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

[class-worrier.livejournal.com]

I started to think in terms of cities, and even districts of cities, rather than nations

I think a lot of us think in those terms. I'd seriously consider leaving Scotland (and maybe Britain) if it wasn't for some important ties.

One point though - that mind-think means that it's not necessary to leave America, surely?
Just move to one of the liberal-magnet cities.

[(Anonymous)]

word!

[johnnyshades.livejournal.com]

you're right. you're completely right.

[violentblue.livejournal.com]

thank you for this.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

As the holder of an American passport who's lived in the UK since he was 4 years old, this whole disaster actually makes me want to move *back* to America. I tell you what, it's a horrible betrayal of one's gifts to hide out somewhere safe, making no difference, when there's places out there that really need good people fighting for them.

The problem, the threat to the world, isn't going to go away through intelligent people running away from it.

[starofpersia.livejournal.com]

I understand what you're getting at, there are aspects of Japan I love dearly, it is at many times a living hell for me. It's a different place for different people, and apart from legal abortions and the lack of hate crimes, it's an absolute abyss for women and queers. Like the fact that a film depicting multiple rapes and battering women was shown at an all women's erotic film festival I attended last week. I think it's easy to miss a lot of the shitty aspects of Japan if you live on the surface and don't speak the language and don't have to work a full time job in a Japanese office or language school. A lot of the negative aspects are subtler, and conveyed through passive aggressive actions, ie, you can go ahead and ask for that day off but please remember that it will cause all your coworkers to resent you for your selfish behavior.

Bush winning is gutting me, because for me, San Francisco IS HOME, it is the place where I feel comfortable, loved and understood. And the fact that the people of San Francisco are militantly opposed to Bush, it doesnt change the fact he rules America, and can impinge on our civil rights.

So what happens when the place I need to be is being held hostage by the Bush regime? It feels like a rock and a hard place.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If enough talented people leave the US, and if it keeps running up gigantic budget deficits by fighting wars, it will shrink to a manageable size. America is clearly on an identity quest. Let it become a red dwarf, shrunk down to its rural red states. Uninventive, intolerant, unproductive. That's its way of discovering 'who it really is'. Meanwhile, somewhere nicer, you can be discovering yours.

Why put your ingenuity at the service of 'a military monster chained to a political dwarf', as someone in the New York Review of Books puts it this month? Why generate tax revenue for a nation whose policies are not only disagreeable, but disastrous for the world, politically and ecologically?

[class-worrier.livejournal.com]

Nicely put. Liberals (for want of a better word) leaving an illiberal country can only make things worse, for those that live there and those that have to deal with them (i.e. the rest of us).

[(Anonymous)]

Aaaargh .. I am disgusted by this election result .. as an American overseas, all I can say is I'm so glad to be here (in Prague) .. I left after Bush stole the first election ... why Americans like being misused and shat on by their government is beyond me ... plain ignorance.

My response now: Never go back there to live. I will pick mushrooms in the Sumava forest, make soup, take trains, paint, love the landscape .. and not tie my future to a gutted plain of walmartification and antigay fundamentalism.

Then again Tesco is making inroads here fast ...

Please bring on global depression .. I want to live in the 19th Century in the 21st Century

Lawrence Wells
http://www.volny.cz/bikerbar (http://www.volny.cz/bikerbar)

[(Anonymous)]

It's naive to think that people can just up and leave. What's most important for most people is not whether their govt is mildly right-wing or very right-wing (as the choice was in the US) but their network of family, friends, social structures/relations etc., which even in this day and age tend to be overwhelmingly geographically based. Despite your praise for the tightly strutured social models in Japan, Nick, you yourself are something of an "electron libre" as the French say, and are probably more suited to a wandering, ad hoc modus operandi. There are some things to be gained from the "cut & paste" lifestyle, but also a certain depth that is lost. You live in Berlin, and you like the social democratic model of German govt, and yet you're really only floating on the surface of the social polis there. You spend a good part of your time on the Net where you converse with mainly Anglo-Saxon people and read the Anglo-Saxon media, your friends and acquaintances mostly aren't German or Berliners, you haven't bothered to learn the language so there are crucial ways in which you can't participate in the life of the city, you're not really much interested in the German culture of today, and when you do go out wandering, you search out familiarity in the same hipster/ethnic areas you'd go to in any city in the world... in short, you're not really living in Berlin, because you could be in any number of big cities, including American ones, leading exactly the same sort of life. If all this sounds like a criticism, it isn't really because it fits my own profile pretty well too. But it's a lifestyle that is not suited to everyone, and is, as I said above, one with its losses as well as its gains.

