, observing, and participating, to see the past and present with depth and breadth and in them read the consequences of what we were doing and some of the potential futures. “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang, but if you wanted to know which way it was going to blow, studying meterology helps. Remembering that we sowed the wind helps you know that we will reap the whirlwind.
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The idea he was a prophet seemed to go hand in hand with the idea that things had long been pretty calm and stable but were about to go haywire, that the apocalypse was looming. Those who considered impending chaos, violence, and destruction surprising intrusions on a static reality often had failed to noticed that they had been with us all along. The future surprised them because they had forgotten the past and too often not even scrutinized the present. A 2003 profile recounts, “As Davis cataloged the natural disruptions in Los Angeles’s history—tornadoes, mud slides, fires—he was surprised by three things: disasters occur regularly; the media covers them unequally; and they are always labeled ‘catastrophes, unusual, exceptional,’ which, in Davis’s mind, makes them the opposite of what they really are: to be expected.” To be expected if you know the history.
Mike knew apocalypses had been coming at us all along, the expanded us that included, for example, Native Californians for whom the apocalypse came in Franciscan robes and on horseback in conquistador’s armor. It’s in the title of his 2000 book Late Victorian Holocausts. And of course the other meaning of apocalypse, the original one is, revelation, and places are full of revelations for those who study them deeply enough. In this sense Dead Cities is a book of revelations about cities and the places beyond them whose destiny is inseparable from urban life, urban power, and the ravenous urban appetites for raw materials, just as urban life is never separate from the natural world as water in the overabundance of flood and shortage of drought, storms, weather, and climate chaos.
A prophet is nothing more or less than someone who can speak with a moral voice, who rises high and sees far. It’s not just a rhetorical power; it’s a capacity to see and passion to do so. Frederick Douglass declared in lines I imagine Mike might have liked,
For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed.
Dead Cities has ancestors; there’s an American prophetic tradition that includes (but is not limited to) Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Chief Seattle, Wovoka, Black Elk, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldua, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Patti Smith, Reverend William Barber II, Julian Aguon. Prophecy is the ability to move freely in imagination and language, to look across the broad swathe of time with a bird’s eye view, to draw connections across the distance, to see the patterns that can’t be seen from up close on the ground.
Ayana Mathis writes, “The prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Tanakh are myriad and complex but have in common their proximity to periods of big trouble for the ancient Israelites—the sort of trouble that alters a nation and its people forever.” Theologian Walter Bruggeman in his book The Prophetic Imagination says the task is “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness of the dominant culture around us.” That works. Mike wrote about a prophet in the theological sense in Dead Cities—Nevada’s Paiute messiah Wovoka whose visions and teachings led to the Ghost Dance religion among the devastated Indigenous survivors of genocide. “The essence of the Ghost Dance is perhaps, precisely the moral stamina to outlast this great mirage,” he writes.
Mike Davis seemed to have read everything in political science, geology, geography, environmental science, western and urban history, and it all seemed to be churning into ideas within him.
Dead Cities is the third book in an urbanist trilogy that began with City of Quartz, the 1990 book that made Mike’s reputation as a prophet—but its subtitle was Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, an argument you get to the future through a deep dive into the past. The second book, Ecology of Fear, has a passage in its opening essay that sums up some of what prophetic power consists of. He wrote in praise of the essential lushness of the Los Angeles basin, in the course of contradicting the accounts of it as a bleak and arid place, “Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.” And then a page later, he cites Father Juan Crespi writing in 1769 about the Los Angeles basin’s “admirable” landscape with its “soil… black and loamy.” It takes a kind of mental athleticism to get from Rodney King to the Spanish friars in such a compressed space, from the social to the economic to the ecological with such ease, someone who can see both the grand sweep of history across a place and hold so many details together.
Those brief passages are already violating a lot of rules of academic writing, including the “stay-in-your-lane” notions of expertise defined narrowly. The use of police brutality as ecological metaphor—I’m not sure that’s allowed either, and Mike’s prose style had bravura and pyrotechnics that are not normal in that arena either, any more than was his passionate engagement on behalf of the underdogs and outsiders. Academic writing often strives to sound dispassionate by means of disengagement; Mike floored it in the opposite direction with full-throttle sentences like this one in Dead Cities:
Las Vegas, moreover, is a major base camp for the panzer divisions of motorized toys—dune buggies, dirt bikes, speed boats, jet-skis, and the like—that each weekend make war on the fragile desert environment.
Mike seemed to have read everything in political science, geology, geography, environmental science, western and urban history, and it all seemed to be churning into ideas within him, and when he spoke it was as though he just stopped damming up the torrent of ideas coming together from his contemplation of this colossal database.
I met him in 1995 after I’d sent him my second book, Savage Dreams, about the nuclear wars that weren’t supposed to have started, the Indian wars supposedly long over, raging together in an American west most people outside the zones of impact seemed unable to see. I was just starting out and he was endlessly kind and encouraging to me, as he was to a lot of other people. I remember a man whose son had died by suicide (who he’d called regularly for years to support), a prisoner to whom he was a faithful correspondent, and wonder if I was just another stray lamb he was shepherding. We exchanged letters and then emails, hundreds of them, over the next decade, and hung out in person from time to time in those years and then, through no ill-will, didn’t keep up the connection. But it meant a lot to me at a crucial time in my life as a writer and westerner.
The essays in Dead Cities are ferocious. Some of them feel very much of their time—but that time haunts us and has things to teach us as a new generation of right-wing pundits pushes fear of crime and immigrants and lobbies for more policing and fewer civil rights. Ferocious but far from hopeless.
Mike was born in 1946 in Fontana, east of LA. Octavia Butler was born a year later in nearby Pasadena, and her visionary science fiction novels—notably Parable of the Sower—spring from a world that has a lot in common with the one described in Mike’s books. She saw harshness, trouble, racism, environmental destruction, but she too wasn’t going to surrender. She wrote in an essay, “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” That is, it assumes we still have some choices to make about what kind of a future we will have. A prophet in the glib sense tells us what will happen as though it’s inevitable, encouraging passivity. A warning tells us that there’s still time to decide what will happen, that we are shaping the present in the future. Warnings call for action.
Mike himself affirmed hope toward the end of his life when he told an interviewer:
This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle.
Here in Dead Cities are the catastrophes, the tools, the movements, and the courage.
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From the introduction to Dead Cities, available now from Haymarket.
