Those articles by Fiske and Davis....

In the article "Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power, and Resistance", Fiske uses a metaphor relating malls to cathederals, making a mall seem secular. I, in no way found this a helpful metaphor, since I absolutely abhor malls in every way. Anyway, Fiske uses this metaphor and then describes how metaphors can pose as a problem when trying to describe something. The metaphor used means that the power of consumerism on consumers is similar to the power of religion on its followers. I took the metaphor in this way: The consumer's religion is her shopping mall, and Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, Gap, etc. are the gods she worships.
As Fiske put it, "... a resisting reading must align itself with the differences rather than the similarities...", and that's exactly how I started reading this assignment, mostly because of my biased look at the shopping mall in my area.
A shopping mall does not discriminate against who is admitted, be it someone with the money to throw away on things they don't actually need, but are told they need it by artfully composed advertising, or a "mallrat" who virtually lives at the mall and has never actually given in to the sermon to buy, buy, buy.

The excerpt from Mike Davis' City of Quartz about the "Militarization of Urban Space" in Los Angeles seemed a lot like a work of fiction to me, and reminded me of a horrible movie I remember watching called "Escape from Los Angeles" with Kurt Russell. When I looked up Mike Davis on the internet I found a few articles from major newspapers that stated that the information Davis provided in his work was blown out of proportion to the actual situation in Los Angeles. I know that the internet is not one of the best places to look up information , seeing that the information may not have been gotten from a legit source, but I don't think that you can look at a lot of essays and works and believe everything they say either, especially when it's as seemingly biased as this work by Davis.
My parents grew up in and around the L.A. area, my relatives still live there, and I visit every summer. I have never seen anything on such a large scale as what Davis describes happening in Los Angeles. When I walked through downtown Redondo, which had been known as a "badland" when my parents first got married and lived there, I don't see any racial discrimination, I don't see a dystopia as Mike Davis put it. Driving around, I've seen many homeless shelters that provide a place to stay and food for such unfortunate people, and I didn't see many people sleeping in parks or on benches at bus stations (though I admit I did see a couple), but on a few occasions I've seen more homeless while driving around Allentown than I have seen on the streets of L.A. on my roundabout walks with my cousins. The views presented in this excerpt by Mark Davis seemed incredibly biased and were borderline decietful in my eyes. He magnified certain things that are actually happening on a smaller scale to try to prove his point that Los Angeles, instead of being the "town of dreams" and full of opprotunity for everyone, is in fact infested with mass riots, racism and anything else you can throw in.