A writer with passion for all that's left

Despite his grim writings, civil rights activist and urban chronicler Mike Davis is optimistic, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

From his perch in the Skytower, Los Angeles polemicist Mike Davis points out that you can choose the way in which you look at a place.

There's a lot of generic stuff down there, he says, surveying the little flattened city. Auckland, San Diego, Sydney, Vancouver ... the worldwide trend is to engulf us all with sameness, to make commodities of history and authenticity. One could easily choose to see Auckland in this way, as simply one of a type.

But it's the particulars of a city that make it interesting, Davis says. He has written two rather famous books about his own city, City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, which have earned him various monikers, none of which he likes.

He's been called a prophet for his foreshadowing of the 1992 LA riots, something he insists anyone could have seen; an apocalyptic visionary, a measure of his unsuccess, he wryly remarks, as his work critiques others' apocalyptic visions, which he analyses as veiled racism; and urban theorist. Again, this is not how he sees himself.

Davis makes no claim for his books as allegories or metaphors for cities in general. He quotes one of his all-time favourite sources, Karl Marx, who said, more or less, that to understand something you have to look at all its parts.

And so, looking now at Auckland, what Davis sees with his sharp, attuned eyes skimming over the Queen St McDonald's sign to the volcanic cones beyond, is the strong Maori imprint on the hillsides, an indigenous marker stronger than he's seen in any American city.

"This is still a Maori city in many ways," he says. "My approach, if I were a New Zealander writing about Auckland, would be to approach the city by what is still the most singular thing about it, rather than what is most generic and off-the-shelf."

Not liking, or even believing in, the generalising implications of the term urban theorist, Davis prefers to think of himself as a kind of anatomist of Los Angeles, who leaves the theorising to others. This is probably an overly modest position, but it points up something immediately noticeable about Davis: he looks like one thing but turns out to be another.

On the surface, he's as much a part of the American academic establishment as, say, the French philosopher Baudrillard, who now teaches at the University of California and also writes about Los Angeles.

But Davis has been very rude about Baudrillard and his ilk, the post-modernists whose thinking, he says, has defoliated the humanities.

These philosophers, he says, turn human anguish into intellectual fun. Forget pure theory, Davis advises. What about the grim human reality?

Davis is highly qualified, has studied and taught at universities in several countries, taught urban theory for several years at the Southern California Institute of Architecture - "I teach it in order to discredit it, or deconstruct it," he says - was a fellow of the Getty Institute, and now teaches at the State University of New York. He holds a MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as a genius award, giving him $US60,000 ($141,500) a year for five years, with no strings attached.

"I'm utterly and completely opposed to this kind of thing," he says. "Needless to say I didn't turn it down."

But despite the figurative robes of academia, Davis is a walking, talking, picketing social activist on issues such as workers' rights, police violence and anything else that pertains in particular to the struggle of immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Often arrested and no stranger to the the Los Angeles Police Department's overnight cells, he's a blue-collar anglo who believes his city's future lies with its immigrant Latino population. He is an oxymoron: a Los Angeles socialist.

He grew up in the civil rights movement, cut his teeth in the Teamsters Union, has belonged to the Communist Party but recently joined Left Turn (a small group working within the larger anti-globalisation movement).

Briefly, proudly, he even belonged to the greatest group in American industrial history, the Industrial Workers of the World, or "the Wobblies." When his end comes he has instructed his daughter that he is to be buried with his little red membership card.

Such passion for the left is unusual in Western society these days, where it's fashionable to deride left-wing ideology as out of date and out of touch. The Los Angeles Times labelled Davis an unrepentant Marxist (in an article that set out to fact-check his anti-establishment Ecology of Fear, but found only a few minor errors in Davis' extraordinarily broad sweep), rather as if it was a sin to hold such beliefs.

Yet the irony is that, for a man whose books are such catalogues of human error, greed and inevitable social and environmental catastrophe, Davis maintains an almost incredible optimism that things will eventually work out all right. That optimism was at the heart of his first, epiphanic political experience, and the sense of it has never left him.

He was born in Fontana, a gritty working-class town 97km east of San Diego, into a racist, segregated society. Despite his father's trade unionism and his parents' exceptional attitudes towards race (born of a Protestant anti-slavery ethic), Davis was on the way to growing up a red-white-and-blue conservative when he underwent an experience that changed his life totally, like a religious conversion.

In 1963 he attended a Congress of Racial Equality picket in San Diego and was transformed by the righteous bravery of the picketers in the face of the jeering hatred of passers-by. He joined the civil rights movement fulltime, working for Students for a Democratic Society, even though he was neither a student nor middle-class - he also worked with his father as a meatcutter.

Then, after the SDS sent him to Los Angeles in 1965 as an organiser in the anti-war movement, he became a truck driver, joining the militant Teamsters Union and the Southern California branch of the Communist Party.

The lowest in seniority in his trucking company, he drove a different route every day, and soon knew Southern California better than just about anyone, knowledge that stood him in good stead when he began his much later career as chronicler of Los Angeles.

It wasn't until he was 30 that he took a Teamsters scholarship to go to university. What was to be a one-year diversion became a new career involving several years at universities in Thatcher's Britain, where he deliberately converted his homesickness into a new perspective on Southern California.

The fruits of that perspective are City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, with something to come on the forces of resistance and LA's alternative futures.

He's wondering, though, if he's reaching the limits of what he has a right to write about. The most important writing about LA will come from a different place, the children of the new immigrants, he says.

He's doing his bit there, too, as commissioning editor for Verso, the imprint of the New Left Review, the largest Marxist publication in the United States. The biggest duck in a small pond, he says drily. So far, it has published at least 20 Los Angeles immigrant authors.

It's from the civil rights movement that he traces his unflaggingly cheerful perspective on the prospects for social change.

"Anyone from my generation who had my experience can't be cynical or pessimistic without selling their soul," he says. "If you'd seen the miracles that happened in the United States in the 60s, what ordinary black southerners were able to do, and what the anti-war movement was able to accomplish, you could never be pessimistic.

"Every fixed and eternal thing in the world can be turned upside down. It's all to do with how you see things."

* Mike Davis is a participant in the Auckland Writers' Festival today and tomorrow. For session times see www.nzherald.co.nz/arts

Auckland Writers festival