Country of Exiles (9 page)

But one day, he nearly lost his backpack in an airport. He thought someone had stolen it as it passed under a metal detector. He panicked. He confronted the attendants. It turned out he was wrong; the bag had gotten misplaced somehow. But he had had “an awful fright,” he said. He had experienced his first Merwinesque moment.

Mobile businesspeople carrying remembering machines exist everywhere in America. They have helped create the
landscape of the temporary, which has opened up over the last fifteen years in close relation to the expanding network of highways and roads. This landscape, of course, in one form or another, has long been on the American scene; for many it
is
the American scene, the best in America, in which place (or places) have merit only in “strictly pragmatic terms,” as things to discard or forget once their uses have been explored and exploited.
³
It could just as well be called the landscape of the improvisational, the landscape of the flexible, or the landscape of the exchangeable and replaceable. In recent years, however, it has gotten bigger, emerging out of the economic universe, with its transnational firms, its rivers of goods, people, and data. It has presented as much a challenge to place as has the physical landscape of highways and gateways.

At least since 1985, the landscape of the temporary has been occupied by new classes of people: among them are the executives and managers who have left their home offices, and even their country, in search of opportunity and money. These people have willingly imposed on themselves an extremely flexible regime of work. Many have become
expatriates
, accustomed to temporary attachments; they see living and traveling abroad as an inevitable and desirable part of what they do. A huge pool of nonmanagerial temporary workers also belong to this landscape; in the recent past, such workers existed on the fringes, now they crowd the center of the labor markets. Along with these workers and managers, moreover, have come new kinds of temporary
housing
to serve them—“mansions” for executives, built to be quickly marketable; new chains of hotels and motels for mobile managers and professionals; and mobile homes for blue-collar men and women. For many Americans, rich or poor, the home has been reconceived to accommodate the new flexible patterns in work and management.

Many critics have deplored the existence of this landscape
of the temporary as a violation of what most Americans once imagined homelife and work to be; as much as any single feature of American society, it has discouraged settling down, made planning in the long-term hard—if not impossible—and transformed flux and uncertainty into normal, ever-present aspects of daily life.

Other observers—like late landscape writer John Brinckerhoff Jackson—have taken a different view. Indeed, Jackson, even though he understood profoundly how essential an abiding sense of place was to the well-being of any society, might also be called America’s most significant modern-day philosopher of the temporary. He coined the phrase “the landscape of the temporary” and affirmed it as the most typical American landscape. It evolved, he thought, out of forms of mobility that have always distinguished (and enlivened) American culture; he maintained, moreover, that a new sense of place might even come out of the fluid margins and roadways of American life. If people create their own worlds (and I believe they do), then Jackson’s teachings were as much a building block to the landscape of the temporary as anything else in America. He helped create an
intellectual
argument that, in its own right, helped other Americans defend and normalize the landscape of the temporary.

Business professionals of all types have pioneered the shift to flexibility, transforming temporary ties and relations into ordinary behavior. In the interests of global competition, they have accepted high degrees of “insecurity” and “ambiguity” (although they are paid good salaries for that acceptance).
⁴
“In this culture, we must find the sources of stability in ourselves,”
said Morris Schechtman, business consultant favored by many congressional Republicans, in his 1994
Working Without a Net
. “Internal security nets are portable.”
⁵
Rosabeth Kanter, consultant for Fortune 500 companies, has argued the same thing in her book
World Class
(1995). “Traditional values,” she said, “are eroding,” and we “must build new forms of security while embracing the emerging realities of flexibility, mobility, and change.”
⁶

By the mid-nineties, corporate managers were flying around the world more often, and more quickly, than ever before—here to sign a deal, there to play golf, here and there to convene a meeting, sign a deal, and play golf, all within a few days, sometimes on the
same day.
⁷
There were so many flying executives and other business people that airports and hotels were overflowing.
⁸

