The Incendiary Other

Mike Davis

I was extraordinarily liberal until I came to Malibu, now I'm a fascist.
—Screenwriter quoted in the Malibu Times

The 1993 firestorms, following so close on the heels of the Rodney King riots, opened a Pandora's box of fear. One disaster was superimposed upon the other. From Laguna to Ventura, rumors spread that some new breed of terrorist, or worse, several, were on the loose, reported the Malibu Times. Public officials openly speculated that black gangs were at last making good on the old — largely apocryphal — threat to burn rich white neighborhoods. In private, some even hinted darkly at a possible Muslim connection to New York's World Trade Center bombing.

The homeless also cast shadows in Southern California's social imagination. The Eaton Canyon fire, accidentally triggered by a transient, seemed to confirm mountain and canyon homeowners worst fears of an invisible army lurking in the brush. Clandestine hobo encampments, like those in Tuna Canyon along the Malibu coast, were singled out as intolerable fire hazards.

As media-hungry politicians went slumming from one fire scene to another, inflammatory rhetoric escalated. Governor Pete Wilson, desperately trying to toughen his image, compared arson with child molestation and proposed life sentences for the guilty. This did not satisfy two Republican legislators — Congressman David Dreier and Assemblyman Ross Johnson — who insisted on the death penalty for the instigators of fatal blazes. Dreier even demanded one-year prison terms for accidental fires.

Meanwhile, fire investigators zealously emulated the federal-local task force model deployed during the 1992 riots. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents joined city and county fire officials, Sheriff's deputies and local homicide detectives in an unprecedentedly intensive search for the arsonists believed to be responsible for setting 19 of the 26 recent Southland fires. Private contributions raised the reward for apprehension of the Malibu arsonist — initially described as a mysterious figure in a blue pickup — to $350,000.

For its part, the normally temperate Los Angeles Times blew its editorial fuse box over the arson issue. Livid that some environmentalists had characterized homeowners themselves as the real firebugs, the paper reassured readers that it was hardly a crime against nature . . . to choose to live in the mountains, at the urban/rural interface. Instead, it called for a true paradigm shift in the way that Californians think about fire.

Fire prevention, to repeat, is now crime prevention… Californians need to stop viewing brush fires solely as acts of God and start thinking of them as sometimes acts of criminal — even pathological — man. What the arsonists did to us in the last two weeks they can do to us next week, or the one after that, if weather conditions are right for their evil crime… We are no longer just fighting it; we are fighting them.

Ironically, the Times paradigm shift from it to them has been the conventional wisdom in Southern California for generations. Although probably not more than one in eight blazes is caused by arson, Californians have always criminalized the problem of mountain wildfire. The majority have never accepted the natural role or inevitability of the fire cycle. The political, as distinct from scientific, discourse in each generation has been obsessed with the identification of an incendiary Other responsible for fire destruction.

In the early 20th century, this cruel-hearted and selfish man (Frederick Rindge's description) was portrayed as an Indian, sheepherder or, mzost frequently, a tramp. During a World War I, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) were believed to be lurking behind every burning bush in California. A decade later, major wildfires — like the 1930 Decker Canyon blaze — were usually blamed on itinerant farm workers, especially the Okies. A year after Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, 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 Los Angeles 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 to the 1993 firestorms, however, was unprecedented in its virulence and scope of blame. 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 the 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 Councilman Robert Gentry, who lost his home in the fire, for devoting too much attention to AIDS victims and not enough on fire protection, according to the Times. Scorning the charge that homes with wooden roofs and siding virtually invited a holocaust, the so-called Laguna Coalition instead excoriated environmentalists for opposing a proposed 3-million-gallon reservoir. On Orange County talk-radio stations, the Sierra Club was denounced as arson's fifth column.

In Riverside County, meanwhile, burned-out homeowners charged that federal regulations designed to protect the rare Stephens kangaroo rat had prevented them from clearing tall brush around their homes. My home was destroyed by a bunch of bureaucrats in suits and so-called environmentalists who say animals are more important than people, claimed one distraught resident quoted in the Times. I'm now homeless, and it all began with a little rat. (The allegation that wildlife regulations prevented fuel clearance is a canard. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service actually encourages the mowing of grasses that surround homes for fire safety; the problem is that homeowners find mowing too troublesome, preferring simply to rototill their ecosystem under.)

These attacks were, in effect, the opening salvos in a major political offensive to unleash further pyromaniac suburbanization. Thus, Representative Ken Calvert (R-Riverside), supported by the powerful Riverside Building Industry Association and the Farm Bureau, proposed a radical revision of the Endangered Species Act to protect property rights. At stake were 77,000 acres of federally protected habitat that developers had long coveted. Likewise along the Laguna coast, pro-growth forces were orchestrating a hue and cry against the gnatcatcher. This small, almost extinct bird was depicted as an arsonist through a bizarre syllogism that equated any undeveloped landscape or protected habitat with a fire hazard ipso facto.

In Malibu, local wrath fell on advocates of greater public access to beaches and critics of hillside development. It was a replay of an old battle. After the 1978 fire, for example, the Coastal Commission wanted celebrity homeowners to provide more public easements to Trancas Beach. Governor Jerry Brown's Malibu friends, however, generated such an uproar against government by extortion that he renounced his own stunned commissioners as bureaucratic thugs. Four years later, while state officials were preoccupied with fighting the 1982 Trancas Canyon firestorm, local guerrillas attacked a public-access project at El Pescador Beach. Tires were slashed, sand put in gas tanks, machinery pushed over the bluff, and site improvements trashed, wrote Thomas Mikkelson and Donald Neuwirth in Public Beaches: An Owner's Manual.

In late 1993, Malibuites were again frothing at radicals who advocated more access as well as stricter fire-safety regulation of new and rebuilt housing. Equating public access with freedom of movement for arsonists, residents demanded restricted access to mountain roads during periods of acute fire danger. They also raged against critics of California Fair Plan, the state-mandated insurance pool that subsidizes fire-zone dwellers by spreading costs among the mass of homeowners. Those who wanted the rich to pay a fairer share of the cost of protecting their homes were accused of instigating a new class struggle between flatlanders and hillsiders, reported the Times. As in the wake of past fires, victimhood pre-empted any serious debate about the social costs of sustaining luxury lifestyles along the Fire Coast.

Finally — by the end of summer 1994 — the great arson manhunt had dissipated into a maze of false leads, misidentifications, minor arrests and interagency squabbles. The evil shadow of Fedbuster, whose menacing letters suggested a vast conspiracy ( They burned me now I'm going to burn them back. I fight fire with fire. You like puns, chumps? Sizzle, sizzle ), turned out to be the mad creation of a former sex offender with no role in setting any of the fires. Similarly, the dramatic confession of a transient Satanist that he set the Laguna Beach fire in order to commune with a demon left egg all over the face of Orange County District Attorney Michael Capizzi when it turned out that the suspect actually had been in a Mexican prison at the time of the fire.

In the meantime, the investigation of the Malibu fire turned full circle to focus on the conflagration's original heroes: the two off-duty firefighters on Mount Calabasas. The result was an unseemly brawl between Sheriff Sherman Block, who publicly accused the two of starting the fire so they could put it out and become heroes, and District Attorney Gil Garcetti, who refused to indict them for lack of evidence. As the half-lynched firefighters were left to writhe in the agony of unproven accusation, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms announced that it was taking charge of the bungled investigation.

Related Links:
• Eaton Canyon Nature Area