Country of Exiles (5 page)

Not surprisingly, current immigrants have embraced this view. Thus Janet Wolf, professor of English at the University of Rochester and a recent British migrant, declared in her book
Resident Alien
that she was drawn to America because it was “a
site for a potential self,” rather than a country with a past.
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Bharati Mukherjee, Indian-born novelist, said in 1997 that “I am an American for whom ‘America’ is the stage for the drama of self-transformation.”
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There is much truth, of course, in all of this. Ever since there was an America, it was an idea and a process, above all for those who have wanted to begin again or dreamed of starting over. But this can be carried too far.

In the current jargon, the country is never done, never there, never truly together, a setting suited best to those able to adapt painlessly to life’s shifting demands. In this context, no practical difference exists between those who colonized and settled here and those who immigrated here, between those born here and those en route, between hotels and historical monuments. As Newt Gingrich says, “anyone can be an American.” Or, as Michael Walzer insists, “anyone can come here.” In this context, fresh blood is always preferable to old blood, getting out always superior to remaining, new models always better than last year’s washed-up specimens, because all these resonate with the idea of becoming, of what it means—for some people anyway—to be an American. In this context, moreover, the conception of a place lodged in time and space, in which people share many of the same things, remember the same things, has no meaning. If America is an idea, then any place can be America. Such generalizing obscures the way countries are concrete places, have people in them, have histories of conflict and sacrifice in them, and have been literally sustained by “historical memories real and imaginary,” to quote philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
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The countervailing trends that so marked the country before 1970 seem to have lost much of their potency. Placelessness, therefore, presents a greater challenge to the country than ever, far more so than it did at the turn of the last century,
which for all of its chaos and change, was still a world of boundaries—in moral life, in politics, in the relations among men, women, and children, in national cultures and geographies. In our time, it is no longer a question of settling countries or continents but of standing ground against the placeless and learning how to marshal the power of centering against the landscape of the temporary.

Josiah Royce warned in 1907 that unless Americans acquired or cultivated a stronger sense of “provincial loyalty” as well as a livelier tie to their country (as opposed to the “nation” which, distinct from the country, projected abstract, insensitive institutional power), then they would have only themselves to blame when the national state intervened to take over those tasks the people could not do for themselves. The absence of provincial ideals, he said (and by this he did not mean “sectionalism”), opened the way for governmental meddling and management of all kinds. Without such ideals, “further centralization of power can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life.” “History shows that if you want a great people to be strong, you must depend upon provincial loyalties to mediate between the people and the nation.”
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Since Royce’s day, many Americans have often felt the need to promote a sense of place. Novelist Wallace Stegner has written that “our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy.” Critic Wendell Berry has observed that “our present ‘leaders’—the people of wealth and power—do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of love and study and careful work. They cannot take a place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place.”
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Boundary and space, place and freedom—these things do not contradict each other but go together. People need to feel a bond to a concrete reality larger than the self, a reality that gives deeper meaning to existence.
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They need to be stewards of the concrete places (not the world place or planet) in which they live, because to lose that stewardship is to lose faith in oneself and in one’s own society. Historically this concrete reality has taken the form of the country, the province, and the hometown because these have carried much particular meaning—from individual hopes and ideals to the very smell of the earth itself, the very curve or fullness of a particular landscape—that have enriched the lives of most ordinary people and helped them reach and think beyond themselves. People require a firm sense of place so they can dare to take risks. A society whose common store of memories has been beaten down or shattered is open to further disruption; for such a society cannot defend or protect itself from the stronger incursions of those who know what they want and how to get it.

Years ago, Thorstein Veblen, after hacking away at his cabin, descended from his mountaintop to write
Absentee Ownership
, an account of those people who viewed their properties only in money terms or as the means to profit and wealth. In the past twenty-five years, many Americans are still absentee in the sense Veblen meant, investing in a shadow world of concentrated wealth from which they hope to reap untold riches. But they are absent in other ways as well, absent from their children’s lives, absent from their communities and country, willing more than ever to delegate to others—by choice or by necessity—those responsibilities they once carried out themselves. The reasons for this are complex, but let me begin with highways and gateways, place-makers and destroyers.

I
n the summer of 1995, I visited the towns in Arkansas where Bill Clinton was born and grew up. To get to Hope from Hot Springs, I had to drive many miles down Interstate 30, a long, wide, four-lane highway that stretched to Dallas and beyond. Somewhere near Friendship, Arkansas, the highway grew jammed with trucks on all four lanes; the foothills of pine timber on either side of the road, so unrelieved in their thick greenness, took a back seat to a spectacle of movement. At one point, on a bridge over the Ouachita River, near Arkadelphia, I pulled over to the side of the road to stretch my legs and to look at a river I would likely never see again. A mist hovered over the black water. In that moment, I felt a terrible rush of sucking air. The bridge shook, as truck after loaded truck barreled through.

