Mike Davis: 1946-2022 RIP

 ~~  recommended by dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista:

Mike Davis was one of the Great Radical Leftists produced by American Society in the Twentieth Century.  Though some of you may already know this, I just became aware of his passing this morning; though he died a few days ago, on Tuesday, Oct 25, 2022.  Below are copies of his obituary from Jacobin, The Nation, The New York TImes, and Slate . Davis wrote numerous books and articles, he was published frequently in august journal of the Left, The New Left Review, among many other Leftist Journals.  We should mourn his passing. but always hold him up as an inspiration; just like other Leftist Stalwarts, ranging from Joe Hill to Mao to Glen Ford (editor and founding member of The Black Agenda Report, among many other accomplishments, who passed away in late July of 2021).

I will note here that even Davis underestimated the danger from the far right, and the shift from bourgeois electoral politics to authoritarian methods in the U.S.  It is worth it to read his fine article, in which he analyzed the election results from the 2012 U.S. election, in New Left Review in 2013, “The Last White Election?”, (See, The Last White Election?”, Mike Davis, New Left Review, V. 79, Jan Feb 2012, at                                                                                                                        < https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii79/articles/mike-davis-the-last-white-election >).  Of course that was nearly 10 years ago when figures, who now seem even quaint, like Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, John Boehner, and then House Speaker Newt Gingrich were struggling over control of the right-wing Republican Base; as personified by reactionary grass roots organizations such as FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots.  Davis got it right in that, if not the 2012 election then certainly the 2016 election was indeed the “The Last White Election”, at least one in which the votes were actually counted.  He carefully noted the rise in power in what are now called The Red States.  He hit the general trend right on the head where he wrote in the final paragraph that: “Inured since Reagan to routine thunder and lightning from the Republican hinterlands, the globalized American ruling class has failed to grasp the Weimarian nature of the Tea Party politics.”  (Emphasis added)  Of course that very “Weimarian nature” has been greatly amplified in our current crop of fascist and reactionary political forces.

The Obituaries

Mike Davis’s Many Contributions to Building a Better World Will Live On

Barry Eidlin, Oct 29, 2022, Jacobin, 1,189 words, at                                     <https://jacobin.com/2022/10/mike-davis-writing-labor-influence-socialists>

Our mentors are dying.

At one level, this is a banal statement — an inevitable consequence of the forward march of time. But for those of us on the Left, there are historical and political factors that give it additional weight.

One consequence of the past several decades of defeat and demoralization for the Left has been a lack of generational replacement of leftist leadership and mentorship. Not only have there been fewer people available to serve as potential new leaders and mentors, but those of us who came of age politically between the 1980s and 2000s have had fewer and smaller movements upon which we could cut our teeth and develop as leaders and mentors ourselves.

As a result, it has fallen to veterans of the movements of the 1960s and ’70s to carry much of the weight of keeping the Left alive through difficult decades. That means that, as these veterans inevitably pass from the stage, the loss is that much more painful, their absence that much more deeply felt.

While we can appreciate this sociological observation about generational replacement at an intellectual level, it doesn’t change the fact that each individual death still feels like a gut punch. Knowing the history and sociology does little to soften the blow.

That is certainly the case when speaking of a figure of the caliber of Mike Davis, who died on October 25 at age seventy-six. We all knew this moment was coming after learning that he shifted to palliative care for his cancer a few months ago. But that didn’t prepare us for living in a world deprived of his prolific and penetrating insights.

Reading the tributes and remembrances that have flowed in over the past few days, it is hard not to be awed by the scale and scope of his reach. There is of course his immense body of writing, in which he managed to speak with authority, clarity, and insight on a dizzyingly vast array of matters without slipping into dilettantism.

From droughts and pandemics to urban development and resistance to labor history and politics, socialist strategy, and so much more, few others combined his careful research, clear-eyed analysis, political commitment, and eerie clairvoyance, all wrapped in dense yet riveting prose.

It won him a devoted readership across wide swaths of the US and global left, while also commanding respect in some of the halls of academia and the more mainstream public sphere. Few other thinkers occupy such a central place in graduate seminar syllabi and socialist reading groups while also being influential enough to attract the attention of the MacArthur Foundation and the ire of real-estate developers, along with attempts at exposés from the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Economist, among others. (The Los Angeles Times, for its part, shifted to more appreciative profiles of Davis later on).

