Heavy Metal Freeway California's Season in Hell

by Davis, Mike

• ISBN13: 9780805076875
• ISBN10: 0805076875
• Format: Hardcover
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Summary

Gridlock and declining mobility are key themes in Mike Davis's fascinating low ride through a landscape of affluence and anxiety, inequality and protest. As the state-nation of California slowly strangled in its own congestion, sprawl, and greed, inchoate middle-class rage-incited daily by rush-hour hate radio-coalesced around a despised car tax and a new law authorizing drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. SUV owners united behind a steroid-enhanced messiah in a Hummer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and recalled Gray Davis just in time to watch their homes destroyed by biblical fires. With the characteristic acuity of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, Davis goes off road to give us a view of these events from the standpoint of those social groups-immigrant workers, inner-city school kids, feminists, environmentalists, and trade unionists-who weren't invited to the new governor's $21,000 per plate inaugural banquet. He visits farmworkers' shanty towns, walks the mean streets of forgotten KMart suburbs, and hitches rides with the weary truckdrivers who 'sharecrop' the interstate. As a political earthquake in the Golden State once again rattles windows on the Potomac, Davis argues that California's current turmoil, rooted in its dysfunctional social infrastructures and exploding inequalities, may well presage the shape of national politics to come.

Author Biography

MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Dead Cities, and, most recently, co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See. He lives in San Diego.