This road was inhospitable to anything but trucks. It was a passageway for trucks with goods on their way to Texas, and deeper into Mexico. On this day, the vehicles might have been more than forty-eight feet long (ten years earlier, such lengths
were rare), many in double-trailer combinations. The cargo was equally impressive, ranging from pesticides and logs to automobiles and watermelons. In 1980, the total intercity freight moved by truck in the United States was about 2 billion tons. In 1995, when I visited Hope, the figure had risen to 3.4 billion. By 1997 nearly 4 billion tons of raw materials and goods were being carried by trucks to domestic markets.
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The tonnage, the trucks, the road—all these revealed the new sweep of American trade. Since the 1950s, the American economy has reconnected with the international economy of the late nineteenth century. In those pre-1914 days, when few controls held back the movement of money, goods, and people, “only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the race,” as economic historian Karl Polanyi observed over fifty years ago.
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Yet that system did almost grind to a halt after World War I, as governments struggled to manage markets and as ideologies divided nations. Such post-twenties conditions, which many people took for granted and understood as irrevocable, lasted until around 1970, when the international economic order finally regained its ascendancy.

As never before, business has pierced through both national and international frontiers, a sign of which has been a new world of transport, with its highways on land, sea, and in the air, its gateways of entry and exit, and its almost bewildering diversity of vehicles. This world of movement has been conceived by enterprising businessmen in trucking, rail, and shipping; by technological innovations and government policies; and by the greatest corporate merger mania in American history. An intermodal system of mobility has been erected to link up many modes of transport into a “seamless whole.” It has ushered into life centers of commerce (such as the great ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles in California and Newark/Elizabeth
in New Jersey, to say nothing of the spectacular marine terminals in Texas, Virginia, southern Louisiana, and Oregon). And it has helped both to re-create the nature of place and to undermine it as well.

Throughout history, many Americans have longed to “eliminate all barriers between goods and people,” to quote Herbert Hoover.
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The dream of defeating time and space through transport and communication, in fact, has had more followers in America than in any other country. This is ironic, for even as Americans have seen roads and gateways as avenues of freedom, they have also arranged them into a system meant to discipline that freedom—a trap as well as an escape.
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The history of U.S. transport began in the early nineteenth century with the first turnpikes and canals, followed by the railroads, which bound the economy and country into a single unified market and which many Americans viewed as the principal source of economic as well as civic and moral improvement (a view still alive today).
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By mid-century, the first steam ships carried great numbers of people and goods across oceans with unheard-of speed and safety.

After 1920, cars, trucks, and airplanes were added to this empire of movement. At the same time, Americans much extended a distinct set of parallel roads—one national, the other local. Some time ago, the landscape writer J. B. Jackson distinguished between these two road systems. The national one he called “centrifugal,” or “palace,” because it reflected the interest of ruling elites, surged outward, and ignored boundaries. The local system, on the other hand, was “centripetal,” or “vernacular,” formed for ordinary people and to draw them
into their neighborhoods; it was “the bane of long-range travelers and of a government wanting to expedite military or commercial traffic.”
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In the 1950s, with the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, the federal government opted radically in behalf of the palace roads, betting on the success of an arterial network of paved interstate highways, and converting national road-building into a Faustian enterprise, the greatest public-works project in history.
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In the 1980s and nineties, every aspect of the national system took new form, visible and invisible. It took invisible form with the first electronic computer highways in the mid-1980s. By 1993, fifty million Americans were using computers at work, on average three times as many workers as in Japan, twice as many as in Germany.
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Computers allowed business to monitor and track the flow of goods, money, labor.
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Electronically transmitted, data of all kinds, as well as capital, overshot frontiers and created the illusion that borders did not exist.

The expansion of the visible paths of movement, with their railroads, airplanes, trucks, and ships, was even more dramatic. After years of decline, freight railroads returned in force, covering one-third more revenue-tonnage-miles in 1995 than in the 1980s, and 50 percent more than in the 1950s.
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By the mid-nineties there were 5,500 air carriers in operation (nearly double the sum in 1980) and more than 18,000 airports (public and private), a figure the rest of the world’s nations put together could hardly match.
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“All around the country,” complained an industry critic in 1998, “there are too many airports.”
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By the nineties, the United States had twenty-four million miles of paved roads, half of which had been added since 1965 and all of which equaled the combined miles of all the paved roads in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, Italy, and China.
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Along these roads, moreover, moved a river of registered trucks (from single-unit vehicles to giant combinations), which carried more than 80 percent of American domestic freight and whose numbers had risen fourfold between 1970 and 1995, from 14.2 million to nearly 58 million.
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Between 1990 and 1997 alone, the number of trucks on city and town roads increased by 50 percent, clogging the streets from San Diego to tiny Woodstock, Vermont.
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Fifteen thousand trucks a day, flowing in from the New Jersey Turnpike and its corridor roads, converged at Port Elizabeth/Newark in New Jersey alone, to pick up or dispatch their goods.
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Think of all those moving billboards, ever more garish and childlike in their colors, and ever longer too. In 1984 only 1 percent of trailers were over forty-eight feet in length; fifteen years later, fifty-three-footers had become the national standard. Despite the imposition of a federal freeze on truck lengths in 1991, many states found ways to bring longer trucks, even triple trailer combines, to the roads.
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Single, privately owned rigs, costing upwards of $150,000, had room enough for kitchens, exercise machines, and full-size bed closets.
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Elsewhere in the world, many governments—France and Germany included—have banned the use of triple trailers, limited the size of doubles, and restricted overall the size of individual vehicles; in the United States, regulations have been much less onerous.
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