On its own, Davis’s writing would be more than enough to be remembered as a giant of the Left. But he combined this with a lifetime of activism, organizing, and engagement, from his early years organizing with Students for a Democratic Society to participating in wildcat strikes as a truck driver and meatpacker to mentoring new generations of socialists in recent years. He was also generous as an academic mentor, taking the time to read, comment, and inquire about the work of graduate students and junior scholars just finding their way. Again, I am hard pressed to think of others who combined these qualities to the degree that Davis did.

Unfortunately, I cannot add any personal remembrances of Davis to this piece, as I never had the good fortune of meeting him myself, though I have long been in his orbit. I was first exposed to him as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, where politics professor Chris Howell kept a copy of Prisoners of the American Dream on reserve at the library for his students. Later, when I went to work for Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Davis’s writings on labor and the Left became a critical part of my political education, which I read alongside those of Kim Moody, Mike Parker, Jane Slaughter, Bob Brenner, and others.

When I made the transition from labor organizer to labor scholar, Davis stayed with me. I assigned his work in my social movements class and my seminar on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.” This ensured that I would have the privilege of revisiting and reengaging with his writing year after year. I never ceased to be amazed at the new insights I gleaned from each additional rereading and new ideas that would come to me after sitting with his work.

It reinforced for me not just how insightful Davis was as a thinker but how generative he was. He provided a jumping-off point for countless other scholars to take our own deep dives — even if we might never get as deep as he did.

Indeed, as I posted on social media back in 2018, as I was preparing to teach “Why the US Working Class is Different” in my seminar, “I’m amazed at how [Davis] can casually toss off ideas for about five dissertations in a single paragraph.”

Many of my students had similar reactions to his work, consistently mentioning it as a highlight of the course. Likewise, for me, teaching his work has been a highlight of my life as a professor.

I did come very close to meeting Davis this past September. I had wanted to interview him about his time doing rank-and-file organizing as a Teamster and meatpacker in the 1970s for a book I’m working on with Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht about the Left’s “turn to industry” in that period, when members of socialist organizations took jobs in factories for organizing purposes. It’s a part of Davis’s life that was often mentioned in various profiles but rarely explored.

After I learned of his shift to palliative care, I figured that I had missed my opportunity, but seeing several profiles of him based on lengthy interviews published in the following months made me think that I might still have a chance. So I emailed him and was surprised to receive a reply almost immediately. He was happy to talk but could likely only handle an hour-long interview. We made plans for me to travel down to San Diego the following week, with the caveat that I should check with him the day before.

As scheduled, I wrote him the day before and received a reply: “I had a visit from my end-of-life physician this morning and she bluntly told me cancel all interviews or visits from friends. Apologies.”

While we had to cancel the visit, I was at least able to share with him how much his work influenced my own, how much my students get from reading him, and to thank him for his contributions toward building a better world.

Those contributions may now have come to an end, but they will live on in every student and organizer whose world will make a little more sense, and whose path to changing it will be a little clearer, thanks to Mike Davis.

Mike Davis: 1946–2022

A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s memory.

By Jon Wiener, The Nation,  October 25, 2022,   1,022 words                                                 at  < https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-obituary/ >

Mike Davis, author and activist, radical hero and family man, died October 25 after a long struggle with esophageal cancer; he was 76. He’s best known for his 1990 book about Los Angeles, City of Quartz. Marshall Berman, reviewing it for The Nation, said it combined “the radical citizen who wants to grasp the totality of his city’s life, and the urban guerrilla aching to see the whole damned thing blow.”

And the whole thing did blow, two years after the book was published. When the Rodney King riots broke out in LA in 1992, frightened white people rushed home, locked the doors, and turned on the TV news. Mike, however, was driving in the opposite direction, with his old friend Ron Schneck at his side. They parked, got out, and started talking with the people in the streets about what was going on. Then he went home and wrote about it.

Mike was a 1960s person, but he didn’t come from a liberal or left background. His father was a meat cutter and a conservative, and as a young patriot, Mike briefly joined the Devil Pups—the Marine Corps’ version of the Boy Scouts. His life was changed by the civil rights movement. In 1962, when he was a junior in high school, a Black activist married to his cousin took Mike to a protest organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), picketing an all-white Bank of America branch in San Diego. Soon he was volunteering in the CORE office there. He started college at Reed, but left to go to work for SDS.

