You’ve [Mike Davis] been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak? For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless. I’ve always been influenced by the poems [Bertolt] Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages? What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight. Can you share some of the messages you’ve received? [Davis picks up one stack of papers from his printer, and opens a drawer and pulls out another stack, and begins to read passages aloud.] “We’ve never met but like many people out there I’ve been changed by your work. I’m a brown kid from Orange county who spent many years trying to understand and articulate the complex but unshakable love I have for our home, its haunted uncanniness, its beauty, its cruelty …” “I hear you are in the final stretch of, well, all of this. I write to you from Paris a few hours before I fly back home to LA, and I know that when we make the final descent into the LA basin this afternoon, I will cry softly, as I always do, so in love with the place I call home …” “You came on my podcast back in late 2020 and we talked a lot about rural America. Right now my community is in shambles, because last week eastern Kentucky was hit really bad by a one-in-a-thousand-year flood. I’m having a real hard time time finding any hope anywhere. But I read this interview you did, and it made me feel, not necessarily more hopeful, but more at peace ...” “It is pretty common for people to underestimate their own legacy. So allow me just to say that I’m glad that you did not die on the barricades too soon, before we had your wonderful books. After all, aren’t they a kind of barricade for the ages?” There is so much un-mobilized love out there. It’s really moving to see how much. What are you and your family doing with the time you have left? Avoiding this trap where writers feel they must weigh in with famous last words or a long essay on dying. We’re watching a lot of Scandinavian noir on HBO. In the last month, I’ve started consuming immense amounts of military history, an infantile throwback. I find the counterfactuals – this battle, what did it decide, what was the alternative – deeply fascinating. You can’t expect to die at a very heroic moment. It’d be nice to die in 1968, or with the liberation of Europe in 1945. You’re on the barricades in 1917, 1919. Go out of life with the red flags flying. But despair is useless.
— snippets from an interview with Mike Davis, by Lois Beckett for The Guardian; Aug 31, 2022 (x)
This summer [summer 2022], the 76-year-old stopped treatment for esophageal cancer and began palliative care, giving him an estimated six to nine months to live.