We might call many of these business people neo-expatriates, because they officially resided in their home country but were so often out of it as to be uncertain about where they were, or about what state or country they actually belonged to. (They were similar in this respect to the interstate truckers who moved the goods these men produced.) John Crompton, a snack-food executive with Pepsico in 1995, increased his air travel by 50 percent since the early nineties. E. V. Goings (good name), president of Tupperware in that same period, was not only versed in three languages, after months of language immersion, but had worked in Germany and Hong Kong. Barry Salzman, president of DoubleClick International, spent 75 percent of his time traveling in 1998, toting his requisite laptop to read his hundreds of e-mail messages daily and to help manage his global network of thirteen offices.
⁹

Michael Lorelli exemplifies the peripatetic executive of the age. A “traveling dad,” as he calls himself, he has gone from job
to job, lived in place after place, and known years of jet lag, visiting over eighty countries. He helped run Playtex International, Clairol, Apple Computer, and Pepsico. As president of Pepsico’s Pizza Hut International, he logged 300,000 miles. In the mid-nineties he presided over Tambrands Americas in White Plains, New York, maker of Tampax. While at Tambrands, he lived with his wife and two daughters in Darien, Connecticut, a community Vance Packard memorialized in his 1972 book
A Nation of Strangers
as a new kind of transplant town, known for its big residences where business managers lived temporarily, on their climb up the corporate ladder, and from which they commuted daily to New York. In those days, Packard wrote, the only people who showed much interest in the town’s affairs were the “wives of the transient,” who joined parent-teacher groups, served on the town government, and fund-raised (although their activities were always limited by prospects of future transplants to other places). By the nineties, even this reserve had dried up, as many traveling moms had joined husbands in pursuit of corporate careers.

In the fall of 1996, after Tambrands dissolved its Americas division to create a combined global operation, Lorelli, true to his destiny, pulled up “roots” and left Darien too, migrating to New Jersey to become president of a computer beeper-making business called Medicom.

By his own account, Lorelli paid a price for his chronic traveling, although not a price that seemed to slow him down. “You are away for as many as three weeks at a time,” he admitted in 1996, shortly before moving to New Jersey, “then you come back and you’re a zombie because you’re exhausted.”
¹⁰
So much time in the air, in fact, inspired him to write a children’s book—
Traveling Again, Dad?
which was profusely illustrated by Drew Struzan, a California artist well known for his posters for Steven Spielberg’s films
E.T
. and
Indiana Jones
. The
cover showed both author and illustrator waving from the windows of a corporate jet in the liftoff mode. Both men—it said on the jacket cover—created the book because they “believe that passing along our values is the true purpose of parenthood.”
¹¹

The book is odd. Narrated by an animal—the family’s hamster, Awesome—it seems, on first impression, like an apology from Lorelli to his wife and two young girls for leaving home so often. But it is really a sentimental gloss on the landscape of the temporary, amplified by Struzan’s Pollyannaish drawings and interspersed with snippets from family letters. It is unclear throughout—indeed, it is never stated—what “values” are being “passed on.” “I’m going to miss you, Dad,” says Awesome. “I wish you weren’t going away.” “Dad explained that being away from the family now and then was part of his job. Lots of moms and dads have to travel for work.” The girls are reassured: as Awesome points out, “the map on the refrigerator helps us to keep track of Dad’s travels.”

Along with neo-expatriates like Lorelli, however, have come the real thing: business expatriates who have lived abroad, managing and creating investments, properties, and companies for extended periods. Years ago, most people thought of American expatriates as artists or various bohemians who fled the crass money culture of their country to pursue some “higher” goal. Most longed to become writers or artists; some died in Europe; still others, like critic Malcolm Cowley in the 1920s, returned home, burdened by guilt, to write memoirs begging for forgiveness for having left the country.
¹²
Cowley called his book
Exile’s Return
.

