They Warned Me About Culture Shock. Not Culture Relief.

Some of us had always been strangers in the place where we grew up.

Photo by Eva Darron on Unsplash

After I first visited Europe in 2023 — a trip that required years of saving — someone told me, “Traveling outside the country really makes you appreciate what you have.”

What is that, exactly?

Student debt I was still paying off at the time? For a computer science degree that’s shed most of its value since 2016? Or the medical debt I accumulated thanks to an immune system wrecked by frequent overtime — and being someone I wasn’t — just to pay off said debt? Watching in horror as 40- and 50-something coworkers were laid off years before retirement, as if it wouldn’t happen to me too? Getting cut off and flipped off by fellow Americans stressed to the max on the crumbling roads around the immaculate corporate buildings where we worked? Or could it be the HOAs that nagged me about a leaf out of place, even in a rental? Maybe it was in the hours waiting for passing freight on Amtrak, robbing me of what little precious time I had to visit my family?

That’s the prize for escaping poverty. I know because I won it, mainly due to systemic forces outside of my control. That’s the American Dream, right?

And what I appreciate most of all is being browbeaten by certain older people — who grew up under the most forgiving socioeconomic conditions in history. They pulled the ladder up. And then they blamed younger generations for having trouble scaling the wall, new and improved with swinging Ninja Warrior pendulums and locusts. The Zohran Mamdanis among us — those rare few who beat the odds — just smiled and scaled the wall anyway. Of course, that’s not what I did. I climbed partway up, shrugged, and moved to Spain. How could I possibly live with myself? George Carlin said it best in his Life is Worth Losing comedy special…

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.

Carlin was implying the American experiment was a lost cause unless the citizens could at least identify and discuss the root cause of their woes: wealth inequality. But I have some bad news — he said this back in 2005.

In a semi-sane parallel universe, New Yorkers would’ve elected a Mamdani in response to the subprime mortgage crisis characterized by 1) predatory lending practices, 2) credit agencies OKing toxic securities, and 3) regulators drunk at the wheel. Banks were flooded with hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts. What of homeowner relief programs? They were graciously handed a leaky bucket with a broken handle. The government treated saving banks as essential and saving families as optional. The money was for institutions; the foreclosures were for everyone else — like my mom. And this was despite the Nordic nations having nearly identical banking crises in the early 1990s. Same deregulatory real estate frenzy, same implosion. Economists, bankers, and politicians knew about it. They let America’s version happen anyway.

Echoing Carlin, here’s what Christopher Hitchens had to say in his Vanity Fair piece America the Banana Republic:

What they put at risk, though, was other people’s money and other people’s property. How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place!

Uh, so it’s worse now, in case anyone hasn’t noticed.

Hitchens explained America was trending toward a banana republic back in 2008. If you’re wondering what I was doing to nip this madness in the bud, well, I was a woefully unenlightened teenager. But this shouldn’t be news to people who weren’t teenagers at that time, though. How truly stupendous it is that Trump has to brazenly exploit the preexisting state of play — on repeat — for people who vaguely identify with the left to consider, “Hm, isn’t it weird how all of our institutions are corporate interests in comically multi-layered Scooby Doo villain masks?”

Meanwhile, my European wife and I want to raise a family, and I’m not encouraged by the hilariously belated response from one of the most progressive voting blocks in America. Look, I’ve lived in the Midwest for many years… so I base my cynicism upon encountering “low-information” voters in real life who actually believed FEMA alerts could activate the homosexual nanobots otherwise lying dormant in the tainted blood of the vaccinated.

Don’t be surprised if Mamdani is ousted for trying to fulfill his promises, because undoing decades of inertia is so much more difficult and less popular than profiting from disaster. New York is one of the few places in America where I’d probably love to live, but acquaintances from there — people with “good jobs” — are barely able to afford rent.

Assuming America’s affordability trendline will somehow magically reverse in our favor — just because some guy got elected — is a disingenuous take, however. Good news: Mamdani just so happens to be one face of many in a progressive wave flowing across America. But well-meaning representatives can only do so much until right-wing voters and liberals can agree that the affordability crisis has a simple origin: the owners, as George Carlin called them, hoarding all of the wealth for themselves—

Wealth that the owners do not create. Workers create wealth, not deplorables playing with workers’ few remaining assets in the massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) we know as The Stock Market™. Thumbs-down on the recent housing updates.

Why do you think the American media never confronts the people taking all of the stuff? To imagine a banana republic — with a government and media ecosystem owned by the wealthy — would have any interest in fixing this “problem” is sheer delusion. And if there’s anything I can demonstrate on this blog, it’s that I’m also remarkably incapable of solving this problem.

By the way… why should I? I’m reminded of how, when I was a kid, the teachers made my classmates and I recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Yet, our recesses involved forming scrappy warbands to defend ourselves from bullies — because our teachers and other staff couldn’t care less about us. I do recall the teachers defending the bullies, though. The bullies were the cool kids. Their parents had money. Point being: why is one party bound by a pledge when the other isn’t?

And now, I’m a man with a wife. We banded together, in a sense. And her rights are being tread upon by fully-grown bullies.

When she told me she was ready to leave it all behind, finally, after years of back-and-forths about moving abroad, I did what any supportive partner would do: I worked with her to downsize our belongings into the most prized possessions that could fit into a few suitcases (including my Steam Deck of course), and we hopped on a plane. We now live in Galicia, Spain, where she feels better than ever; secure in her privacy, personal autonomy, and general safety. The locale was not selected by a manic fugue of spreadsheet calculations and listicle skimming. No, it emerged out of subjective preferences and plans that materialized over many years.

But not having the financial resources to begin with was the only reason we spent all of those years talking about moving abroad, rather than acting on it. Had we the wealth, my wife and I would’ve left several years prior — not to flee a uniquely dumb and excruciatingly preventable political situation — but seeking urbanism and acculturating beyond the confines of what we already knew for personal enrichment. And to be closer to my wife’s family. For us, the imagined motto of moving to Spain ultimately became: “Come for the empowerment, stay for the tapas.”

I cannot comprehensively enumerate every single mutually consistent axiom as to why we moved, because they’re surprisingly difficult to parse in retrospect. When you invite a singularity into your life, there’s gravitational lensing involved. That’s partly why others who live abroad tend to be cagey about their why. For one thing, that’s their business. Two, I tend to be more forthcoming than most… to my detriment. At least I’ll tell you the truth, not what I think you want to hear.

As Christopher Hitchens would say, believing in Tinker Bell doesn’t make her real. (Hitchslapped!)

Telling the truth can feel like voluntarily walking barefoot on a pile of thumbtacks. Rather than subjecting others to a punitive moral calculus, I prefer to hear them out and put myself in their shoes. My grandfather instilled that in me — along with an appreciation for freedom, travel, and Irish whiskey. You can manage all of that with your own shoes and a one-way ticket to wherever.

Be that as it may, I was unprepared for something when I arrived in Spain. It wasn’t culture shock.

No — when I stepped outside Madrid–Barajas Airport — I felt a surge of culture relief.

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Thanks for spending time here with us at Bebop Libre. Let’s conclude this bittersweet missive with a special message from David Byrne…