| Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life by William Leach |
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| Books - Non-Fiction | |||
| Written by Alexander Zaitchik | |||
American civilization has always been less grounded than the others. The whole idea behind the national project is to move in and move up...
He offers a brief sketch of "place" in American life - with well worn quotes form Touqueville and Turner - but focuses on the recent developments he sees as the market driven hyper-causes of placelessness: an intermodal transport system that lays a thick weave of highways across the country and crowds them with fifty foot trucks; the 'mallification' of communities; increasing dependence on real-time communications technology; deregulation of trade and labor markets; the frenetic emptiness of a tourist industry that whores out the past; the corporatization and internationalization of American higher education; and the eerily similar cosmopolitanism of liberal academics and business elites who want to break off the conceptual and tax shackles the nation state itself. The hidden histories of these developments are rich and fascinating, but read like disconnected essays and fail the admittedly daunting task of capturing the "there"-less nature of US society in an ether neoliberal age. Nor does Leach seem attuned to the ways in which placenessness is becoming a global phenomenon, influencing Tehran as well as Tallahassee. Alas, the author is an old school social critic and lacks the philosophers bone to really nail his subject on the head. His closing exhortation that "it would be a good thing" if we remembered and rooted ourselves in a shared past is almost touching in its anachronistic flaccidity. But one gets the feeling that Leach knows this, and his blurb informs us that he is currently working on a book about butterflies.
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Mass internal migrations across the continent fueled US 'progress' until the beginning of the 20th century, and Americans still move more than any other people: to Dallas, to LA, to Prague.
