The great escape is the new American Dream

How splendid it would be (in theory) to live far from the madding MAGA crowd

Oh how sweet it would be to live the life of an expat, perhaps to ride one’s bike to a beach in Portugal, or to commune with the monkeys in the forests of Costa Rica, or to chill with the tulips in the Netherlands, or to wait out the rain in the pubs of Ireland…to live 24/7 virtually anywhere else but here in the belly of the beast.

Last June, when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage with his mouth hanging ajar like an assisted living elder, too frail to fight the bellowing evil lummox, I began my column this way: “Canada is too cold, New Zealand is too far, Portugal is too small.” I was serious.

And in November, when 49.8 percent of the electorate - the feckless, the oblivious, and the ignorant - voted to implode the American experiment, I joined the hordes of Google searchers who sought information on how to get the hell out. There’s a hot new website that dispenses expat advice, and since the election more than 50,000 disgusted Americans have signed up. Indeed, a Monmouth University pre-election poll says that “One-third (34 percent) of Americans would like to go and settle in another country if they were free to do so.”

I totally get it. I personally have no interest in sharing oxygen with the MAGA pod people. They look normal, but heaven help us. They’ve opened the gates for predatory freaks like Bobby Jr. They remind me of something Joni Mitchell once said: “My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species.” They walk among us, not caring a whit about what the convicted criminal has wrought in just one wretched week. If I want to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’ll stream the film. I sure as hell don’t want to live it.

Political commentator Charles Pierce has said, “Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man.” No thank you. I prefer to gaze at websites that detail the terms of residence in foreign countries. Dreaming is such a splendid pastime.

Not long ago, NBC News interviewed a North Carolina woman, Bianca Lynch, who had decamped with her family for reasons that make total sense to me: “It’s very very hard for us to see ourselves being in this country, having to be around so many people who felt (about Trump) that, ‘This is someone who needs to be in power’…I can’t change an entire country. I can simply move myself somewhere else and default to be happier.”

True that. I lived overseas for three years in the early ‘90s and it was sheer joy to escape America’s grotesqueries (guns, Newt Gingrich, theocrats). I truly would leave again, right now, in a heartbeat…um…if not for a wee list of…um…complicating factors:

My grandchildren.

My gainful employment.

My comfy condo.

My social network.

Oh well. Such are the ties that bind. I suspect that similar factors inhibit millions of expat dreamers. My ancestors came to this country circa 1900 and laid the foundation for the kind of life I’ve been lucky to build, and it ain’t easy to give up all the everyday goodies like the 5000 varieties of cereal reportedly on shelves and online.

Besides, it’s not easy to be a refugee. My friend Ken Kalfus, the novelist, recently wrote a book (2 a.m. in Middle America) that envisioned a mass American exodus due to strife on our soil, due to what he calls “the fragmentation of our public discourse,” but alas (spoiler alert) the pursuit of happiness abroad proved a dead end.

And earlier this month novelist Paul Theroux, a veteran expat, crafted his own caveat in the NY Times: “There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien.”

I can relate. I felt like an alien even in London, my home for three years, despite the vaunted Special Relationship. The Brits were condescending - when I tried to introduce myself to a neighbor, he lowered his eyes and introduced me to his dogs - and, now that I think of it, they never cleaned up after their dogs. The sidewalks in tony St. John’s Wood were, dare I say, an obstacle course. And the Brit bureaucracy? Don’t get me started. There was one particular intersection with several agencies that we nicknamed Incompetence Corner.

Navigating foreign bureaucracies would be a pain in the arse even if they’re competent. Spain has a nomad visa and residence permits, Mexico has temporary and permanent resident visas, New Zealand has work and study visas (for Americans way younger than me), France has a long-stay visa only for work and study (would a Substack newsletter qualify as work?), Portugal has a “D7” visa that requires a monthly “passive income,” Albania says you can stay there for a year without any visa, Ireland has retirement options that require close scrutiny of your finances by Irish accountants, Vietnam requires a work permit beyond its 30-day tourist visa…that’s ironic, right? We bombed the hell out of Vietnam to beat the commies - and 60 years later 86 percent of expats who’ve landed there are happy with the cost of living.

The thing is, I could pack up and go somewhere, having filled out all the forms, but America would follow me anyway. Our culture spreads everywhere, like a kudzu plant. If I were bicycling in the Netherlands (which has something called a DAFT visa, thanks to its Dutch American Friendship Treaty), and paused to open my phone, the first news alert would surely be the latest imbecilities bellowed by the MAGA wildebeest. And I’d probably be trying for the umpteenth time to unsubscribe to the emails I get from Tim Walz. Whoever he is.

So I guess I’ll stay put. We all have our ways to cope. One political columnist I know wrote this a few days ago: “As a hailstorm of executive orders began raining down on America, I literally thought, what can I do to escape this? The answer that came to me was very strange: Go clean out your spice rack. So I did. And discovered that, judging from the sell-by date on a rusted tin of red pepper, I hadn’t done a ruthless spice-rack purge since 1984…It was cleansing, I admit. It felt good. For about fifteen minutes.”

Not good enough. Dreaming of the great escape is forever.