Flee Club

... in which Ashley blames America first.

My buddy Harold had just returned from a trip to England (we never called it “The U.K.” in those days, though everyone seems to now), and reported his conclusion, based on the posh accents of London’s waitstaff, that Americans were comparatively stupid. Granted, we were living in Swamp Carolina at the time, smack dab in the chicken-fried South, where there was little evidence to counter his claim. The locals may well have known their way around a leaky crankcase, but they fell short on the verisimilitudes of Chaucer, which is what I assumed the Brits chatted about on the tram.

Convincing me that Blighty was superior to dumbass ‘Murica was not a hard sell, and I was enthralled with Harold’s stories of articulate tobacconists and worldly hotel clerks. He began excitedly talking up the idea that we, two jobless 20-year-olds, should move to England, where we might hobnob with the intellectual elite. And he had me convinced, in my youthful cluelessness, that we could move to England. I assumed that Harold may indeed have had the connections to make this happen. After all, he knew a guy who could paint your car for a hundred bucks, and another guy who could get us into the movies for free, so maybe he knew someone who could secure our entry into Great Britain. Someone who could wave us through passport control and maybe also had spare couches. We could get jobs at the Virgin Megastore.

I don’t have to tell you that no steps were taken to instigate this move. The idea was entertained through a week of doob-passing chitchat, and then Harold met a guy who promised him free skydiving lessons and his priorities shifted irreversibly. I moved on to Plan B of my life goals: Leading my garage band to superstardom despite no gigs and only two strings on my bass. This was, though ultimately unattained, the more realistic of the two ambitions.

What strikes me today in reviewing this colorized, 4K restoration of a memory is that no one among our peers, on hearing that we schemed to escape from the US, considered it anything less than a totally bitchin’ idea. And no one argued with our assertion that Europe was an oasis of scholarship and Enlightenment values compared to Gong Show America. Naturally, our collective, weed-soaked assumptions about this were based on almost nothing, our knowledge of European life having been gleaned from BBC sitcoms and the Cliff Notes for David Copperfield. We only knew that Europe had a hell of a lot more trains and a lot less of everything else. Less Hollywood, less WWF, less 700 Club, less NRA, less Garfield. Without all those artificial additives in the cultural diet, surely the Europeans were more sophisticated, indulging in Bach and Brancusi all day as they did. I mean, Shakespeare came from England, right? All we had was Stan Lee.

There was also a notion stirring in our blossoming brainstems that perhaps this cultural division between Budweiser and Bordeaux had some political dimension. We had the idea, passed down to us from our hippie forefathers, that the American Way was not only witless but warmongering. And like our elder siblings at the Human Be-In, we were not simply allergic to war but to the War Machine, the objectives of which we’d been fully aware since that issue of the Weekly Reader in fourth grade with the mushroom cloud on the cover. It seemed to us that the US was not only propagating chewing gum culture for its own dipstick citizenry but was superpowering its way across the globe to spread the good word about pure chewing satisfaction.

In this, it appears the fretful conservatives were right in ascribing our wrongheaded ideas about America to liberal indoctrination. Our fragile minds were filled with propaganda about nuclear annihilation being bad for the environment and other Marxist folklore. A steady diet of Dr. Seuss, Star Trek, Norman Lear, and Schoolhouse Rock (which committed the unforgivable faux pas of explaining the Constitution) had turned us into little-league nattering nabobs with a hate-on for Reaganomics. We had concluded from kindergarten onward that Uncle Sam was a big dookie head.

But the dookie head viewpoint was far from unanimous. Ergo, none among our crew of ignorant young Europhiles ever mentioned our desire to live outside the US to our parents. Our fathers - enlisted men, military civilians, and dock workers gainfully employed by the local Naval Shipyard - not only considered the proliferation of Garfield a sign of America’s economic (and therefore moral) supremacy (Garfield representing our God-given right to hate Mondays), they found the idea of a Paris vacation akin to communism. Our mothers, secure in the Whirlpools and Frigidaires of American domesticity, could not imagine a life in Oslo or Milan, where their preferred hairdryers could find no outlet.

