The building of highways and gateways, the rush of trucks and trains, the spread of temporariness in work and life, the reliance on such service industries as gambling and

Temp firms increased in number from 800 in 1950 to 16,00 in 1993. (p. 68)

Another outcome of the growing landscape of the temporary has been the rise of newer kinds of housing for the affluent as well as the poor. (p. 76) Temporary housing for the affluent includes convention centers and resorts as well as hotels and motels near airports and business centers - places not often seen or visited by many of us.

Temporary housing of all kinds, then, has been cropping up since the late 1970’s but

J.B. Jackson in his 1994 book, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, said that trailers also resembled automobiles, impersonal and "easy to trade and sell." "When a better job becomes available somewhere else, the family can at least consider the wisdom of selling and finding similar accommodations wherever they go." Jackson also noted what he thought were the many blessings of trailer parks: the low costs, the ease of financing,

with it no new responsibilities, no change or expansion in the traditional routine." (p. 80; quotes from Jackson’s book, pp. 60-62) Leach counters by pointing out that trailer parks do not qualify as paradise,

The lure of the temporary prevented [Jackson], by and large from appreciating fully the plight of those who lived in modern trailer parks. (p. 80)

. . . the unskilled workers in mobile homes seem perfectly suited to the needs of the flexible labor market: they often move on a moment’s notice with little protest. Yet, unlike many skilled H-1B [immigrant professional] workers or academic adjuncts, who ultimately - for the most part - have more freedom to dictate their own fates, these workers have little power to shape fate on their own terms (although many would deny that anyone should help them, least of all the federal government). (pp. 88-89) Leach implies - but does not explicitly state - that Big Business, not the poor, directly and indirectly receives the lion’s share of the government dole. At that level, however, we don’t call it welfare but national interest or investment in America or some other high sounding title.

Government policies in the areas of taxation, immigration, education and business taken together amount to a huge welfare program for the very richest people in our country. Our transient society has come about largely as a consequence of bending the power of civil government and corporate practice to apply these policies. Established Power imposed the landscape of the temporary on others. Jackson argued that the vernacular often equaled mobility; but just the reverse could be claimed: that ordinary people have longed for stability and permanence (as much as for their opposite), while Established Power, in its commitment to expanded markets, has preferred change. (p. 85) Country of Exiles here presents to us the outworking in our own society of a principle laid down in Scripture: "The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty" (Proverbs 10:15). Exiles also points out that major universities have joined the ranks of Big Business in building the City of Wealth. Major universities now accept grants from large corporations for research projects which benefit those same corporations. Coupled with dwindling enrollments, this development has pushed institutions of higher learning to become market-driven and profit-oriented. After 1980, research universities shifted from national to global terrain. They embraced the transnational economy, striking alliances with companies around the world. Concerned about shrinking enrollments of native-born Americans, they turned to recruiting foreign students, foreign scholars, and wealthy immigrants. (pp. 123-124)

By the 1980’s American universities were competing for customers (students), particularly for students who could pay their way, but above all for wealthy foreign and immigrant students; as a result, many of the country’s most elite schools saw a marked dwindling of the traditional majority group. (p. 135)

Indeed, besides recruiting foreign students, schools from Harvard to Berkeley hired thousands of foreign postgraduate scholars and faculty, a practice begun long before 1990. (p. 137)

Throughout their history, America’s greatest universities aspired to do what Cardinal Newman, in his classic book The Idea of a University, said they should do - educate "the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out toward truth and grasp it." (p.147)

. . . insofar as American universities have emulated business practices and allied with corporations for revenue and status, they have exchanged what was left of an older form of open inquiry for a new internationalism tailored to the needs of the marketplace and indifferent to the life of the country. (p. 148) The universities’ switch from agents of Western culture to promoters of internationalism sacrifices Western Civilization on the altar of multiculturalism. Institutions of higher learning now comfortably ride the bandwagon of international commerce which promotes multicultural cosmopolitanism - building the World City of Man (for fun and profit). Market cosmopolitanism emerged after 1980 in much of the business world. It replaced Marxism (with which it once competed) in the sweep of its internationalist ambitions. (p.165)

Market libertarians all, the men at Cato have urged that all obstacles - religion, nation- alism, patriotism - be modified or dumped before the god of Productivity. (p. 166) I could go on multiplying quotes on the problems of our placeless society, but I want to also show the author’s insights on place as well. Near the end of his book, William Leach demonstrates his insight into how the need for a sense of place relates to the larger questions of culture and ethics. . . . there can be no culture built under unstable protean conditions, mainly at the borders, or by strangers. Any culture that hopes to endure, to say nothing of thrive, must be formed and sustained at the centers, not at the edges. America cannot be reimagined out of the materials spawned by geographical frontiers and urban edges, because it is at those very edges and frontiers where the world’s pimps and con artists congregate the most and the market forces are the most Darwinian, most virulent, and most subversive to the making of any kind of decent collective life. (p. 176) He also helps us view this picture of what our society has already begun to resemble in light of a strong sense of place. A strong sense of place, along with the boundaries that shape it and give it meaning not only fosters creativity but also helps to provide people - especially children - with and assurance that they will be protected and not abandoned. In our time, many people are riveted by the worst kinds of sexual predation, by child abuse especially. But in a society bent on dismantling boundaries as a regular fact of life and inclined to exalt a borderless mentality, no one should be surprised that other boundaries - especially those shielding children - should provide so little power to defend. Yet it is indisputable that children need a sense of place (along with and acceptance of boundaries that define and establish the safeness of place) in order to become self-reliant. This sense of place should be ideally created by parents (not by state authorities or by police), who care for and love their children and who give place to the feeling of "indestructibility" which every child needs. "Where firm boundaries are needed to give meaning to content and control to spontaneity, and do not hold," observed child analyst D.W. Winnicott, "there will be an increase in the number and power of antisocial individuals, tipping the balance against the mature in society." (p. 179, Winnicott quoted in Madeleine David and David Wallbridge, eds., Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the Work of D.W. Winnicott [New York: Brunner/Mazel Pub., 1990], p. 151)

But as Jackson . . . observed, boundaries "stand for law and permanence," "create neighbors," and "transform an amorphous environment into a human landscape." (p. 180) Country of Exiles accurately depicts society as bent on tearing down all walls, obliterating all boundaries. Those of us interested in community, permanence and a sense of place as aspects of the heavenly assembly need to listen to men like William Leach. We need to stop trying to ape the trends of the world in order to demonstrate our shallow attempts at relevance, and our churches need to fully express community in covenant, community rooted in the permanent and immovable. If we do not, we shall continue to drift, and our boundaries and standards will continue to follow the way of the world.