Prophet Davis

"An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. I am claiming, in other words, that Wovoka offers us a neo-catastrophist epistemology for reinterpreting Western history from the standpoint of certain terminal features of the approaching millennial landscape. He invites us to reopen that history from the vantage point of an already visible future when sprawl, garbage, addiction, violence, and simulation will have overwhelmed every vital life-space west of the Rockies. This is Turnerian history, if you will, stripped down to its ultimate paranoia: the West become Los Angeles. For those who retain the Ghost Dance tradition, this end point is also paradoxically the end point of renewal and restoration. It is through this black hole that the West will disappear into the singularity of catastrophe, only to emerge, on the other side, with streams full of salmon and plains black with bison."

Mike Davis, 'White People Are Only a Bad Dream...' (1999), in Dead Cities, New York: The New Press, 2003, 31.