Since the mid-1980s, these literary types have been superseded by a different breed who have little interest in “higher culture” and seek no forgiveness. Instead of fleeing money, they have been bringing it to the world.
¹³
Among them were
young American investment bankers, real estate specialists, and techno-experts, who had invaded even Vietnam with their laptops and wallets, eager to make their first million. “We’re creating a city here,” Rachel Loeb from Kansas City, who sold skyscraper space to businesses eager to build in “new” Saigon, told a reporter, “and I’m selling it to the fund managers and CEOs of the world. I don’t know many twenty-three-year-olds who can say that.”
¹⁴

In a burst of euphoria in 1995, the
Wall Street Journal
called people like Loeb the “footloose soldiers” of “history’s mightiest cultural and commercial empire.”
¹⁵
To some degree they resembled the peripatetic mining engineers, the Herbert Hoovers, of the turn of the century, but there were more of them, and they were much less animated by the need to return home to serve their country. Some were very “footloose” indeed, such as a clutch of American billionaires who notoriously moved abroad to escape the IRS.
¹⁶
Ted Arison, the “If you could see me now!” owner of Carnival Cruise Lines, the world’s biggest such company, lived in Israel, a tax-free paradise for Americans. The Campbell Soup heir John Dorrance III acquired Irish citizenship. The Dart brothers, Ken and Robert, sons of Kenneth Dart, the billionaire founder of the biggest foam-cup company in the world, renounced their U.S. citizenship. One lived in London, the other in the Cayman Islands. Like Dorrance, they became Irish citizens.
¹⁷

The Darts were a symptom of the bigger pattern, the movement of American firms abroad, which, in the form of subsidiaries or as direct foreign investment, had surpassed all other transnational business in the world.
¹⁸
But what did it mean that so many highly trained men and women—sometimes the most talented of Americans as well as the most money-hungry—no longer seemed to care for the places they came from and had lived in? How would they be made
accountable, and to whom? How would they be taxed, and by whom? And, if they could not be taxed, how would they keep any sense of place at all?
¹⁹
Year by year, managers and executives who claimed flexibility as the mark of the most advanced human activity were absent from the country. “Place for me,” one internationally mobile specialist said in 1994, is not something nailed down in time or geography, it “is a marker of change, chance, of opportunity.”
²⁰

Not only has management adopted absenteeism for itself, but it has imposed it on workers, skilled and unskilled, as well. Since 1980, new flexible labor reserves materialized, all configured to serve the interests of business, and all contributing to the further demise of the union movement. During World War II, union membership within the ranks of all nonagricultural workers had reached a record 35.5 percent, a figure that remained relatively stable into the 1960s. Following that decade, however, the movement stalled; by the seventies, it began a rapid decline. By 1995 only 16 percent of workers in the private sphere were in unions, and in 1998 the figure had dropped to 10 percent. The causes for this attrition were complex, but the most significant was the widespread reliance by business on cheap, flexible labor, a reliance that kept wages down, set worker against worker, and severely undermined worker solidarity.
²¹

The new flexible labor pools included native-born Americans, skilled and unskilled, who worked under contract for short periods of time, traveled anywhere to take up temporary employment and often lived hand-to-mouth. Legions of foreign migrant workers also belonged to these reserves, as did
immigrants, legal and illegal, many recruited into the country by hundreds of American firms—from the giant new meatpacking and chicken-producing factories of the South and Midwest to the fast-food chains and garment sweatshops on both coasts. Thirty years ago many of these businesses were unionized and paid good wages; in the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of nonunionized immigrants have toiled under conditions that most Americans would regard as intolerable.
²²

The last time management had this kind of control over labor was in the late nineteenth century, before the advent of unions and safeguards. It was at this time of great industrial growth that corporations, big and small, first produced “close to the market” (“just-in-time” may have been an American idea) and to create inexpensive labor pools that managers could draw on at will. “We hire men when we want them,” said an employer around 1900. “We have no permanent work force.”
²³
Business also blocked all immigration controls, to keep what historian Alexander Keyssar calls “brigades” of inexpensive workers “sufficiently large to permit the demand for labor to fluctuate widely and often.” “The presence of foreign-born workers enhanced the ability of employers to run their businesses … ‘close to the market’ ” and “to regard all workers as potential members of the reserve,” Keyssar writes.
²⁴
These reserves, immigrant and nonimmigrant, reached levels of 20 percent of the workforce; they were found in every major trade or industry, each with its own surplus of unemployed, available workers. Few belonged to the middle class, however, since professional employment, from teaching to law, provided job security.
²⁵