[NYTr] On Fleeing the Country

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Aug 11, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp08112007.html

The Three Vices

On Fleeing the Country

By BEN TRIPP

Fleeing the country is taking longer than I thought it would. I’ve been
planning my escape for several years now: the tunnel is dug, the papers
forged, I stitched up an SS greatcoat out of old burlap sacks, made a
pair of jackboots out of prosciutto nicked from the canteen, and I’ve
memorized a few phrases of the kind of German they now speak in
Washington (“Karl Röve ist ein Zionen mit einem Vorhaut”). Yet I’m
still here, and I can’t quite say why. It’s not like I’m having the
time of my life waiting for Homeland Security goons to show up at the
house and shove an electric fucknozzle up my botty. The only obvious
reasons to stick around, besides some atavistic sense of patrie, are
bile, cowardice, and sloth, my three primary virtues if you exclude man
tits.

Four years ago when I first started crafting a hang glider out of
newspaper and broom handles, powered by a lawnmower engine with just
enough gas to get me over the Mexican border, the cave-trolls of the
radical Right were ascendant. It was an election year and Bush was
handing Kerry a plateful of his own windsurfing ass.

Evangelical Christians, baby-eating Libertarian cranks,
Neoconservatives, Paleoconservatives, and me-first, you-next
authoritarian assholes of every stripe roamed the American scene like
werewolves in a neonatal ward. If ever there was a good time to split,
it was then. As in Daniel 5:1-13, Belshazzar’s Feast was winding down,
the writing was on the wall , and the going was good. It seemed urgent
at the time to get out of the country while the passport system was
still valid. Yet I stuck around. And things got worse. The bilious
response was first, probably: a self-destructive desire to be here in
the States when things finally reach their nadir, just so I can get in
the old “I told you so” on the way to the Wal-Mart Detention Center.
But cannot the lesser but still pungent thrill of schadenfreude, or
relishing the misfortune of others, be enjoyed from a distance, such as
Southern France? No, that’s cowardice speaking, which is my next topic.
To enjoy a disaster, it must be complete and absolute; no disaster is
complete and absolute unless one is personally there. Which leads quite
naturally to cowardice.

I am afraid to leave. It was either Mahatma Gandhi or Scary Spice that
said, “Boy, you gotta pack your shit and get the hell out”. This is
sage advice until you see the mountain of shit I have to pack. My
blushing fiancée’s family left Ireland a few decades ago. This required
little more than to pack a hamper and walk away; the family heirlooms
at the time consisted of a busted fiddle and a delft macaroon plate.
They didn’t even have to cancel the electricity or the phone, because
there wasn’t any. For an American of the average type (and I am barely
even that), moving overseas is a matter of organizing some half-million
books, three quarters of a ton of old shirts, an exercise machine in
unused condition resembling the superstructure of the USS Tripoli,
numerous defunct automobiles, a box of obsolete cordless telephones,
eleven antique chairs from Mother’s great-aunt’s place in Boston, a tub
of vintage Viewmaster reels of travel and religious subjects, plus
viewer; a beaver hat, my brother’s kung fu equipment that he left
behind when he expatriated to China, enough DVDs to pave the Piazza San
Marco in Venice (which would make them campi movies, hahaha), a stuffed
hyena, a birthday candle in the shape of the number ‘4’, and a cracked
chamberpot—plus the fiddle and the plate. Then there’s the useless
stuff. Were I to move all this lumber to Ireland, for example, the
place might sink into the ocean. It would cost me as much to ship it
all overseas as it would to live overseas without it for six years.
Which is clearly what my brother figured out. But I’m not only afraid
of having to uproot my material goods and abandon my little comforts,
however daunting that may be. There’s also the pelf question.

Man cannot live on bread alone, but it beats eating locusts. How much
does it cost to move to another country? Nothing, compared to how much
it subsequently costs to be out of work in Denmark for three years,
consume my entire life savings (enough to purchase some fruit), and
finally end up following an hitherto undiscovered gleam as a mucker-out
of futbol stadium latrines. I cannot say, however, that I am more
afraid of the unknown (destitution in a foreign land) than I am of the
known (death and taxes, in that order). It’s not as if I’m holding out
for some Great White Hope (Barack Obama, for example) to come along and
save what’s left of the country I thought I knew. “But,” you inquire in
a hypothetical epiplexis, “Aren’t we making progress against the forces
of Sauron?” After all, since the last elections we’ve finally made some
big changes. We’re putting the progress back in progressive! The
anti-war, pro-environment, future-first movement has caught on. The
so-called Left is on fire, blogging away like crazy, making frontal
assaults on the congressional switchboards at all hours of the night
and day. We’ve gotten Democrats elected back into positions of power,
Republicans are dropping like flies (just exactly like flies), and a
woman is Speaker of the House, no less. Is that not something to love,
to keep fighting for?

No. Even as the Left rushes into the corridors of power, pitchforks and
torches aloft, we discover the government has vacated the premises. A
million people march on Washington, and nobody in the popular press
reports on it. Nobody in power pays it no mind. The majority of
Americans want to end the occupation of Iraq, and the least popular
president in modern history simply says, “no”, and that’s that. The
global climate is in crisis and politicians are talking about coal
plants. The Democrats (whores of a different color) have moved into the
ideological spectrum formerly occupied by Ronald Reagan, the
Republicans are squatting in Mussolini’s old office, and anybody that
isn’t preaching Biblical End Times is pissing up a rope. It was all
well and good to decry the antics of the Government when there was
still a chance of transformation within the bastions of Washington, and
thus a return to the country ‘tis of thee I used to sing about.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the notion of “my country” was
conditional. It’s not just a place, it’s a sense of being. Voltaire put
it thus:

    “Where then is the fatherland? Is it not a good field, whose owner,
lodged in a well-kept house, can say: "This field that I till, this
house that I have built, are mine; I live there protected by laws which
no tyrant can infringe. When those who, like me, possess fields and
houses, meet in their common interest, I have my voice in the assembly;
I am a part of everything, a part of the community, a part of the
dominion; there is my fatherland"?”

Read that again with special attention to the “no tyrant can infringe”,
“common interest”, and “voice in the assembly” bits. For the right sum
I can arrange to get you a hang glider. As for myself, the only reason
I’m still here is sloth, but that would take too much effort to explain.

Notes

i One could say, were one a Biblical scholar, this was no time for
Parsin our words.

ii Voltaire, “The Philosophical Dictionary”, 1752

[Ben Tripp is an independent filmmaker and all-around swine. His book is
Square In The Nuts. Mr. Tripp may be reached at credel at earthlink.net.]