Life on the Compound

I sit in an old ranch house. From my desk I can look out seven windows at forty year old trees. I can hear three air-conditioners humming and sputtering. Behind me is a single bathroom and before I reach the bathroom door the hall branches off into two separate bedrooms, one is empty. Outside herds of stray cats, all the colors of a sandstorm rainbow, prowl through the night. Because somebody continues to feed them, they return day after day. They fight and mate on the roof, in the trees, on the hoods and trunks of cars, screaming to the unpeopled evening. Some of them sound like lost children when they mew. Their cries mix with the call to prayer when the sun goes down. It erupts in a cacophony, from all angles, without syncopation. In some countries I find the call to prayer beautiful, a kind of operatic fugue aimed straight into the keystones of our genetic code that inspired us to create religion. I do not feel that way here. There is no grace to the resonating chants here, and it is no small irony that the husky wails of these minarets come from the only Muslim country that believes god could create a world without music.

This collision of prayers, and white robes, and Sharia law doesn’t exist here though. Only the sounds can make it over the walls. Walls which most are surprised to discover were not necessary when the house I find myself in was built. They came later, much later.

In the beginning there was America. For Americans this statement is enough, for the rest of you we can say the beginning occurred when the Europeans, from that small Anglo Saxon continent in the middle of all the maps, obliterated themselves. The long march from the enlightenment across the oceans and jungles and deserts of the world had turned in on itself, twice, in less than 30 years. The United States of America rose, spread it wings, and declared itself the guardian angel of the only system that could have brought about such disaster, and the only system that could bring about rebirth. We, the Americans, would defend Europe, we would rebuild Japan, we would set forth to all of those former colonies the Europeans had brutally begun to make like us, and we would complete the metamorphosis, because the only other choice was the slow erosion into Godless communism.

It is the 60’s. For the British this place is the orient, for the Americans the middle east. For a generation this world, somewhere between Europe which we understood, and Asia, which we didn’t, had discovered, rediscovered and exploited the most important natural gift ever bestowed on any land in the world, oil. Its power is without precedent, it is death brought to life, black and foul and wonderful and beautiful. It makes people immensely wealthy. It makes people immensely powerful. It makes the collective efforts of a thousand alchemists over hundreds of years, trying to turn lead into gold, seem like a fly by night pyramid scheme. America gets here first.

It is a simple arrangement. America, Europe, the good guys, need oil. We need this oil to make weapons, to make cars, to make everything, and to make it faster and better than our enemies. We pay the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for this oil, and they pay us to help them get the oil out faster, more efficiently. They pay us for the weapons to defend the oil, and to defend the tiny yachtful of people in the kingdom who profit from it. We are Americans though, and we cannot live in Saudi Arabia. We work hard, and we play hard, we drink beer and whiskey, we want our wives to look sexy, to be seen with sexy wives. Our god is very different from their god.

We build a compound. We build tennis courts, racquetball courts, basketball courts, a big pool, a patio for barbecues, a ballroom for lavish parties, a garage to fix our American cars, a restaurant that cooks our American food, a corner store that stocks our American products, with a Laundromat to dry clean our American clothes. We put up signs that say “Drive Slowly Children at Play,” and they are. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, and they all go next door to the American school, and learn the American curriculum with their American friends. They grow up with American values, they fly back home to attend American colleges. The employees of this American company walk down tree lined streets dotted with the pink flowers of Mariposa and Dipladenia. They know each other’s names, they know each other’s children, and they make a lot of money.

It is the era of the Midwest. The good old boys are about to land on the moon. The coasts of America are filled with reefer madness, and war protests. Crime is high there, immigration is high there, the streets are dirty, and everyone is a stranger. We model our perfect community in Saudi Arabia after our perfect communities in the Midwest, in the South…but not that part of the South. It is not a suburb; it is a town, the kind of place where the statue of some old ranch hand who pacified the Indians rests in the town square. It is pure, conservative, and white. It is a mirror into the world they’ve left behind, the American dream seeded into the desert and lavished with water desalinated from the Red Sea.

The sand wives do not work, unless they really want to. Since women cannot drive many employ drivers. They employ gardeners. They employ people to wash their cars, clean their houses, and cook their food. They hire small armies of helpers and servants, otherwise they have no expenses, and servants are not expensive here. They save most of their money. They live a lifestyle they were not accustomed to at home. They are upper class bodies with middle class minds. Many come here on two year or three year contracts. Many stay here for twenty or thirty years. Their children grow up in this bizarro America. Some meet their husbands or wives here. They fly back to America with their parents to get married. They stay in America while their parents return.

It is 2010. A strange thing has happened. The Midwest has collapsed. In St. Louis, intrepid arsonists are lighting up foreclosed, brick homes. When the fire department arrives they blow the bricks onto the grass while putting out the fire. The bricks are then carted into old Cadillacs and driven down to Florida where they are sold to developers. This has happened with such frequency that the penalty for illegally transporting bricks is now close to that for arson. In Detroit, a careful shot can hunt pheasants and other game within a few miles of downtown in districts so long abandoned that forests grow between the walls of empty factories. The population of Detroit has dropped 25% in ten years. The coasts are no longer scary, dirty and dangerous. The coasts brought us Starbucks, Google, and Facebook. Mixed race families have risen 50% in less than a decade. Hispanics and Asians now outnumber African Americans. You have a one in five chance of meeting an agnostic or Atheist on the streets of any major city, maybe more. We haven’t landed on the moon for a long, long time.