[(Anonymous)]

dear momus,

thanks so much for this post. its so encouraging, and echoes the exact sentiment that i have come to develop in the last year or two. there is so much creative energy, so many genuine, inventive, and intellectual people in america. seriously SO many. if i hadn't started to find some of them by my late teenage years, i could have been dead by now.

but that nation is not ours. it will be far more effective to let the US implode in its own grossly bloated romance with bigness, self-importance, and so-called 'moral-values' by deserting it, than by trying to change shit. im sure it won't come in our lifetimes, but someday there will be a world without nations. as it is, the citizens of every other country deserve to elect the american president more than we do. bush, kerry? what difference does it make for those living within our borders? either way we'll go on living in ultra comfort, guzzling gasoline as the price rises to ten dollars a gallon and beyond.

for my part i am going to act like said nation-free world is already here now. and i would encourage anyone with similar feelings to just up and get the fuck out. there are a lot of us, and if we all leave, all the artists, writers, intellectuals, scientists, and just good people in general, america will suffocate, and the condition of the world as a whole will get a whole lot better. so please, if you ever had the first thought about it, do it. if we all leave now, we'll even be able to see a strong imact in our lifetimes.

-shane

a californian writing from tokyo

[everybabyweeps.livejournal.com]

im going to knit a hat with that design on it, if you don't mind.

and i'm leaving.

Re: From the Independent Group to Robot Rockism

[(Anonymous)]

Considered lightly over rumours
Of cotton bud economics, heard amiss
Through reeking ear horns of cankered magic,
Or jigged sparklingly
At the wrong time, this worst time:
Words seep into oubliettes
As colours pulse from a billion throats
Of the referred,
Whose tongues drip prayer and rage,
Other souls,
Stricken and trickle bowelled,
Imponderable
In the immensity of their being.
And still,
Fucking still,
Blood mops,
Fools,
You theorise.

I'm not a religious man, but...

[gillen.livejournal.com]

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." (Revelation 18:2-4)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm disgusted and depressed by this election result, but the answer is not to leave but to stay and fight. Four years is a long time but not forever. We need to contest the power at its heart. The liberal half of the country needs to stay put and make its voice heard.

Re: From the Independent Group to Robot Rockism

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry,

For 'Whose tongues drip prayer and rage', read 'Whose deep tongues drip prayer and rage.'

Thanks,
Ben

Re: I'm not a religious man, but...

[(Anonymous)]

Good quote, although I question whether Nick Currie's voice is either strong or indeed originating in an abode of atemporal splendour and the highest good. For anyone interested in meaningful discourse, as opposed to poppycock and piffle, I warmly suggest Mary Midgely's 'The Myths We Live By'.

Re: I'm not a religious man, but...

[(Anonymous)]

Published by Routledge don't you know.

[plastickitty.livejournal.com]

Thank you Momus

Is changing your country like changing your LJ icon?

[xv.livejournal.com]

Half of this country voted democrat. That's impressive, especially considering that the Bush people breed a heckuvah lot more than I do. Personally, I don't want to see my country waste away. As internet users, we are already global citizens. I used to think that the internet would accelerate population movement/clustering among brainy types like us. Now I'm not so convinced, merely by observing myself. Not only have I stayed put in the precinct I was born, but the house. The internet satisfies my wanderlust. This virtual community is where I am comfortable.

Re: Is changing your country like changing your LJ icon?

[sneerpout.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[malo23.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to jump in here and say that I agree with you 100%. Japan can indeed be a living hell at times, and it has more problems--social, economical, political--than most people are willing to admit (see this book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0809039435/qid=1099486963/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-6302097-4616737?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) if you need further convincing). At the same time, and speaking as an American citizen, I, like many others, feel betrayed--wounded, even. I just don't understand how the American people (if it is in fact the American people who will *really* decide the outcome of this election) could vote for another four years of Bush, Jr. I mean, it boggles the mind. He lies, he cheats, he sneers at the camera...it's a nightmare, truly a nightmare. I don't know whether I'd want to go back to the U.S. at this point, if indeed Bush ends up re-ascending his throne, yet staying in Japan forever (and ever) certainly isn't a very appealing idea either (and, just for the record, I'm married to a Japanese woman and speak the language). Sometimes it seems as if there is *nowhere* left to go. A rock and a hard place, indeed. I'm feeling the crunch.

~m

[sneerpout.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, and am currently hosting a discussion as to which country I should settle in next. But if even a small proportion of the bright, talented, caring individuals in America were to turn their backs on their country in the light of this setback, there would be fewer forward-looking and sensitive people left to fight another day.

[xbrokenx.livejournal.com]

that is beautiful.
best thing ive read all week.

Hope instead of fear

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

I wish my backpack was as light as yours. Your message is one of hope instead of fear. The election was the opposite. In a moment like this I truly appreciate your journal. Feels a little better.