[Marxism] Mike Davis: Who Really Set the California Fires?

[Walter Lippmann]

Who Really Set the California Fires?
By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on November 1, 2007, Printed on November 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66706/

You can't have too much of a good thing, so let me just quote Mike
Davis from 1998 to introduce Mike Davis 2007 on the California fires.
In Ecology of Fear, his 1998 book on southern California, he wrote
just about everything you'd ever need to know if you didn't want to
be surprised by the raging Santa Ana-driven wildfires of 2003 or
2007. After all, there's nothing new about the burning phenomenon on
what Davis then dubbed "the fire coast." "A great Malibu firestorm,"
he wrote, "could generate the heat of three million barrels of
burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees." No wonder Cold War
era researchers used those California fires to model the behavior of
nuclear firestorms.

What remains eternally new (and yet utterly predictable, once you've
read Davis) is the increasing amount of tinder we put in the way of
such fires in "the suburban-chaparral border zone where wildfire is
king" -- and then the fierce fire-suppression campaigns that new,
wealthy homeowners in their privatized, gated communities,
McMansions, and McCastles demand, which only build further the fuel
for the fires that, even in the 1990s, were "becoming ever more
apocalyptic." Oh yes, and another thoroughly predictable thing: After
hundreds, or thousands, of houses burn, the search for villains
begins not among the politicians and developers, pushing human
habitation ever deeper into the lands of the firestorm, but for
arsonists, "although probably not more than one in eight blazes is
caused by arson." The shape of the shape-shifting arsonist has
changed over the years: more or less in historical order, according
to Davis, they have been Indians, sheepherders, tramps, Wobblies,
Okies, "Axis saboteurs," and, in our own time, environmentalists,
(indirectly) endangered and protected species, gays, and terrorists.
The search for arsonists is, of course, on again -- and one has so
far been identified, a boy, possibly only 10 years old, playing with
matches whose case is now being turned over to the district attorney
for possible prosecution.

And finally, it's predictable that "the essential land-use issue, the
rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs," is ignored;
while, in the rush to fight the ensuing fires, vast sums of taxpayer
money are functionally spent on luxury enclaves and gated hilltop
suburbs. As Davis concluded back in 1998, but might as well have
written last night, "Needless to say, there is no comparable
investment in the fire, toxic, or earthquake safety of inner-city
communities. Instead, as in so many things, we tolerate two systems
of hazard prevention, separate and unequal."

And the worst of it is that "fire itself accelerates gentrification"
in those former wildlands. Charred hillside? All the better to build,
my dear...

The fate of prophets is, of course, to be ignored. Nobody raises
statues to them. -- Tomdispatch Editor, Tom Engelhardt

San Diego Builds a Statue to an Arsonist Developers with Matches

By Mike Davis

This August, just as the first Santa Ana winds bent the boughs of the
eucalyptus trees in Balboa Park, 500 wealthy business people and
Republican Party donors raised their champagne glasses to salute "Mr.
San Diego," Pete Wilson, as he unveiled a bronze statue of himself in
downtown's Horton Plaza. Wilson, of course, was the controversial,
immigrant-baiting governor of California during the nineties; but the
statute specifically apotheosizes his role as the political catalyst
for San Diego's "downtown renaissance" during his earlier three terms
as mayor of the city (1971-1983).

The 74-year-old Wilson, whose preppy appearance leads strangers to
mistake him for an aging member of the Kingston Trio, recalled the
bad old days -- before million-dollar condos and billionaire
developers took over downtown -- when the nearby "Gaslight District"
was a "haven for saloons and tattoo parlors." He praised the memory
of his friend and crucial ally in remaking downtown, developer Ernest
Hahn, whose statue adjoins his. But it was difficult to make out his
words since, across the plaza, several hundred demonstrators, an
inspiring coalition of young Latinos and gays, were beating drums,
blowing whistles, and chanting "racist!" Some of Wilson's admirers
blistered, but Mr. San Diego was characteristically gracious about
free speech: "Horses asses," he laughed.

He was cheered by a small group of counter-protestors belonging to
one of the Minutemen sects. Although far too scruffy to be invited to
join the champagne drinkers, they nonetheless idolize the former
governor as the Paul Revere of the Brown Peril (especially for his
notorious television reelection ad: "They keep coming..."), as well
as the chief megaphone for the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994
which -- had it not been stopped in the courts -- would have expelled
immigrant kids from their kindergartens and kicked their mothers out
of maternity wards.

It is unclear, however, whether either the immigrant-rights activists
or their Minutemen opponents were aware that what they were
protesting or applauding was actually self-deification. As the San
Diego Union-Tribune (the Copley franchise that has had a total
monopoly of the city's daily newspaper market since 1938) reported
the next day: "The land under the Wilson and Horton statues is owned
by the Irvine Co., the Orange County real estate giant that bought
the property recently. Wilson is a member of the company's board of
directors."

Most of my friends dream of the day when we can give that statue the
same shove that brought down the Colonne de Vendôme in Paris in 1871
or Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003, but I
demur. I think we should simply chisel the word "arsonist" in large
letters at the base of the Bronze Pete.

No, I am not suggesting that the ex-governor was seen lurking in the
shadow of Palomar or hiding behind an oak at Witch Creek as the fires
began to burn -- although who knows what he does with his time when
he isn't recruiting for Rudy Giuliani? But, as the protestors rightly
won't let the world forget, he deliberately ignited California's
nativist underbrush in the early 1990s and started a conflagration of
immigrants' rights that now engulfs Latino communities across the
United States.