As an SDS organizer in the late ’60s, Mike was part of the largest mass arrest in the history of 1960s protest—at “Valley State,” now California State University–Northridge, in 1969, when 286 were arrested after a peaceful sit-down of 3,000 students protesting the school administration banning all demonstrations, rallies, and meetings. “What I remember most vividly about the arrests,” he said 45 years later, “was the ride to jail in a police bus. The girls started singing, ‘Hey Jude, don’t be afraid.’ I fell in love with all of them.”

City of Quartz was his masterpiece. Published in 1990, it opens with a description of a visit to the ruins of the socialist city of Llano del Rio, founded in 1914 in the desert north of LA. There, on May Day 1990, he finds two twentysomething building laborers from El Salvador camped out, hoping for work in nearby Palmdale. “When I observed that they were settled in the ruins of a ciudad socialista, one of them asked whether the ‘rich people had come with planes and bombed them out.’” They asked what he was doing out there, and what he thought of Los Angeles. “I tried to explain that I had just written a book…” And then you turn the page, to chapter one, the unforgettable “Sunshine and Noir.”

After City of Quartz, everybody wanted Mike. Adam Shatz wrote in 1997 about how

phoning Mike Davis is a good way of getting acquainted with his answering machine.… Sitting on his porch on a warm evening, I understood why: The phone rang incessantly, and Davis never once rose from his chair. The calls last from morning to midnight. It might be the photographer Richard Avedon or the architect I.M. Pei with a request for one of Davis’s legendary tours of L.A.… It might also be a Danish curator mounting an exhibit on the postmodern city, an organizer with the hotel workers’ union, a student at UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Center, or (very likely) a Hollywood screenwriter.

He turned down most invitations to speak. I remember his daughter Roisin telling him in 2014, “Dad, you really should reply to that invitation from the president of Argentina,” and Mike saying, “If I’m not replying to the pope, I’m not replying to her.” (He had been invited to the Vatican after the publication of Planet of Slums.)

But he accepted some. At UC Irvine, where we were colleagues in the history department for most of a decade, I gave a lecture in his course (“Intro to 20th-Century US History”) to cover for him the day he was speaking at an anarchist convention in Palermo.

Mike hated being called “a prophet of doom.” Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door. But when he wrote about climate change or viral pandemics, he was not offering a “prophecy”; he was reporting on the latest research. After Covid hit, we did several Nation podcast segments about it; he told me at one point “I’ve been staying up late reading virology textbooks.”

He said he wrote about the things that scared him the most. Ecology of Fear (1998) dealt with earthquakes, forest fires, floods and century-long droughts. One chapter, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” became a classic, arguing that fire budgets would be better spent protecting crowded inner-city neighborhoods rather than mega-mansions built in remote hillside fire areas. That provoked its own firestorm. His critics, led by a Malibu realtor, couldn’t refute his argument, so they went after his footnotes—and both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times ran stories about the “controversy.” But the controversy faded and the argument became stronger. “During fire season,” LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote in 2018, when fires circled LA and the sky was full of smoke for weeks, “I always think about…‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.’”

Unlike the rest of the New Left, Mike didn’t reject the old left—his mentor in the 1960s and ’70s was the renegade CP leader in Southern California, Dorothy Healey. Mike loved arguing with her. When Dorothy died in 2006, Mike wrote in The Nation that she represented “the left’s ‘greatest generation’—those tough-as-nails children of Ellis Island who built the CIO, fought Jim Crow in Manhattan and Alabama, and buried their friends in the Spanish earth.” Their deaths, he said, were “an inestimable, heart-wrenching loss.” Now we feel the same about his.

Mike Davis, Who Wrote of Los Angeles and Catastrophe, Is Dead at 76.

Neil Genzlinger        Oct. 27, 2022      The New York Times    1,573 words

In ''City of Quartz'' and other books, he predicted trouble ahead. Events often proved him right.

Mike Davis, an urban theorist and historian who in stark, sometimes prescient books wrote of catastrophes faced by and awaiting humankind, and especially Los Angeles, died on Tuesday at his home in San Diego. He was 76.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter and literary agent Róisín Davis said.

Mr. Davis, an unabashed leftist who once organized antiwar rallies for Students for a Democratic Society and was arrested at several protests, garnered considerable attention with his second book, ''City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles'' (1990), in which he wrote that Los Angeles ''has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.''

