By D.J. Waldie
FROM: Los Angeles Times

We lost Joan Didion last year and now Mike Davis. Kevin Starr preceded them in 2017. These three interpreters of our dreams should be read together. They told us who we were as Angelenos and, more broadly, as Californians. Davis was a Marxist. Didion was the realist. And Starr was a Catholic. Each had a theory of history, an explanatory model of the forces that had made this place and brought us, sometimes heedlessly, to it. Unfortunately, history has never meant much to the people of Los Angeles.

Davis and Starr were friends (which delighted Starr), perhaps because both believed that historical events aimed toward a redemptive conclusion. Both Marx and St. Thomas Aquinas thought history would have a happy ending, however delayed it was. In service to that conviction, Davis examined the distempers of Los Angeles and diagnosed their causes. His analysis was harrowing. I criticized him for his pitiless conclusion (in “Ecology of Fear”) that my working-class neighbors should never have been allowed to live here, that their suburban hopes for an ordinary life had cruelly deceived them.

In an interview Davis gave to The Times in July, he disparaged hope. “I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope; I think people do it out of love and anger.” Those fires burn through his books, though I cannot judge the proportion of anger to love. Despite Davis’ reputation for bleakness, I prefer to believe that love had become dominant. He told the Guardian in August, after he had ended treatment for esophageal cancer, “What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems.” Read Rest of Article Here