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

Re: sure, Roethke is canadian. but i'm not saying i want to move there. even if it's a good idea.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see so much poetry on this thread. Speaking of which, I wanted to mention that I just learned that an American poet who lived for twenty years in 'exile' in London, Michael Donaghy, died in September, aged 50.



Michael was a very precise, startling, witty writer who produced only a handful of poems each year, memorised them, and performed them compellingly. His work has some of the lucid, ludic precision of Nicholson Baker. He was a charming, loveable man, an avid Irish folk musician and a great teller of jokes. I was lucky enough to know him a little when I hung out on the fringes of the poetry scene at the Troubadour coffee house in Earl's Court in the late 80s. He's remembered by friends here (http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/story.jsp?story=567734) and you can read an interview here (http://www.mdx.ac.uk/rescen/NWPodia/NWpodRLee.html). Michael was an example of an American under-appreciated in his own land, flourishing away from the US -- he was published by Oxford Poetry, and won several prizes. Many of the voices on that reminiscences thread are American friends of mine who ended up, permanently, in London: Tamar Yoseloff, Alison Spritzler-Rose.