That book examined the mythologies that had evolved about Los Angeles and Southern California, thanks to noir movies, surf culture and Hollywood, and contrasted those images with the harsh realities faced by thousands of Angelenos, especially members of minority groups.

''What we're going to find out in short order is that for tens of thousands of people, there's only one rung of the ladder,'' Mr. Davis told The Los Angeles Times in December 1990, just after the book's publication. ''There's no place to climb up.''

That comment, and the book, seemed particularly prophetic a little more than a year later, in April 1992, when disastrous rioting swept South Los Angeles after a jury did not convict four police officers who had been charged with assault in the beating of Rodney G. King, which had been captured on videotape.

Mr. Davis acquired a reputation as a seer, though in the preface to a 2006 reissue of that book he resisted that characterization.

''If there were premonitions of 1992 in 'City of Quartz,''' he wrote, ''they were simply reflected anxieties visible on every graffiti-covered wall or, for that matter, every lawn sprouting a little 'Armed Response' sign,'' a reference to the home security warning placards that become ubiquitous on the lawns of the affluent in the 1980s.

Mr. Davis turned to fires and other natural disasters in ''Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster'' (1998), which included a particularly provocative chapter titled ''The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.'' That book too came to be seen as prophetic, and Mr. Davis found himself being interviewed every time devastating fires came through the area. Though nature delivered the wrath, he wrote, hubris and greed deserved the blame.

''Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm's way,'' he said in the opening chapter. ''For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic. As a result, 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.''

Economics was a constant undercurrent for Mr. Davis. The fires that he warned about, he noted in a 2018 interview with the magazine Jacobin, not only were destructive, they also increased inequity.

''The rebuilding just produces bigger, more expensive homes,'' he said, ''while the trailer parks and the homes of people who didn't have adequate fire insurance through wealth are displaced.''

His 2005 book, ''The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu,'' talked about the likelihood of pandemics. Matt Steinglass, reviewing it in The New York Times, called it a ''brilliant, concise jeremiad.'' Among other things, Mr. Davis wrote in that book that pandemics would affect low-income people disproportionately, an assessment borne out years later by the Covid-19 crisis.

Detractors questioned the accuracy of some of Mr. Davis's assertions and the hyperbole of his prose. That criticism seemed to peak after he won a $315,000 MacArthur ''genius'' grant in 1998.

''A lot of writers are tired of Mike Davis being rewarded again and again, culminating in the MacArthur fellowship, for telling the world what a terrible place L.A. is,'' Kevin Starr, California's state librarian, told The Los Angeles Times in 1999.

Supporters said the critics were resentful that his books, unlike theirs, made best-seller lists, and that he had achieved success without a Ph.D. Mr. Davis said his political views were also a factor.

''I understand having acquired a public stature and being someone with unpopular ideas that I'm going to get attacked -- being a socialist in America today, you better have a thick skin,'' he told The Los Angeles Times. ''There is a kind of intolerance in the city for people who say things that went wrong haven't been fixed.''

Michael Ryan Davis was born on March 10, 1946, in Fontana, Calif., about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, to Dwight and Mary (Ryan) Davis. He spent his early years in Fontana before his family moved to the San Diego area.

His father was active in the meat cutters union, and the struggles Dwight Davis experienced made a strong impression on his son, who described his father as a patriotic man who had faith in the inevitability of human progress.

''By the end of his life, he'd seen his union destroyed and his pension plan taken away,'' Mr. Davis said in 1998. ''It's hard to see your parents lose their beliefs.''

Also formative was an experience he had at 16: A cousin took him to a civil rights rally in San Diego organized by the Congress of Racial Equality.

''The courage and moral beauty of what these ordinary human beings were fighting for struck me,'' he said, ''and I have never forgotten it.''

At about the same time, he became a meat cutter himself for two years when his father became ill. He also began working for Students for a Democratic Society, helping to organize antiwar rallies.

In his 20s he joined the Teamsters union and drove a truck for five years. His routes took him all over Southern California, acquainting him with its geography and its varied communities, knowledge that would underpin his writing.

He didn't start on his path to becoming a scholar until relatively late: At 28 he enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, aided by a scholarship from the meat cutters union. He eventually earned a bachelor's degree in economic history there, and also studied in Britain. After graduating he lived in Britain for several years, serving as managing editor of New Left Review, a Marxist journal. In 1986 he returned to California to teach at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica.

