Exit this Roman shell

[imomus]

For those of you thinking of leaving America today -- and there are many, I'm sure -- I'd say just do it. Walk away. Leaving Britain is the best thing I ever did. I lived for years there feeling like a political and cultural exile, trying to fight back with satire and a thousand subtle forms of stubbornness and resistance. But being an 'internal exile' is not good for the soul. My struggle with attitudes which seemed toxic to me started making me as hard, cynical and corrupt as the people and the attitudes I was fighting.

Soon I realised that British people were not going to change. At least not in my short lifetime. My contribution was never going to be accepted in that country. It was much easier to get up and go. You can change the world around you by simply getting on a plane and going to the place where they think like you, even if they don't speak the same language you speak. So I went to live in France. In Germany. In Japan. I became a world citizen.

I started to think in terms of cities, and even districts of cities, rather than nations. I made my own cut and paste environment, a place where I felt comfortable and valued. I selected its elements from the internet and the parts of the cities I loved and went to live in. I count the moment I left my incorrigible homeland as the moment my adult life really began. I am now a much happier and better adjusted person.

So just leave. America doesn't deserve you. Walk away. America doesn't need your talent, your creativity and your intelligence. Or rather, it needs them desperately, but it will never acknowledge that. It's too stupid to understand that. If it calls for you, it will call for you for the wrong reasons. It will call you up as a soldier. It will call for you as canon-fodder in some spurious and unnecessary war that serves the interests of 1% of its population and an even smaller percentage of the world's population. Even if it lets you live in relative peace as a mere civilian, it will force you to live in ways that destroy the world's weather systems and its environment. It will use your tax to fund pre-emptive wars of aggressive imperialism against impoverished nations with energy resources.

Leave while you still can. Leave as a civilian, not a soldier. Leave and lead the life you were born to lead. Your absence will hurt America economically, but it deserves that. And it doesn't deserve you.

Get a passport, get a visa. Work a job, save some money. Come to Europe, come to Japan. Life is more civilised here. Come as you are, come to work, come to play, come to stay. Make love to foreigners, not Americans. Make non-American babies. Make your children world citizens, as you make yourself one.

Then you know in your brain
Leave the capitol!
Exit this roman shell!
Then you know you must leave the capitol

Leave the capitol!
Exit this roman shell!

It will not drag me down
I will leave this ten times town
I will leave this fucking dump
One room, one room

(The Fall, 'Leave The Capitol')

Comments

[jake82.livejournal.com]

I'm a Canadian citizen who has lived in the United States all my life, and I have every intention of staying here. Change is only going to happen from the inside out-- how long is it going to take, if all the intellegent liberals leave as you suggest, before the country implodes? Four years? Eight? Or will this neo-con paradise just go on indefinitely, bringing the rest of the world down with it? Running away isn't going to solve anything-- the issue still exists even if we aren't living in it.

Believe me, I know what you're talking about when you speak of he toxicity of being exiled in your own land, but doing the expatriate thing won't do much more than make ourselves feel better. I think the bigger issue is the pessimism of American liberals... all along this year, people have been saying "vote Kerry!" but muttering under their breaths about how they know he won't win. However you feel about him, I think Michael Moore put it well (http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2004-09-20) in a message from a few months back addressing the issue. For the past week, all I've been getting from my liberal friends is "Bush is going to win. No, you're so wrong-- I'm certain he'll win!" and with every new red state appearing on the electoral map, "see, Kerry has no chance! He's already lost." Regardless of the 150 electoral votes that were still up for grabs, everyone was already proclaiming that Bush was going to win by a landslide. Well, it turns out he didn't. In electoral terms, he won by less than a million votes.

Such a paltry victory should do the opposite of triggering all of our hope (intellegent liberals like the people who read this, I assume) running for the hills. We need to stay and fix things here, because if we don't no one else is going to... waiting for everything to collapse is not a viable solution-- we may as well be supporting them. We've turned ourselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy: Kerry is going to lose, so why even bother?

Why? Because if maybe 200,000 people had bothered we wouldn't be dealing with four more years of the most disastrous presidency in our history and probably widespread irrevocable damage to society, the environment, foreign relations, blah fuckin blah.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm a Canadian citizen who has lived in the United States all my life, and I have every intention of staying here. Change is only going to happen from the inside out-- how long is it going to take, if all the intellegent liberals leave as you suggest, before the country implodes? Four years? Eight?

But surely, by the logic of your own argument, you should be working within Canada to change it from the inside? Your example is like me saying 'I went to Japan and worked on changing their society instead of my own. I wasn't a quitter.' You did quit your native land, you just didn't quit politics. Which is fine, and exactly what I'm arguing. You can do art and politics wherever you are. You don't need to bind yourself to a bunch of suspicious farmers in Nebraska. Why should they define all your dialectics?

[jake82.livejournal.com]

I practically consider myself American despite my Canadian passport-- I never lived there, my Candian-born parents were already living in American when my mom went back to Vancouver to, you know, birth me, so as to give me a Canadian citizenship. I'm planning on becoming an American citizen in the next year or two (my mom already has).

Staying in the United States is important because what Bush and the neo-cons are doing is widespread and has global effects-- if you're an American liberal (as I pretty much consider myself) running away from probably the most important fight in the world in the pursuit of happiness seems the worst thing you could do at this point.

A number of commenters, here and in other blogs today, have been saying "there's a point at which activism seems useless and loosening your efforts on the fight seems the best thing to do", as if this all means we have seen a sweeping defeat and should renounce the fight. While I can understand this initial feeling of dejection, I hope people will get past it and realize that 49% of the country doesn't want Bush as their president-- and those are just the people who voted. The fight hasn't been lost by a long shot, and running away isn't going to improve matters.

There was an interesting point made on the blog Boing Boing today:

Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

"Change comes from discontent," he said. "And right now, there's a lot of discontent."