JG Ballard on Mike Davis's vivid indictment of the social and environmental chaos enveloping urban America, Dead Cities
Saturday February 22, 2003 The Guardian
Buy Dead Cities on Amazon. co.uk
Dead Cities
by Mike Davis
432pp, The New Press, £16.95
Is the era of American influence drawing to a close, despite the nation's vast military and economic power? Reading Dead Cities, one feels that a moral blow was struck at the United States on September 11, a deep thrust to its dream of itself. Still trapped in the 20th century, when carrier fleets and nuclear weapons cowed entire hemispheres, America now seems to be lashing out in desperation, threatening Iraq, North Korea and perhaps in due course, old Europe. To appease the gods of the smart bomb, gorge yourself on a Big Mac and a Schwarzenegger video...
If America is over, the prose laureate of its decline is Mike Davis. His apocalyptic take on the country's soured hopes has glimmered through a long series of books since City of Quartz, his brilliant elegy for a Los Angeles destroyed by corporate greed and short-term civic thinking. Anyone who finds today's America brusque and overbearing should read this unflinching indictment.
The end-of-the-world yarn has long been the mainstay of English writers. Americans have always seen the disaster story as a peculiarly British form, a mix of anger and frustration that afflicts a depressed island people trapped on their bleak outcrop. By contrast, America was too big, too confident and too full of possibility to visualise its own destruction. Only in the past 10 years, as in the deeply paranoid X Files and Independence Day, have Americans begun to accept the notion of their own extinction. Meanwhile, there was always the nearest interstate highway and the westward road to the enduring redemption fantasy of California.
But Davis was there before them, and is now sitting on the beach with his back to the Pacific, hoisting his storm flag. Dead Cities warns that not only is the sea too polluted to swim in, but the whole of California, Nevada and Utah is a poisoned reef of social and environmental disaster.
For Davis, I suspect, the ideal American west is a pristine terrain untouched by tyre or footprint, where no river is ever tapped to irrigate an orange grove or sewage farm, and a developer's show-house is an incubator of ecological death. In the expanding suburbs of Las Vegas he finds the innermost circle of hell - a gated community of high-priced houses inside a larger gated community. Grim, no doubt, and socially divisive, but it reminds me of the Surrey where I live, down to the housewives in their four wheel drive vehicles and the eventless shopping malls.
Davis makes graphically clear the destruction wrought in Nevada by the atomic testing of the cold war era. He estimates that at least half a million people were exposed to the radiation from nuclear detonations, whose effects were concealed by Washington. By a nasty irony, the population most directly affected by the tests were a "Norman Rockwell tapestry" of ultraloyal nuclear-site workers, Nevada cowboys and freckle-faced schoolchildren.
Davis regards Nevada as an ecological and social wasteland, but his deepest hostility is reserved for the state that made him famous and most embodies the American dream. A sharp-eyed urban environmentalist, Davis tracks down every crime committed by the immigrants to California. The needs of an exploding population are geomorphically equivalent, he writes, to sea-floor spreading and mountain erosion. "Even more alarmingly" - a phrase dear to Davis - the weather is under threat. Goodbye smog and electric sunsets.
Los Angeles devours imported water and energy, and exports pollution, solid waste and weekend recreation - what the rest of us call family picnics. Like Las Vegas, it displays all the sins of irresponsible urban development: local government subordinated to greedy private corporations, the dictatorship of the automobile, and the relentless growth of social and racial inequalities.
All the same, Los Angeles does have its charms, in part those of the third-world capital it has become. LA was a film set before it became a city, and no one expects it to be as docile and well run as Geneva or Adelaide. For all his social conscience, Davis may be as elitist as any chateau owner who spots a washing line on the horizon. What he most objects to, after all, is other people, their cars and supermarkets, theme parks and affordable housing.
Some years ago, on my one free day in Los Angeles during a promotional tour, I hired a car at my Beverly Hills hotel, a more difficult task than I expected, given that I wanted a Chevrolet. "Sir, we have Mercedes, we have BMW...." "Thanks, but I'd like a chevvy." "Sir? We have Porsche, we have Jag-u-ar."
"No. Chevrolet."
I got a Chevvy in the end, probably smuggled in from a blue-collar suburb, and spent the day exploring a familiar universe of palm trees, car lots and pleasant middle-class housing, a tribute to the enduring qualities of painted glue. Later, describing to my hosts an immense drive from Venice Beach to Silver Lake, I met an appalled response. "My God! You were in the ghetto." Bearing in mind that Beverly Hills is a tiny enclave on the rim of the vast metropolis I had criss-crossed, I wondered who was in the ghetto and who was outside it.
LA was always a social laboratory, the city that the rest of the world would follow, the clearest blueprint of our shared American tomorrow. Davis's despair at what it has become, along with California and the west, may well reflect a larger despair at America as a whole. Surprisingly, he quotes the Egyptian poet Sayyid Qutb, described by the New York Times as "the intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists". Qutb sent a postcard from New York with the comment: "If all the world became America it would undoubtedly be the disaster of humanity."
It may be that Davis has glimpsed this apocalyptic prospect. Perhaps what he perceives and describes so passionately is not just the demise of Los Angeles but of the American dream and, beyond that, the death of the dreamer.
· JG Ballard's books include Super-Cannes (Flamingo
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