That same year his first book, ''Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class,'' was published. The formidable title was off-putting, and so was the text. John Gabree, in a review in Newsday, said that Mr. Davis ''writes in the sometimes impenetrable style of a social scientist.''

He adopted a more reader-friendly approach in ''City of Quartz'' and his later books, many of which made best-seller lists. They included ''Dead Cities, and Other Tales'' (2002), ''Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class'' (2006) and, most recently, ''Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties'' (2020), written with Jon Wiener. Among Mr. Davis's admirers is Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former opinion writer for The New York Times.

''The best writers burrow themselves in the back of your eyeballs and color everything you see,'' Mr. Kang wrote in The Times in June after Mr. Davis said he was stopping cancer treatments. ''Davis is that for me -- my California is the California he excavated through his reporting, his scholarship, his activism and his unflappable moral integrity.''

Mr. Davis's wife, Alessandra Moctezuma, survives him. Four previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Róisín -- from his third marriage, to Brigid Loughran -- he is also survived by a son, Jack Spalding Davis, from his fourth marriage, to Sophie Spalding; and a daughter, Cassandra Davis, and a son, James Connolly Davis, both from his current marriage; and a sister, Janna Lazelle-Lake.

In an interview with The New Yorker in 2020, Mr. Davis was asked if he thought Los Angeles might experience another wave of violence.

''The socioeconomic conditions that produced the '92 riots are still with us,'' he said. ''The Rodney King beating and police detonated it, but the riots came in the midst of a recession and revealed a city in which hundreds of thousands of people were living day by day, with no reserves.''

Yet he wasn't all pessimist all the time.

''This seems an age of catastrophe,'' he said, ''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.''

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

I Still Don’t Understand How Mike Davis Could Write Like That

A Marxist whose books did it all.

By Jack Hamilton   Oct 26, 2022,  Slate, 1,471 words, at                                                    <https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/mike-davis-obituary-books-city-of-quartz.html >

I have never lived in Los Angeles, but I have probably spent more time thinking about L.A. than any other city that I haven’t resided in. This is partly the fault of Hollywood, of Ice Cube and The White Album, of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Party Down, of the despised Lakers, but it’s mostly the fault of Mike Davis. Davis, the historian and urban theorist who died on Tuesday, was probably my favorite writer about cities that I have ever read. He didn’t only write about L.A., not by a long shot, but L.A. was his Beatrice, his Dark Lady. Every time I visit Los Angeles Davis’ work floods through my brain, often down to specific words, phrases, and sentences.

Davis’ path to becoming one of the most renowned writers and thinkers of his generation was anything but conventional, and for a more detailed account I strongly recommend this wonderful interview that he gave in 2020 to the great L.A. journalist Jeff Weiss. A very abridged version: Born and raised in southern California, Davis briefly dropped out of high school to work in a slaughterhouse. After spending most of his twenties working as an organizer for groups like the Congress for Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society, he entered UCLA as a 28-year-old freshman. He tried unsuccessfully to get a Ph.D. in history from the same university but was thwarted when the department rejected his dissertation, an early draft of what would become his landmark book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. (As someone who sits on Ph.D. committees with some regularity, this is beyond funny.)

Davis’ first book, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, came out in 1986, but it was his second, City of Quartz, published in 1990, that would make his reputation. City of Quartz became a sensation and established Davis as a leading public intellectual, particularly in the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. Riots, when, in Weiss’ words, “his tome became everyone’s favorite Rosetta Stone for translating the civic unrest.” If Davis never wrote another book after City of Quartz he would still be a legend; he of course wrote many, many more, including 1998’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, 2001’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, 2006’s Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class, and, most recently, 2020’s Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, which he co-wrote with journalist and historian Jon Wiener.*

City of Quartz was the first book of Davis’ that I ever read, early in graduate school, and it was a staggering experience. The book is a masterpiece, and a nearly indescribable one. It’s a history book that’s also a work of social and cultural criticism that’s also a work of urban theory, all while carrying the righteous heft and energy of a moral polemic. As a writer, there are books that you wish you’d written and books that you hope to someday be good enough to write, and then there are books that just make you awed and grateful that someone this smart is walking (or, now, has walked) the earth. City of Quartz belongs to the last category.

