i hope the formatting doesn't fracture on this. mike davis has become
the darling of the architecture seminar ever since his 'frank gehry as
dirty harry' chapter in "city of quartz".
The Day of the Locust
By Mike Davis
The mobs howled again in California, rattling windows on the Potomac.
Are the barbarians marching eastward, as they did after the famous
tax revolt of the late 1970s, or is this just another West Coast
full-moon episode with little national consequence?
The larger meaning of Schwarzenegger's triumph of the will, of
course, depends on how you interpret the grievances that provided the
recall's extraordinary emotional fuel. But I must warn you that
analyzing this election is an adventure in a realm of stupefying
paradox and contradiction. All the same, it may tell us a great deal
about the emerging landscape of American politics.
The hardcore ideologues of zero government and McKinley-era
capitalism are trumpeting the recall as a new populist revolution in
the spirit of Howard Jarvis's Proposition 13 in 1978. They echo local
Republican claims that a venal Democratic governor, in league with
big unions and the welfare classes, was turning off the lights of
free enterprise and driving the hardworking middle classes to Arizona
with huge, unfair tax increases. Gray Davis, in a word, was the
anti-Christ, wrecking California's golden dream on behalf of his
selfish constituencies of school teachers, illegal immigrants, and
rich Indians. The Terminator, they assure us, has literally saved
California from the yawning abyss of "tax, tax, tax; spend, spend,
spend."
>From the outside, this seems rather ridiculous. Davis, to begin with,
is an autistic centrist in the Democratic Leadership Council mode who
has governed California for the last five years as a good Republican.
In fiscal policy, as well as in prisons, education, and the
lubrication of corporate interests, there has been no significant
departure from the paradigm of his predecessor Republican Pete
Wilson. Indeed, Davis has been such a raving executioner and
prison-builder that crime-and-punishment has disappeared as a
right-wing wedge issue.
Moreover, if California's middle classes have any cause to feel raped
and pillaged in recent years, clearly the culprits are Arnold's
eminence grise, Pete Wilson, who deregulated the utilities to begin
with, and the Bushite power cartels like Enron which looted
California's consumers during the phony energy crisis of 2000-01. And
it is the Bush administration that has told bankrupt state and
municipal governments everywhere to "drop dead" while it shovels
billions into the black hole it has created in Iraq. Fiscal crisis
should be an issue owned by the Democrats.
Strange, then, that almost two-thirds of the voters in the mega-state
that supposedly belongs lock, stock, and barrel to the Democrats
either endorsed the stealth return of Pete Wilson -- the mind
whirring within Arnie's brawn -- or voted for a right-wing quack, Tom
McClintock. These are the kinds of election returns you expect to see
from GOP bedrock states like Idaho or Wyoming, not from the vaunted
Left Coast.
When you peer at the dynamics of recall rage up close, the whole
phenomenon becomes stranger still. Here in San Diego, where I live
and the recall originated, the Schwarzenegger blitzkrieg seemed to
suck anger out of the clear blue sky. This, after all, isn't
Youngstown or even Stockton or San Bernardino. Republican voters, as
far as I know, are not being evicted en masse from their homes or
forced to steal milk for their staving babies.
Far from it, the value of the median family home soared almost
$100,000 last year and the area is once again awash with Pentagon
dollars. The freeways are clogged with Hummers and other mega-SUVs,
while those with luxury lifestyles, carefully tended by armies of
brown-skinned laborers, bask in the afterglow of Bush's tax cuts.
Enlistment in Arnie's army of "hell no, we're not going to take it
anymore" tax protestors visibly bore little relationship to actual
economic pain. Yet, for weeks, suburban San Diego has been contorted
into visceral, self-righteous rage over the supposedly satanic regime
in Sacramento. Indeed exit polls show that, in San Diego as well as
statewide, support for Schwarzenegger increased with income and
topped out at the country-club and gated-community level.
So are California's fat cats merely impersonating populist anger?
With so little correlation between actual economic hardship
(greatest, of course, in pro-Bustamante Latino and Black inner-city
neighborhoods and rural valleys), what explains this astonishing
mobilization of voter emotion, particularly in affluent white suburbs?