Children are no longer allowed on the compound. The mid-western blondes have all left their husbands. Overweight, middle aged American men have begun collecting their second and third wives. Some from the Philippines, some from Thailand, some from Ethiopia and some from a host of other third world countries, they are sweet and beautiful. During the day, during the evening, during the week or on the weekend the streets are empty. A simple gate has become three square miles of concrete barriers running the length of breadth of the property. The birds that flock to the still beautiful trees bivouac atop rings of razor wire before they swoop over the walls. Like America we are spending more to protect less. The past has become more valuable than the future. In later years only death is certain, while the past can always be augmented by a generous sprinkling of improvements on the widening gaps between memories.

As the numbers within the walls dwindle, aging houses, unoccupied, fill with mold as the paper peels off the walls. Dusty, dead cars begin to outnumber new repairs in the compound garage. Middle managers drive Chevy Suburbans three hundred meters a day, from their houses to an office in the compound and back. After 20 years in the compound, no American in the main office speaks Arabic. Spots of rust become permanent rivulets of time running down the facades of aging structures. Everything gets repainted often.

All around me is a lattice of regret. Garbage cans filled with McDonald’s wrappers are too easy a metaphor for complacency, but there they are. Shrubbery once verdant is now overgrown. If complaints were the radioactive decay of real ideas, we’d all be glowing. Everyone still makes a lot of money, but having made it for so long and having accomplished so little, it is never enough. Ambition is a country house where you can die near trees.

This synchronicity, this abrupt shock to middle class hope in a dying middle America and this running-on-empty stagnant life in the American enclave of Saudi Arabia, strikes me as appropriate. Since the beginning of time, somewhere in the 1940’s, Americans have never had to fight for their dominance, they simply filled the void left by the previous powers. Like a child too young for the throne, accepting the crown from some vizier after his father had died suddenly, and without cause. The boy, wise beyond his years, manages a string of small miracles, but finds in his old age that his only real pride came from doing things young, not doing things well, and when his domain begins to recede has no magic tricks to fall back on, no trapdoors to the stocks of food and money he should have saved when the good times felt like they would last forever, and so dies not a visionary, but a miser, taking refuge in the successes of his short history, unable to confront the uncertainty of the future.

On the weekends the westerners pour out of their compounds in trucks and later SUV’s. They drive out to a secluded spot in the desert and have hash house harrier runs. They sing goofy songs, and practice bizarre rituals, because we are different from the people who live here. When the women leave the country they burn their black coveralls at the last hash, cleansing themselves from the source of their wealth. This group, like the compounds was almost entirely white once, but there is mixing, and it is a portent of things to come. There are more Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, even Saudis opening this trap door from tedium. They arrive there because they are here. When the compound was built, they weren’t.

It is the 60’s again. If one wants an expert, they pay a westerner. The pay western engineers, western educators, western MBA’s, western PHD’s, western consultants, and western managers. In the land of the king there was thousands of pharos. They put on their Stetsons and jeans and came to tame the sand.

The world has changed. Everyone else has learned to learn while America has forgotten. Our loss has been their gain; our loss of velocity and our lack of hunger their call to arms. And so we shrink here, in this small corner of the world, and we shrink at home, where the corona of the coasts glows as the black hole of the past dims and crushes the center down into invisible shards, as an all consuming job becomes a line item on the resumes of the unemployed mass. The beacon has become a distress signal.

We drive out from one compound to another. We drink moonshine and homemade wine and homemade beer. We drive to the American consulate, where they have real beer and real wine, and drink with Marines and women hungry for passports. We revel in our money, but not many speak in kind words about their jobs. We speak in a kind of Laurel and Hardy routine, everything is a Saudi’s fault. Often it is, but we have no incentive to change, work harder, innovate, we still get paid for failure. We live in a permanent state of disinterest. If things are bad at home we can always wait it out, we are America, since the beginning of time we have been the best, and so it will be later when we’re ready to return.

I am walking. It is the middle of the day. The compound feels like the opening montage of a zombie flick, if only there were tumbleweed around, the scene would be complete. I walk out of the compound. I pass a Saudi soldier manning a machine gun while watching some video on his blackberry. I walk through an iron gate. The guards are smoking and playing a card game. Another Saudi soldier is leaning back in his chair, sending a text. His rifle is at least ten feet away. Some friendly locals shine a flashlight on the engine of an entering car, they walk around the car with a mirror to check the undercarriage, they look at some bags and boxes in the trunk, but don’t inspect them. If the trunk was filled with fertilizer and a detonator nobody would know. How much effort is spent on the illusion of security, and from what noble pursuits is the money siphoned to pay for that illusion? It is like taking gas from a school bus to pay for a metal detector in a now inaccessible school.

This place, with values so different from our own, was still one of our most precious bubbles once upon a time. In the middle east it was a diet of American movies, American music, American cigarettes, and American dreams. Whenever a fatwa was loudly declared, more contraband quietly hummed along the highways of satellite signals. It was not Iraq or Afghanistan that spent up our cultural capital, we let it slip through our fingers. It was a promise to the world that we would be better. When we built our compounds we were joining our world to theirs, it was a symbiosis of hope. It is now a parasitic scar, with a steel straw sucking into the sand through clenched teeth. These new American technologies racing around the world, the Facebooks and Googles and twitters, are not bringing our content to them any longer. They are making their own. Our latest innovations have simply revealed that we have nothing left to say to them, nothing left to show them except that we tried, and now it is their turn.