“Takes soap and water for to keep it clean”

by David Benjamin

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps… But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, introduction

MADISON, Wis.—Over the years, in my capacity as a snoopy reporter, I’ve been received at corporate headquarters all over the world. Without even a finicky exception, I’ve found every one of them spotless. Nobody keeps it clean like the non-union janitors at DuPont, Toshiba, or Archer Daniels Midland.

We all know the psychedelic pleasure of entering a corporate HQ, where the soothing tones of canned Kostelanetz insinuate from invisible surround-sound. As you tread—soiled and guilty—on floors blindingly buffed, your gaze traces the height of a towering atrium toward a miraculously birdshit-free skylight, beneath which the cool breath of air-conditioning caresses the fronds of a bird-free grove of royal palms eighty feet tall. You pass statues by Picasso and mobiles by Calder. Irresistibly, you lingering at the pond beneath a Carrara marble fountain, where gold and calico koi glide lazily among the nympheas and water hyacinths.

Even the receptionist, behind her uncluttered, paperless titanium and polished granite island, looks as though she’s been steam-cleaned, chemically sanitized, sterilized, buffed, sanded, depilated, blow-dried, lacquered and shrink-wrapped in silk by Vera Wang.

In all the profit palaces I’ve trespassed, I never spotted a vagrant paper-clip, a crumpled ball of paper, a stray Post-It, a candy wrapper, a half-empty coffee cup, a gumwad, a booger, a loose hair, or even a dust mote. Nor did I even once spy a fly, or a cobweb, or—on all those acres of tinted, UV-protective glass—a fingerprint. 

The messiest HQ I ever visited was a giant electric utility in Italy. But this was a private/public partnership. Even there, though the facades were a little run-down and the shrubbery infested with timothy and ragweed, the insides were scrubbed and sparkling. This company had an even fussier partner in Japan, Mitsui Petrochemical, where neither petroleum nor any tonic more potent than Pine-Sol had ever stained the corporate escutcheon. Mitsui’s cleanliness regimen was so fanatic you could perform surgery in the toilet stalls. 

After such adventures, I’ve often wondered if these conglomerates see the irony—or hypocrisy?—in their devotion to keeping their nests so vigilantly antiseptic. 

For instance, you can probably run a white glove along every windowsill at BP’s home office in St. James Square without picking up a smudge. But if you wade briefly through the mangroves in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, you can still come away with oil-smell in your nostrils, dead branches sodden with deepwater crude and a handful of diesel muck bearing the bones of birds and baby gators suffocated by BP twelve summers ago. 

Photos of the Denver headquarters at Newmont, the earth’s largest mining company, are a clinical study in anal-retentiveness. It’s the sort of tabernacle where you tremble in dread to move a chair out of its waiting-room formation, lest an armed guard suddenly descend like Jehovah to drive you out of paradise at the point of a (polished) shepherd’s staff. This germless grotto, with its lemony woodwork and daily delivery of fresh-cut flowers, stands in stark contrast to the immense gashes ripped in the earth of Colorado, Africa and Indonesia by Newmont. This fastidious housekeeping regimen belies the wasting disease and death, groundwater corruption, poisonous lagoons and vast habitat destruction wrought in the corporation’s name, far, far away from its immaculate kehlsteinhaus. 

For further example, ten of America’s worst polluters are coal-burning power plants. But test the well-filtered air in these firms’ home offices, and you’d detect—I promise—nary a micron of the tons of cyanide, sulfur, carbon, mercury, hydrochloric acid, dioxin, arsenic, nitrogen oxide and plain old soot that their facilities waft upon the clueless millions who live downwind. 

I can’t help picturing how it might look if we were to match the hygiene profile of each HQ with that board of directors’ environmental record. For some companies, this would require visitors to take a few survival precautions before setting foot in the vestibule.

Picture me, arriving at such a company to interview the glib, handsome CEO. 

To get there, I weave my way, coughing, through a blackened wasteland—its only features the clawlike skeletons of trees—denuded by wildfires triggered by hot ash that sifts down from the vast toxic clouds spewed from a circle of 200-foot smokestacks. As I enter, SWAT-garbed sentries hastily deck me out in hip waders and fit me with an industrial-strength surgical mask, goggles, latex gloves, Kevlar flak jacket and a fireman’s helmet. “Don’t touch anything,” one of them says. As I tiptoe on oil- and urine-slicked floors toward the reception desk, I gingerly step around the razor-edged steel shavings, mine tailings, glass shards, mounds of garbage, heaps of asbestos, a small mountain of coal ash and puddles of caustic fluids that could eat right through my boots, shoes, socks and feet. My mask filters a miasma so dense with carcinogens that the air is purple and almost palpable. But I’ve been warned: the mask won’t protect me if I hit one of the lobby’s pockets of dioxide, monoxide, phosgene or methane. 

Every surface is streaked with soot. Pillars are cracked and crumbling. Portraits of the founders, clinging crookedly to the wall, are swathed in mildew and sagging in their frames, each one a torn, distorted effigy evoking Dorian Gray. The palms are dead. Yawning culverts poke from the walls regularly vomiting lumpy brown sewage that spreads across the lobby, carrying medical waste, contaminated needles, countless plastic bottles, dead fish and, here and there, a luckless asphyxiated duck. The water in the lobby’s grand aquarium has gone gray and fetid. Its former fish float shapelessly. In the pond beneath the clogged fountain, the koi, now faded from gold to mucus-yellow, have fared no better. Their cadavers lap against the shore while sinister bubbles rise up from the bottom and burst flatulently on the gummy surface. The water lilies are platforms of black slime.

Further on, I carefully step around the shriveled remains of wildlife—deer, squirrels, meerkats, egrets and cranes, mountain gorillas, an elephant.

The receptionist, wearing an orange hazmat suit and holding me at distance with a cattle-prod, breathes compressed air from tanks on her back. Her desk, assailed by clouds of flies, banked with washed-up salmon and oily waterfowl, is streaked with unnatural stains. It reeks of decomposition. Lying unnoticed on the reception desk, beside a reeking vase of wilted flowers, is a deceased penguin. 

Yeah, I know. This is all dark fantasy. As corporations and their political puppets continue denying the price of pollution, as Earth degenerates into an overheated orb wreathed in industrial scum and toxic exhaust, we can count on even our most shameless scofflaws to keep up appearances. Like Dr. Tyrell in his penthouse office in Blade Runner, with its Parthenon columns, spooky lighting and IMAX picture window, the gods of capitalism will always—bless their hygienic hearts—occupy spotless, fragrant, climate-immune aeries in immaculate glass towers, accessed by private helicopters, unsullied by the filth they create and unthreatened by the riffraff and replicants who muddle and struggle far, far below.