So we certainly didn’t get it from them. In fact, through the sheer will of our non-violent (okay, sometimes pretty violent) resistance, almost none of the values and attitudes of the Paul Harvey acolytes who raised us made a dent in our Joe Strummer orthodoxy. And the question of one’s loyalty to the United States – should I stay or should I go? – seems eternally divided along these same political end zones. Or, at least for we restless youngsters in that bygone Atari age, divided along generational lines. We wanted to move to Europe because our parents weren’t there. In America, our parents were everywhere.   

A few decades and several lifetimes later, with the aid of someone who could wave me through passport control (my German wife), I finally did leave the United States. Reactions to my deserting my country during the Trumpian Troubles (“The Trumples”) were as expected. My fellow libtards erupted in angry jealousy. Given that maturity has enhanced our concerns about healthcare, childcare, and the minimum wage at Popeye’s, the rabid desire to escape America’s company-store servitude has intensified beyond the reach of Wellbutrin. Those who manage an escape tunnel from McDonaldland are viewed with sickening envy and even contempt.

The conservatives among my peeps concluded, predictably enough, that I had gone insane. American media's blockade of any and all information about non-US sections of the globe (save regular updates on airport bombings and knife attacks by headscarfed radicals) has pixelated the citizens’ conceptions of foreign lands. Some among my cowtown contemporaries picture Germany as a land of fly-infested, open-air markets where men in fezzes wield scimitars astride camels. Or, if slightly better educated, imagine beer-funneling dancers in dirndls and lederhosen, yodeling in cobblestone squares while undesirables are quietly marched to the camps in the background. Their rightful assumption, in the latter case, is that I would be among the undesirables. In the former case, the scimitars would surely be intended for my infidel neck.

But even without this level of pronounced dipshittery, a basic conservative fear of dislocation colors the idea of uprooting from the Greatest Country on Earth ™. The money will look strange. Traffic signs will be untranslatable. TVs will spout gibberish. They won’t have the right kind of mustard.* Why would anyone leave this land of convenient drive-thru hours and regular-scheduled programs, this clockwork society of President’s Day sales events and Super Bowl Sundays, to live in some upside-down country where nothing makes sense?

It’s frightening. And this is the more essential fear so useful to republican dogma. That isn’t just a foreign land, you see, but a people who are unknowable, perhaps dangerously so. Their ways are not only mysterious but eternally suspect. They’ve never eaten a Baconator – their religion may even prohibit it! If they had any influence over our way of life, they’d cancel Fox News and CNBC and replace them with 24-hour polkas and calls to prayer. Thank God we are here to protect you, your loved ones, and JP Morgan Chase from their exotic cultural poisons.

And so the Freedom Lovers struggle to protect their megachurch heritage, buying more guns to go with their guns, giving all their taxes to a sovereign military expansion, and voting to cast out the dirty immigrants. Meanwhile, my liberal brethren hunker down in their red-state madhouses, massaging their chakras and blocking the trolls, dreaming of a day when they might pack up their Ehrenreich paperbacks and skedaddle to a civilized country. Someplace where they sip espresso in museum cafes, chatting about social reform and existentialism. People have to be wiser and more cultivated overseas, don’t they?

I can neither confirm nor deny Harold’s circa 1987 observations about general intelligence levels in the nation formerly known as England. Brexit has erased any practical possibility of me and my EU-citizen spouse relocating to the UK, and I have yet to even visit the Nation of (surely highly articulate) Shopkeepers. Neither can I give a fair evaluation of the education or refinement of the German people, given that, as of this writing, I still don’t understand what the hell they’re saying a good 85% of the time.

But my experience so far suggests that they are not necessarily smarter than the average grease monkeys gapping sparkplugs in South Carolina sheds. The advantage the Europeans have is that they are not crazy. Because the problem with America is not that it’s a stupid country, but that it is - through its exploitative economy, its cults and militias, its empirical dominations, its corporate corruption, its sectarian politics, and its monster truck rallies – mentally ill. As it turns out, our hippie elders, despite their self-deceptions concerning Moby Grape, were comparatively level-headed. And they were on ‘shrooms!

And so, to answer the question I’m asked most often, yes, we do have a couch you can sleep on. I’m afraid that gig at the Virgin Megastore is out, though.

- A.H.

* Sweet and sour sauce will be, in fact, sour sauce.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)