Is Los Angeles Doomed? - recent report of seismic team detection of earthquake fault already known

National Review, July 12, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

Some seem to hope so.

Recently the New York Times reported a type of story that Southern Californians like me know well. It was about earthquakes, and the gist has often been told in newspapers and on national television, each time as if the news really were new. "Seismic Team Detects a Killer Beneath Los Angeles," the front-page headline declaimed. You see, there's this "blind thrust" fault, nine miles deep and right below downtown. Such faults under L.A. have been known for years. To justify front-page treatment, the Times needed some fresh angle. Aha! The angle was that geological information long "jealously guarded by oil and gas companies" had been revealed to scientists, who could at last confirm the existence of the "killer" fault.

The type of newspaper article that reports the forthcoming destruction of Los Angeles by earthquake is just a subcategory of another classification, the "L.A. Is Doomed!" article, which may also take the form of a magazine piece, movie, novel, or other book. In these, destruction threatens my hometown by earthquake, flood, fire, volcano, or tornado. It doesn't matter which, since their effects are depicted as interchangeable. Though most of this material is fictional storytelling, let's stipulate that the genre wouldn't be so popular if it didn't somehow satisfy a widespread wish to see the real L.A. in ruins.

Hollywood is a reliable producer of such stuff, as in recent films like The Crow: City of Angels (earthquake), Escape from L.A. (earthquake), Independence Day (evil space aliens), and Volcano (volcano). But creative folks have been destroying L.A. for fun and profit for more than half a century. A chapter in Mike Davis's book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster lists 138 depictions-in movies and novels-of Los Angeles laid waste since 1909.

Scanning this list is like watching boys torture a stray cat: How many ways can they figure out to make it scream? Sometimes destruction comes at Nature's hand. The first instance of L.A. getting washed into the Pacific-"swiftly, relentlessly"-occurred in Myron Brinig's 1933 novel The Flutter of an Eyelid. Nathanael West burnt the place down in The Day of the Locust (1939), while in the 1954 B-movie Them! giant ants consumed the populace. I distinctly remember another film, Earthquake. Released in 1974 when I was 9, it introduced Sensurround, a system of large speakers under the theater seats, emitting bass noises famous for terrorizing moviegoers by making their behinds quiver.

Almost as often, L.A. has been subjected to ruination by human evil, whether environmental degradation (Blade Runner, 1982), religious cults (Gore Vidal's 1954 Messiah), or racial holocaust (as in the popular neo-Nazi fantasy novel The Turner Diaries, 1978). Nor have highbrow writers disdained the trashing of Southern California. Mike Davis cites a "quorum" of the region's fanciest authors-Octavia Butler, Carolyn See, Steve Erickson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Cynthia Kadohata-who have set their novels amid the debris of the city's nightmare future. The best known may be Carolyn See's Golden Days, in which, following a nuclear war, a pair of earth-mother gals establish an eco-sensitive matriarchy.

With the publication of Ecology of Fear and a previous book, City of Quartz, in 1998 and 1990 respectively, Davis himself became the most distinguished example of the creative entrepreneur cashing in on the public's apparent hope that L.A. will be destroyed. For insisting that overdevelopment by nefarious capitalists has set the city on a freeway to ruin, he has been rewarded with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award ($315,000) and (in the case of Ecology of Fear) 14 weeks as an L.A. Times bestseller.

Taking Davis as representative of the "L.A. Is Doomed!" school of thought, I wondered what would be revealed by a few days in a rental car, touring some of the localities he describes as being perfumed with the scent of apocalypse. After all, cultural pileups like the pattern described above occur for a reason. This reason tends to have something to do with underlying social dynamics-rather than with chance and randomness alone, as in an auto pileup on the Golden State Freeway where one car spins out of control, another crashes into it, another into that one, and so on. In a culture like our own, beset by symptoms of a spiritual illness, secular liberalism, such phenomena inevitably reveal an aspect of the disease. That's why I flew to Los Angeles for a diagnostic drive.

When you look out the window of an airplane at night over Los Angeles, the city and its environs appear below as an endless grid of light. A rabbi I know says that no view is more conducive to belief in God than the Manhattan skyline, but L.A. must share the honor. There is no grid to be found in the natural world; that pattern can only be a human artifact. As powerfully as the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, Los Angeles by night unfolds at your feet testimony of the divine spark in man. Without that spark there would be no possibility of our triumphing so utterly over nature. The grid turns out to be the key to the diagnosis.