With unctuous arrogance, he mainstreamed Mexican-bashing and opened a
Pandora 's Box of California's vigilante past. The Minutemen are one
bastard legacy of his; another is public gullibility in the face of
absurd rumors and bogus "CNN" press releases ("Mexicans with Molotov
cocktails" and the like) that are currently being blogged back and
forth across dirty cyberspace. And we should not forget that Wilson
was personal trainer, sage, and guru to Schwarzenegger in those early
days of 2003 and 2004 when Arnie was praising the Minutemen as
"heroes." (The Gubernator, of course, has since been reprogrammed to
the political center by Maria Shriver and her technicians.)

But the Wilson legacy also includes an important, if more complex,
responsibility for the pattern of urban growth in the San Diego
region that now collides so catastrophically with wildfire. As a
so-called liberal Republican, even "green" San Diego mayor during the
1970s and early 1980s, he was the chief architect of an enduring
system of trade-offs, elite alliances, and sleights of hand that has
simultaneously gentrified the downtown area at the expense of the
poor and overrun much of San Diego's countryside with pyrophiliac
gated suburbs and elite estates -- all the while winning accolades
for state-of-the-art "growth management."

In the wake of the auto-da-fé of the city's old guard in the early
1970s (including the arrest and conviction of its two most powerful
business figures), Wilson -- initially allied with wealthy Democrats
-- skillfully overhauled a geriatric City Hall and soothed the
alienation of angry neighborhood homeowners. He slowed piecemeal
growth at the urban periphery, which impressed the Sierra Club and
environmental voters, although the real logic behind these moves was
to transfer control over metropolitan growth from smaller developers
to giant companies with the financial resources to undertake the
phased construction of upscale suburbs and edge cities.

Wilson's 1976 masterstroke, however, was to horse-trade development
rights along the city's northern flanks for new investment in the
downtown's faltering redevelopment scheme. Thus, he bartered the
beautiful mesas across Interstate 5 from the University of
California, San Diego, to (fellow statue) Ernest Hahn (who promptly
constructed "University City") in exchange for the latter's agreement
to redevelop Horton Plaza downtown. A similar quid pro quo was
negotiated for the development of an adjacent "protected" open space
as the Pardee Company's "North City West."

These were not just a set of ad hoc deals but a consistent template
for an unmatched fusion of real estate and politics. The typical
American big-city pattern is chronic competition and political
friction between downtown interests and edge developers; in San
Diego, by contrast, Wilson brought the suburban builders downtown and
so created a unitary and powerful growth machine which, in turn, has
greased his wheels and those of his many protégés and successors.
(Indeed, Wilson's reputation as the "strongest mayor in San Diego
history" is attested by the continued zeal with which all white, male
Republicans, including the present mayor and his predecessor, profess
loyalty to his achievements.)

This hypertrophying of developer power, which Wilson
institutionalized and willed to future generations, has easily
survived small popular insurrections against the impact of sprawl and
congestion, just as it has surmounted unremitting scandal and
corruption in local politics. Pete Wilson's successors have
specialized in giving away one priceless city asset after another --
the former Naval Training Center, the Broadway pier, the Fairbanks
Ranch, Petco Park, among many others) to the same small elite of
billionaires. They are even discussing privatizing the management of
San Diego's incomparable Balboa Park.

The imbalance of power is greater yet at the county scale. In the
wake of the last round of firestorms in 2003, a grassroots alliance
of environmentalists and old-time rural residents tried to slow the
subdivision and trophy-home juggernaut by limiting residential
density to one home per 100 acres: an initiative inspired by the
famous precedent of Oregon's Willamette Valley. They were, however,
utterly crushed at the polls (65% to 35%) by a flood of developer
money, which disguised itself in ads on television as the voice of
embattled "small farmers."

More recently, on the very eve of the new firestorms, county
supervisors endorsed a so-called "shelter in place" strategy that
will permit developers to build in the rugged, high-fire-risk
backcountry without having to provide the secondary roads needed to
ensure safe evacuation. Instead residents would be encouraged to stay
in their "fire resistant" homes while fire-fighters defended the
perimeter of their cul-de-sac. As scores of fire experts and
survivors have pointed out in angry op-ed columns and blogs, this is
a lunatic, if not homicidal, scheme that elevates developers'
bottom-lines over human life. Those who have actually confronted
100-foot-high firestorms, driven by hurricane-velocity winds, know
that the developer slogan -- "It's not where you build, but how you
build" -- is a deadly deception.

Meanwhile, the new fire cataclysm seems to be rewarding the very
insiders most responsible for the uncontrolled building and
underfunded fire protection that helped give the Santa Ana winds
their real tinder. While conservative ideologues now celebrate San
Diego's most recent tragedy as a "triumph" of middle-class values and
suburban solidarity, the business community openly gloats over the
coming reconstruction boom and the revival of a building industry
badly shaken by the mortgage crisis. And the Union-Tribune -- like
London papers after the slaughter that was the battle of the Somme in
1915 -- eulogizes the very generalship (all Republicans, of course)
that led us into disaster. I suppose these heroes already envision
their statues in Horton Plaza.

Copyright 2007 Mike Davis

Mike Davis, who teaches urban history at U.C. Irvine, grew up in the
now incinerated backcountry of San Diego County. His other articles
about the recent Southern California fires will soon be published in
the Nation and the London Review of Books. His most recent book is In
Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket 2007).© 2007
Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story
online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/66706/