Free Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Page B

headquarters was nothing special, just another glass-walled box with a Pizza Hut–style mansard roof, a parking lot full of late-model cars, and nobody in sight but security guards. It was in a business subdivision so new that much of the earth was still exposed, with raw compacted clay and gravel up to the curving suburban sidewalks; and there was a fruit orchard just behind the offices, where one of the protestors escaped when chased by a guard. This, the visible landscape of military technology, was bland, closed-off, a mask. There were other United Technologies landscapes. Some were even more invisible, or only potential: the military bases where the Trident missiles were stationed; the targets they were intended for in this, the late rococo phase of the cold war; and the workplaces where they were manufactured—we were at design and corporate headquarters. (Nuclear weapons are traditionally pork-barreled all over the country, so that almost every state has an economic interest in their perpetuation and no one is responsible for
making
weapons.)
    Another United Technologies landscape was underground, that of the colossal fuel plume which was (and is) leaking toward the reservoir that holds most ofSan Jose’s drinking water. Although Silicon Valley’s industries are often thought of as clean for their lack of industrial-era smokestacks and other such visible emblems of poisons, they are full of such high-tech toxins in the workplace and in storage tanks leaching underground into the water table.
    The most visible UT landscape at the time of our protest was an ostentatious show of American painting, mostly landscapes, from the Manoogian Collection in Detroit, underwritten by this corporation which was destroying so many landscapes out of sight. The works in this show at San Francisco’s M. H. de Young ranged from the Hudson River School of the 1830s to American impressionism at the turn of the century, mostly heroic and idyllic landscapes, images of glorious possibility and pleasant interlude. This was what UT chose as its public face.
    Finding the landscape of Silicon Valley isn’t as easy as getting lost among the subdivisions and freeway exits and industrial parks. When Langdon Winner wrote a profile of Silicon Valley a few years ago, he reached for the Winchester Mystery House as its emblem. It’s an obvious one in a region whose other landmarks are scarce. The Stanford Linear Accelerator, cosponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission; Paramount’s Great America amusement park, with its Top Gun military flight simulator ride; Moffet Air Field; the off-limits Blue Cube missile control center next to Lockheed (officially called Onizuka Air Force Base after one of the
Challenger
’s victims); Mission Santa Clara—all contain something of the valley’s character as well, but Mrs. Winchester’s paranoiac maze in San Jose sums it up best.
    Sarah Winchester moved west after she became the widow of the man whose repeating rifle was the definitive weapon in western expansion—“the gun that won the West.” Frightened of the souls of the Native Americans killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, she sought spiritual advice and was told that as long as her house was being built, she was safe—and the result is the 160-room chaos of architecture that has been a local tourist attraction since 1922. The house had no overall plan, so that doors and staircases lead nowhere, windows open onto rooms added later, architectural details clash, and floor levels and design scales are inconsistent.Workers were kept busy twenty-four hours a day so that construction was always in process. Perhaps the house can be seen as a mad monument to mechanized capitalism. In the words of
Capital
itself: “If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labour—i.e., for shortening the working time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means for lengthening