MARK MY words: Southern California is about to suffer a major earthquake. Probably a catastrophic fire too. And certainly a real estate collapse.
How do I know this? Because the gods (or Thetans) who look down upon our patch of paradise do not appreciate hubris. Yet that's exactly what we're seeing now in the way the region regards itself, and especially in the way it dispenses with critics who do not share its suddenly rosy view of itself.
Back in the catastrophic early 1990s, the narrative was dominated -- and deservedly so -- by apocalyptic, Fontana-born Marxist Mike Davis, whose "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear" portrayed and even predicted a megalopolis ripped apart by class and race hatred, developer greed and constant disaster real and imagined.
Davis' compellingly nightmarish take, which still begins the L.A. discussion east of the Mississippi and across the Atlantic, took gleeful aim at the "booster" wing of Southern California burgherdom, especially the real estate hucksters and sunshine peddlers associated with the pre-Otis Chandler Los Angeles Times. But even while the rest of the world's intelligentsia seemed to swallow Davis' thesis whole -- washed down by such Hollywood bummers as "Short Cuts," "L.A. Confidential" and "Falling Down" -- a curious and humble thing happened here on terra unfirma: The boosters bit back.
But not in the form of boosterism, at least not at first. After the trauma of the early '90s, even the most die-hard of California interpreters were left wondering, as state historian Kevin Starr put it in his introduction to "Coast of Dreams," whether they had "chosen a dead end." Joan Didion was licking her wounds back in New York. Jane's Addiction and X stopped making records. Even Davis took off for Hawaii. But the people who chose to stay dug in their heels, joined the numerous historical societies that were springing up all over town and created a sort of "warts and all" school of regional inquiry and reassessment.
So D.J. Waldie wrote a poetic history of Lakewood's unpoetic suburbs in "Holy Land" (1996); Don Normark immortalized soon-to-be-razed Echo Park neighborhoods in 1999's "Chavez Ravine: 1949;" Sandra Tsing Loh satirized yet celebrated her dorky Valley existence in "A Year in Van Nuys," while Kevin Roderick argued that the Valley was "America's Suburb" (both books appearing in 2001).