It’s in City of Quartz that Davis articulated one of his most memorable dialectics, in an opening chapter entitled “Sunshine or Noir?” It is this tension which Davis saw as the central push-and-pull of Los Angeles, as the city has been imagined, represented, and lived. “Sunshine” is the boosterish impulse to frame the city as a white Anglo-Saxon paradise, all palm trees and pristine coast and limitless potential for success, wealth, and glamor. “Noir” is, effectively, the rejection and critique of this tendency; the artists and thinkers that Davis categorized as noirs believed that what is superficially promised by the sunshine proponents in fact is just a veneer over vicious exploitation, injustice, and inequality. Think of the degraded but innocent Frank on death row, at the end of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, or the monstrous Noah Cross getting away with all of it at the end of the 1974 neo-Noir Chinatown. The noirs are often the heroes of Davis’ work, forging terrible beauty from conditions of depravity.

Davis was a Marxist, and his work pulses with the most capacious and humanistic possibilities of that tradition. Marxist historians and critics are sometimes caricatured as being myopically blinkered in their focuses of concern, but in Davis’ case nothing could be further from the truth. Davis was interested in everything: architecture, movies, literature, music, politics, nature, technology, all of which he viewed as arenas for struggles over social power. What allowed Davis to yoke all these subjects (and so many others) together was his extraordinary abilities as a synthetic and idiosyncratic thinker, and also—I can’t emphasize this enough—his intoxicating gifts as a stylist. His writing surges off the page irresistibly, exciting and compelling in equal measure. Ecology of Fear starts as an environmental history of Los Angeles and, more than 400 pages later, ends with a chapter on science fiction that closes thusly:

In this fashion, the Rodney King riot, although composed of tens of thousands of individual acts of anger and desperation, was perceived from orbit as a unitary geophysical phenomenon…. Indeed, had alien voyeurs really been watching the earth from a secret observatory on the moon or suburbs on Mars, they would have been mesmerized by Los Angeles’ extraordinary combustibility. No other urban area on the planet so frequently produces large “thermal anomalies.” Seen from space, the city that once hallucinated itself as an endless future without natural limits or social constraints now dazzles observers with the eerie beauty of an erupting volcano.

This is a magnificent passage: whip-smart, transportingly evocative, even darkly funny. I quote it at length because, well, how can you not. But Davis also had a brilliance for economy, pithy and erudite phrasing that somehow managed to convey everything you need to know about a subject. “Noir,” wrote Davis, “was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent.” Or, one of my favorite Davis-isms, from a chapter in Ecology of Fear entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” (Davis wasn’t much for soft-pedaling), a description of the glamorous coastal city as a place “where hyperbole meets the surf.” Marvel for a moment at just how perfectly chosen the word “surf” is, and all that it conjures.

The deep environmental concerns of so much of Davis’ work are just one aspect of what made him such an inspirational, even prophetic figure to a 21st-century generation of leftists. He was a veteran of the Sixties New Left who never made the centrist (or rightist) turn of some of his former comrades, nor did he stubbornly cling to that movement’s shibboleths. His thinking was ever-evolving and constantly responsive to the world around him. In 2005 he published The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, in which he warned that the conditions of global capitalism were making the world increasingly vulnerable to a devastating pandemic; earlier this year he published a revised edition to address COVID-19, now fittingly re-titled The Monster Enters. He was a lodestone for a younger generation of left intellectuals and activists, and a generous one at that, as evidenced by the recent outpouring of tributes in the wake of his illness and death.

I am a professor of American Studies, and it recently dawned on me that I have assigned Mike Davis’ work in nearly every American Studies class that I’ve ever taught, even though I don’t teach classes on Los Angeles, or even (really) on urban history. Davis’ brilliance was for rendering L.A. into a site of unique specificity and character that doubled as a sort of bleeding-edge metonym for America itself. I’m not sure that there’s a better dialectical formulation for how Americans think about themselves than Sunshine and Noir; we are a nation that’s still awash in ideas about Manifest Destiny, limitless opportunity and a near-divine sense of exceptionalism, but that has also produced a long tradition of critique of those ideas that, I would argue, is just as central to something like American identity.

But I also teach Davis because he’s a model of how I want my students to learn and think and write. He was someone who constantly looked at where he was, at the world around him in both its most immediate and most distant capacities, and strived to see it more completely, in all its beauty and awfulness. He thought and wrote so as to leave that world a better place, and he was better at it than just about anyone.