"Indeed, Southern Californians seem to have ingested too much of their own propaganda about the 'weather–beaten, cyclone–lashed' Midwest. Our cultural immune system, adapted to dealing with earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, autonomically rejects the equally inevitable probability of tornadoes and occasional hurricanes. They are categorized as exotic events whose existence requires radically different environmental contexts. 'It just doesn't happen here' could be the Golden State's motto. Tornadoes, therefore, are a fascinating index of a larger problem in our cultural psyche: the occlusion of natural history by landscape ideology. They are, so to speak, a periodic litmus test of Southern California's environmental memory" (pg. 155).

"This hugely complex system of shifting biological interactions along Los Angeles's wild edge is only episodically visible to most suburban residents, and then in a phantasmagorical mode. The unexpected appearance of large wildlife in the city's backyards is occasionally charming, but more often threatening. Coyotes and cougars, in particular, have become symbols of urban disorder. These tsatsnitsam are unwelcome heralds of a breakdown in the clear-cut, impermeable, but essentially imaginary boundary between the human and the wild. The ideal suburb is adjacent to nature but never directly implicated in it. Wild creatures are no more welcome across the crabgrass threshold of a subdivision than are urban ones. Indeed, in the minds of most suburbanites, the unruliness in the center of the metropolis is figuratively recapitulated at it periphery. It is not surprising that predators are criminalized as trespassers and discursively assimilated to 'serial killers' or 'gangbangers.' Reciprocally, the urban underclass is incessantly bestialized as 'predators,' 'wilding youth,' and 'wolf packs' in an urban 'wilderness'" (pgs. 207-208).

"Ridley Scott's caricature may have captured ethnocentric anxieties about multiculturalism run amok, but it failed to engage the real Los Angeles—especially the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and range–style homes—as it erodes socially and physically into the twenty–first century. In fact, his hypertrophied Art Deco Downtown seems little more than a romantic conceit when compared to the savage slums actually being born in the city's inner belt of decaying postwar suburbs. Blade Runner is not so much the future of the city as the ghost of past imaginations" (pg. 361).

Le texte est très daté et la traduction me semble plutôt douteuse. Lecture très peu agréable de cette édition questionable. Il faudra lire l’édition originale en anglais.

Maybe if I hadn't read City of Quartz then the bullshit politics of LA would have surprised me more, or maybe if I hadn't read Planet of Slums then I wouldn't be so de-sensitized to the atrocity that poverty is. Mike Davis is brutal in his fact-finding and creation of narratives. L.A. seems fucked and I'm not wholly surprised. One of the more intriguing insights provided by the book is the recognition of the arrogance that humans have of our knowledge of the earth and ecological cycles as if scientific findings and extrapolations can wholly capture every nuance of how nature works. Davis throws this arrogance in your face. More often than not our ignorance is swept under the rug by corrupt politicians or greedy developers, but sometimes, and this is important to note for those averse to his Marxist tendencies, this isn't always the case. Regardless of exterior motives, sometimes humans risk other humans' lives because they think they know what is at risk and what is at stake in these circumstances. Science plays an ideological role in our anthropocentric treatment of the earth. However, when provided with this conundrum for society, that we can't predict everything, what pushes individuals to keep doing as they are doing is when Davis' vulgar Marxism appears. People are rat bastards and will sell each other anything regardless of the human cost in order to turn a profit. It doesn't take devout faith in dialectical materialism to understand that and that's where Davis' argument is successful. He's pointing to petty capitalists, e.g., slumlords, wealthy politicians, greedy land developers, as capitalists, in a Marxist sense, but is it truly such a stretch to think that the only way these people could be so ignorant of the harm they are doing is in order to create capital? This is why I call it vulgar Marxism. He doesn't point to any over-arching systemic mechanisms which force or necessitate these injustices. At the end of the day, why things are so doomed for Davis is because people are heartless and they suck. It doesn't take agreeing with Marx, Gramsci or Adorno to buy into that claim.

Gotta love section titles like "plague squirrels" and "urban eschatology"