In Memory of Mike Davis, San Diego Radical

He was tender and angry at the same time.

Last Tuesday, I heard about Mike Davis’s death when my wife sent me a text message in the middle of teaching my American Labor Movement class at San Diego City College.  

We were covering labor and the left in the 1930s, and I was showing my students With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade.  Just as I looked up from the text on my phone, one of the women in the documentary was talking about what it meant for her to be part of the heroic CIO struggle that was the Flint Sit-Down Strike and how the culture of solidarity it fostered made her realize that she and her sisters weren’t “just individuals anymore” but part of something bigger, “an organization” that stood for a larger WE.  

I teared up and had to pull myself together to finish the class but was left with the thought that, somehow, the symmetry was perfect.  At the heart of Mike’s work, even in his most apocalyptic musings, was the utopian dream of a beloved collective.  I was pleased to see that noted in the NPR piece on his passing that cited his admonition in his 2012 book Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible: 

• Never cross a picket line, even when your family can't pay the rent. Share your last cigarette with a stranger. Steal milk when your kids have none and then give half to the little kids next door (this is what my own mother did repeatedly in 1936). Listen carefully to the quiet, profound people who have lost everything but their dignity. Cultivate the generosity of the “we.” 

In the days since his death, many have noted the profound mark that Mike’s intellectual labor has left.  Perhaps the best commentary was his friend Jon Wiener’s obituary in The Nation, but the Los Angeles Times also did a solid job outlining his legacy.  While those overviews primarily focused on his work about Los Angeles, Jesse Marx’ s Voice of San Diego tribute to Mike when the news of his going into hospice broke earlier this summer is the most notable piece on Davis’s take on San Diego, which wasn’t pretty.   

As the introduction to Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See observes: 

• War, tourist spectacle, endangered dissent: these are the perennial axes of modern San Diego history.  Here, where illusion is a civic virtue, reality has always nested inside spectacle like a set of Russian dolls. First, of course, is the happy tourist in shorts and a Sea World tee-shirt proffering his credit card to the gods of commerce.  Second is the heroic warrior, blue eyes fixed on the westward horizon of Manifest Destiny.  Third is the smiling booster, handing out the brochures welcoming newcomers to Heaven on Earth.  Fourth, is the lowly-paid service worker or enlisted person struggling to afford the cost of paradise.  Fifth, is the scorned dissenter, trade-unionist or civil rights activist.   And sixth and innermost is the recent immigrant whose invisible labor sustains the luxury lifestyles of Coronado, La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe.

And in this book that Mike co-authored with my wife Kelly Mayhew and me, we sought to take a first step towards “redressing this deficiency of published social criticism of a city that so many conservatives extoll as a utopia of patriotism and free enterprise” that “has too frequently been a town wide open to greed but closed to social justice.”   Mike, in his customary style, used his portion of the book to blow up “booster stereotypes” and expose the corruption that has come with our “long history of weak and venal city halls dominated by powerful groups of capitalist insiders.”  

This view of San Diego’s history was not greeted with open arms in many quarters outside of activist circles, but it did much to expose the darker reality that lay underneath the postcard image our city loves to project.  Despite its establishment detractors, Under the Perfect Sun was a breath of fresh air to those looking for something other than booster pablum about “America’s Finest City.”  

It was one of the great honors of my life to do this work with Mike, who came up with the idea for a radical history of San Diego after looking over the manuscript of my first novel, Drift, that included a series of historical vignettes about the IWW free speech fight and other bits of unofficial San Diego history.  That’s the way Mike Davis operated, generously and quick to encourage other writers and activists to have their shouts.  

Much has and will be written about Mike Davis’s immense contribution to the intellectual inheritance of the left, and rightly so, but I will also remember the man who loved to drive the backroads of East County reminiscing about his family and his youth when he went to CORE protests in downtown San Diego or spent time satisfying his wanderlust.  Mike relished going on adventures and hikes with our kids, finding good barbeque places in El Cajon, and bullshitting about just about anything over a beer.  

Once, amid the worst of the Cedar Fire, we drove up Interstate 5 to get away from the smoke choking the city and jog on the beach near San Onofre, shaking our heads at the insanity of out-of-control exurban development in burn zones and the fact that we were finding refuge next to a nuclear power plant on the border of Camp Pendleton.  It was a surreal moment—grotesque, absurd, and comic all at once.  

Another time, Mike drove me up to UC Riverside to talk with his students about the March for California’s Future, a trek I made with fellow labor activists to protest the perennial underfunding of education and the need to tax the rich to address it.  During the long drives there and back, Mike spoke poignantly about the threats to our children’s and all children’s futures as climate catastrophe and social upheaval were bound to unfold.  He was tender and angry at the same time.  

It is precisely that compassion and fierceness in defense of the endangered future that is his most compelling legacy.