guerrilla curatorship

Sorry, LA.

Man, I love Mike Davis’ rich, thoughtful, prescient writing.

paratext:

“The 1993 firestorms, following so close on the heels of the Rodney King riots, opened a Pandora’s box of white fear. One disaster was, not necessarily logically, superimposed on the other. From Laguna to Ventura, rumors spread that “some new breed of terrorist, or worse, several, were on the loose.” Public officials openly speculated the black gangs were at last making good on supposedly long-standing threats “to burn rich white neighborhoods.” In private, some even hinted darkly about a possible “Muslim connection” to New York’s World Trade Center bombing. Ironically, the hills had been full of hundreds of present and former gang members: all risking their lives on state and county fire crews.

[…]

Although probably not more than one in eight blazes is caused by arson, Anglo-Californians have always criminalized the problem of mountain wildfire. The majority have never accepted the natural role or inevitability of the chaparral fire cycle. (Conversely, there has been a persistent tendency to naturalize the strictly human causality of tenement fire.) Political as distinct from scientific discourse has been obsessed with identifying an “incendiary Other” responsible for fire destruction.

In the early twentieth century, this “cruel-hearted and selfish man” […] was portrayed as an Indian, a sheepherder, or, most frequently, a tramp. During the First World War, the Wobblies were believed to be lurking behind every burning bush in California. A decade later, major wildfires were usually blamed on itinerant farmworkers, especially the Okies. A year after Pearl Harbor, though, FBI agents and National Guardsmen were combing Las Flores Canyon for clues to the identity of “Axis saboteurs” responsible for the 1942 Malibu fire. Reflecting popular preoccupations during the Eisenhower era, the LA Times added new profundity to its reportage of the 1956 Malibu fire by linking arson to sexual perversion. According to a psychologist consulted by the paper, arsonists “set fires at night in order to see women run out of their homes in a state of undress.”

The political backlash of the 1993 firestorms, however, was unprecedented in its virulence and the scope of the blame that was leveled. Seedlings of neo-McCarthyism sprouted in the charred ruins of affluent subdivisions. Following the demagogic lead of Governor Wilson, conservatives claimed to trace the web of a vast conspiracy against the sacred rights of property. In addition to spectral “terrorists” directly responsible for the fires, vengeful homeowner and pro-development groups indicted such fellow travelers of arson as gays, liberals, the Sierra Club, and an endangered rodent.

In Laguna Beach, for instance, pro-growth forces attacked openly gay council member Robert Gentry, who had lost his home in the fire, for devoting “too much attention to AIDS victims and not enough on fire protection.”

-Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis. 130-134.