Culture Shock and Kyle Rittenhouse

And street brawls at the end of empire

As you probably know, I was born in the United States but now live in Europe. I moved six years ago, meaning 39 years of my life were lived within my birth country and the rest of my life has been in France, in Luxembourg, and also a bit in Ireland. I’ve also lived some time in Berlin, and spent several weeks in parts of the United Kingdom.

Almost every traveler to a foreign country has an experience with the phenomenon of “culture shock.” It’s a concept that floats around in the public mind despite never really quite being defined, something we all know exists but cannot really describe.

When depicted in films and television series, culture shock usually manifests in a moment a tourist encounters a local custom that makes no sense or seems so strange as to be not just foreign but alien. In such media narratives, it’s typically a middle-class American visiting an Asian, African, or South American location, and often the “shock” is related to food (eating animals, insects, or fish that are not considered edible in the United States, for example). Or there is some misunderstanding based on a mistranslation, a local meaning one thing by a word while the visitor means another.

My own experiences were nothing of the sort, and what happens in such moments is much more complex than can be represented in a film or television show. In moments of actual culture shock, there is some invisible aspect of your worldview that is challenged when you encounter its non-universality, leading to a severe sense of disorientation and sometimes even mental breakdown.

Crying in the Carrefour

One of my closest friends, who moved to France at the same time I did, can account the same initial experience of culture shock that I had: we both broke down in grocery stores. Twice, actually: once in France, and once again when visiting the United States after being in France.

Grocery shopping is a very basic activity, though it is hardly a natural one. Grocery stores aren’t very old: we’ve only been procuring our food this way for a little over a century. In fact, the very first “self-service” grocery store was founded in 1916; in the century before, if you were not buying your food in open markets you were entering a shop, providing a list to a clerk, and they picked out your order for you.

As a side note, it actually took a lot of effort to get humans accustomed to the modern grocery store. Early stores hired guides to explain to customers that not only were they allowed to take items off the shelf themselves, they were actually supposed to. Also, they used markings on the floor to tell you which direction to go, especially important when they introduced shopping carts or trolleys for customers to use.

So, grocery shopping is not very old, is hardly intuitive, and has no historical precedent. Despite this, it has become automatic to most of us, and we never think about this strange custom unless something “shocks” us into awareness.

For both my friend and I, there were several aspects of our own moments of culture shock, and the times and circumstances under which they were occurred, yet they were suprisingly identical. As way of background, both she and I were lower-class Americans: neither of us had college degrees, nor health insurance, nor reliable wages. Neither of us were in positions where we knew we could definitely pay the next month’s rent, so balancing our tiny incomes to try to pay for expenses most take for granted required finding “creative” ways to procure things we needed.

For her, this meant things like taking large stacks of napkins and sugar packets from corporate coffeeshops and gaming the discount sections of the grocery store. For me, this meant taking things home from work that I maybe wasn’t supposed to and only shopping at my local grocery store when a friend was working, making sure I found a way to get in his cash register line because he’d “forget'“ to ring up half the items in my basket.

Yeah. She and I were both “thieves,” I guess. I don’t know if she ever shoplifted, but I certainly did. I never bought toothpaste or soap at the stores from which I procured them. Bulk sections in high-end “organic co-ops” were my favorite, because they’re really just “make your own price” stations. No one checks that you labeled that $30-a-pound bulk tea as the $5-a-pound inferior tea next to it, or that the brown paper bag you filled with almond flour wasn’t really just regular flour. Also, all you have to do to pay conventional prices for organic vegetables is to quickly peel off a sticker.

Yeah, this is all really, really petty, and it was a history of petty stuff like that which brought both myself and my friend individually to tears in grocery stores in France.

There is a moment someone like her or I experiences staring at the French prices for things we could never afford in the US that cannot be depicted in any film. There’s some gasping, yes, and some mutters of awe and suprise, but what really happens is fully interior. The earth feels like it has fallen out from under you as you start doing calculations and realise that even with the punitive exchange rate you are about to spend a quarter of what you would spend in the US for the same amount of food. That theiving part of you, which you conjured to make sure you could survive, is as shocked as you, and also a bit afraid because he knows he’s no longer needed.

At the same time, you’re very disoriented because nothing is really the same. Sure, everything is actually of better quality and so cheap that you want to cry, but you suddenly cannot remember how to grocery shop anymore. Nothing is next to what you think it should be next to, and the quantities are different, and so is the money you pay with, and it’s all just too much so you hurry out and sit on a bench like a zombie.

The same thing happens when you go back to the US, by the way. Actually, it’s worse that time. They call this “reverse culture shock” but it’s the same mechanism but just more alienating. Nothing in an American grocery store looks like food anymore, and the prices don’t make sense, and especially the bread they sell resembles nothing that you now understand bread to be.

It isn’t just with grocery shopping that this happens. The longer you are in a foreign country, the more you start to notice that your entire framework of existence is different from your environment. Especially, the things you thought made you American are actually not the problem, but rather things you never realised made you American. You’re so much louder than everyone else even when you think you are being quiet, and all the subtle friendly gestures you make to others—no matter how introverted you are—come off as extreme and fake.