In my microcosm, San Diego, part of the answer could be found at the
lower end of the AM dial. At KOGO 600, "San Diego's Radio Mayor,"
Roger Hedgecock, presides over what, even before the official
campaign began), was boastfully labeling itself "Recall Radio." A
defrocked former mayor accused of conspiracy and perjury in the
1970s, Hedgecock, who occasionally fills in for Rush Limbaugh on
national hate radio, takes credit for the "heavy lifting" that put
Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governor's mansion in Sacramento.
Republicans acknowledge that he has been the recall's most
influential voice in Southern California.
>From 3 to 6 PM, "Roger," as he is universally called by his more than
300,000 regular listeners, rules over afternoon freeway gridlock in a
vast radio market that extends as far north as Santa Barbara.
Southern California, of course, has the worst traffic congestion in
the country and the ever lengthening commutes are a continuous,
grinding source of free-floating anger. Hedgecock deftly plays off
this afternoon, stuck-in-traffic frustration. He is the angry tribune
of white guys in their 4X4 Dodge pickups and Ford Expeditions.
For almost two decades, his major rage has been the Brown Peril, the
supposed "Mexican invasion" of California. He was a key instigator of
anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994 as well as local
semi-vigilante protests against border-crossers. On the eve of the
recall, he continually warned his listeners that the Mexican threat
was now of apocalyptic proportions, given Gray Davis's signing of a
bill to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers' licenses.
"This is the end of American democracy, the end of fair elections,"
he fulminated. "Vast numbers of operatives," he warned, were
enlisting newly-ID'd immigrants to cast hundreds of thousands of
illegal ballots to keep Davis in power. San Diego, moreover, was
facing an "invasion" of trade-unionists from alien Los Angeles who
would "tear down pro-recall signs" and generally terrorize
neighborhoods. Roger urged locals to defend their homes and resist
the hoards of illegals and LA unionists "in the spirit of 1776."
In several weeks of listening to Roger's screeds, punctuated by
hallelujahs and amen's from the choir on their cellular phones, the
only issue that came remotely close to the same decibel level as
illegal immigrants (and "the so-called Chicano community") was a hike
in the registration tax on cars. Hedgecock ignored the fact that the
automatic escalation of the car tax (2% of its value) had originated
in Wilson-era legislation. Instead, he directly connected it to
illegal immigrants "whose cost to the state of California is almost
exactly the budget deficit." "That's how bad things are, ladies and
gentlemen," he intoned constantly. Car taxes and wetbacks were his
incessant themes.
The mainstream media has done a poor job of documenting the
organization of the recall at the grassroots level where AM voices
like Roger's, or his counterpart Eric Hogue's in Sacramento, rouse
thousands of mini-Terminators. As a result, there has been an overly
respectful legitimation of economic populism in the recall dynamic
and only a faint registration of the central role of traditional
racist demagoguery and the revival of the Brown Peril rhetoric that
made Pete Wilson the most hated figure in the state's Latino
neighborhoods. To adapt a rap phrase, "It's all about fear of a brown
planet."
Yet, I don't want to suggest that this is a simple repeat of
anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in the context of a recession and a
nationwide crisis of state financing. Arnold Schwarzenegger does add
something genuinely novel to the mix. He is not just another actor in
politics but an extraordinary lightning rod, both in his movie
persona and in real life, for dark, sexualized fantasies about
omnipotence.
Pleasure in the humiliation of others -- Schwarzenegger's lifelong
compulsion -- is the textbook definition of sadism. It is also the
daily ration of right-wing hate radio. As governor he becomes the
summation of all smaller sadisms, like those of Roger Hedgecock that
in turn manipulate the "reptile within" of millions of outwardly
affluent but inwardly tormented commuter-consumers. In their majesty,
the predominantly white voters of California's inland empires and
gated suburbs have anointed a clinically Hitlerite personality as
their personal savior.
The last word about all this should, of course, belong to Nathanael
West. In his classic novel The Day of the Locust (1939), he clearly
foresaw that fandom was an incipient version of fascism. On the edge
of Hollywood's neon plains, he envisioned the unassuageable hungers
of California's petty bourgeoisie.
"They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old
. . . Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize
they've been tricked and burn with resentment. .. Nothing can ever be
violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies."
Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most
recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales.
©2003 Mike Davis
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