Nothing in America is ever closed anymore. Things are relocated, consolidated, optimized, aligned — and then, some years later, discovered to have been empty for quite some time. We have abolished the ending and replaced it with a procedure, and the procedure is always the same: first the contents are removed, in stages, across fiscal years, each stage too small to mourn; then the shell is pronounced closed, to general surprise, by people who were not paying attention at the proper time, which is to say at the beginning.
A factory in Iowa will now spend two years losing its products one at a time — first the windrowers, then the balers — until nothing remains inside it but the announcement that it has closed. This is not cruelty, and it is not even, particularly, deception. It is simply the modern grammar of corporate change, and like all grammar it repays study. For the practical consequence is this: by the time the word closure is permitted into print, there is nothing left to save, and everyone concerned — the town, the union, the dealer down the road — discovers that the argument they had prepared was answered two years earlier, in a sentence they did not think to contest. Power, in our time, prefers the preliminary verb. Relocate. Consolidate. Evaluate. Whoever learns to read those words as decisions, rather than as preliminaries to decisions, will never be surprised by anything an institution does again.
There is, too, a number now, and numbers are always more candid than adjectives. A line of sugar cane harvesters built some thirty-five machines a year in Louisiana for the American market; the line is going to Brazil, where the demand, like everything else that matters, had already gone. Thirty-five is not a statistic. It is a price — the disclosed exchange rate between a domestic asset and its survival. Below a certain volume, a plant, a product line, a dealership, a service territory no longer stands on its merits. It stands on sufferance, awaiting arithmetic. I should think every asset in America now carries such a number, invisibly, the way certain houses carry a smell of gas. The strategic question is no longer whether one is valued, or historic, or well run — all the words with which the doomed have always comforted themselves. The question is which side of one’s number one is on, and whether one intends to find out before the institution does.
It follows — though it is rarely said — that a region’s protection has quietly changed its nature. For a century a place was safe inside a manufacturer’s map because of what it was: loyal, historic, three generations of dealers, the founder’s own county. Sentiment was a currency, and it purchased real security. That currency has been retired, as currencies are, without ceremony. What purchases security now is volume, and volume alone; and the withdrawal of protection will not announce itself in any headline a farmer will ever see. It will arrive as distance — the part that takes a week, the technician who covers three counties, the dealership that is now a depot. Empires do not withdraw from their provinces all at once. They begin by making the provinces harder to reach.
The countermove exists, and it is unglamorous, which is how one recognizes a real strategy. In this Valley a packing company has been spending its own money to become, within its own territory, a concentration — new lines, new machinery, a product consistent enough that the arithmetic of others must reckon with it. One does not survive a volume economy by appealing to history. One survives it by becoming, locally, the volume.
A final observation, since it costs nothing and predicts a great deal. As the domestic map contracts, the language of commitment expands; the two curves are related, and not by accident. Commitment, in the modern announcement, is a function of departure — it is declared most fervently at the moment of leaving, and with an eloquence proportional to the distance involved. This is not hypocrisy, a charge too crude to be interesting. It is logistics. The interpretation of a decision must be transported to its destination just as surely as the machinery, and it arrives, if the work is done properly, a full season ahead of the trucks.
Institutions, like empires, do not announce their retreats. They redescribe them — and rely, correctly for the most part, on a public that reads the description and never consults the itinerary. The itinerary is available. It always was. It is written in the verbs, priced in the volumes, and signed, as these things always are, by no one in particular.