Even wilder are all the subtle beliefs you didn’t realise you had, even as someone who took pride in a critical stance towards American culture. These are very difficult to describe because they are so invisible, and you only start to understand them when you notice what people in your new environment take for granted, too. My friend experienced this when she realised she couldn’t carry the knife she always had on her any longer, the one she needed in the US to protect herself from aggressive men in that renowned capitol of social justice, Portland, Oregon. I experienced related incidents: getting pushed aside by women on a sidewalk, walking by playgrounds and noticing more fathers than mothers with their children, and noting with utter surprise how female joggers late at night never crossed the street to avoid a man on their path.

That is, we both discovered that women don’t have as much reason to be afraid of men, or aren’t taught to be so afraid of them despite still experiencing sex-based based violence. Also, relationships are a bit more equal in France in really subtle ways which are quite difficult to quantify.

You also see many, many more “mixed-race” couples, so much in fact that you finally realise that “mixed-race” doesn’t exist. One thing you notice quickly is how something you rarely see in the US (a minority male with a white-skinned female) is just another thing, nothing strange or rare or remarkable. This of course isn’t to say that there is no racism in France (there certainly is), but rather that the default there is much more equal than even in woke US subcultures.¹

The False Narratives of Kyle Rittenhouse

I could write for hours on all the other ways that culture shock has manifested for me since living in Europe, but I just had another incident of culture shock that surprised the fuck out of me. It was about Kyle Rittenhouse, or, rather, about the invisible frameworks by which Americans who consider themselves “anti-racist” as well as those who consider themselves “patriotic” encountered the events that led to his trial and his eventual acquittal.

When the initial event happened, I was still on social media and still mostly embedded in woke ideology. By that, I mean I was still reading and mostly agreeing with leftist, Antifa-aligned friends and their commentary about the situation. I read all the news stories about the event that I saw, of course avoiding any media outlets that I knew would give a particular spin I wouldn’t agree with. Some friends wrote or shared tributes to the men Rittenhouse killed, calling them anti-racist heroes, comrades, and other glowing terms.

I saw of course the photos of the men who were killed, and of course marked their skin color, but one thing that still boggles my mind is how despite my careful attention to detail I somehow believed the victims were black people. I’m no idiot, apparently—I’ve had several other friends, all of whom give astute attention to such things, report the same mistake. A few journalists have lately pointed to this same phenomenon as well, as well as compiling major news stories about the case and noting that the race of the victims was rarely if ever identified. That is, many news stories themselves actively gave the impression that the victims were not white.

There were many other strange discrepancies between the narrative I believed and the actual details of the event. For instance, Rittenhouse was repeatedly said to have “crossed state lines” with a gun into a community to which he had “no ties,” yet the distance he traveled was 21 miles (33 kilometers)² and the gun was already in Kenosha. Also, he worked in Kenosha, and his father, family members, and friends lived there. Also, the popular statement many of us believed (including me) that his mother had driven him there was also false.

The problem is that all these false statements fit very well into a cultural framework which was fully invisible to me, so well that I never thought to question any of it. Nor did I ever once think to question the woke narration of the dead men as anti-racist heroes who were there to protect the black community and seek racial justice. The first man shot, Joseph Rosenbaum, had just been released from a mental hospital the day of the event, and had plead guilty to charges of child-rape:

…Rosenbaum was charged by a grand jury with 11 counts of child molestation and inappropriate sexual activity with children, including anal rape. The victims were five boys ranging in age from nine to 11 years old. He was convicted of two amended counts as part of a plea deal.

Anthony Huber, whom many of my anarchist friends painted as an Antifa hero, also plead guilty to domestic abuse (strangling and “false imprisonment” of a previous girlfriend) and was the subject of no-contact orders from her.

While of course the criminal histories of those who were killed attacking Rittenhouse do not mean they deserved to be killed, what is particularly important here is how the narrative of them being “heroes” arose. This occurred through the very same mechanism that created the narrative of Rittenhouse being a “white supremacist” and “vigilante,” or aligned with groups like The Proud Boys and other right-wing street gangs.

All these narratives arose because it was the only way we could fit this incident into the woke ideological framework. To challenge any part of this narrative required willingly experiencing a kind of culture shock in which the invisible foundations of our worldview would be challenged.

This is the same process that also occurred for people who saw Rittenhouse as a hero and immediately assumed that he was protecting himself and his community from violent thugs. This narrative fits perfectly into a fully different ideological framework, and is just as false.

Also, there are uniquely American assumptions on all sides which you only really notice when you’re from the United States but no longer live there. First of all, the fact that any of them had guns (Rittenhouse, and also the people who attacked him) is such a bizarre aspect of American exceptionalism that I fail each time explaining it to friends here. Rittenhouse would never have been able to have an assault rifle here, but also none of the people in that riot would have had guns either. Also, the principle of self-defense here is usually based on equal escalation: using a knife to defend yourself from a knife-wielding attacker would be self-defense, but if you escalate to a gun and they still only have a knife, you are likely to be considered to have become the aggressor.

Of course, Kyle Rittenhouse should never have had that gun, but “should never” applies to a lot of other parts of the events that day as well, and it is anyway just a moral judgment and opinion based more in our invisible cultural frameworks than legal or objective truth. By the same logic, no one should have guns, meaning we should disarm not just right-wing groups but also gangs, Antifa brawlers, and woke gun clubs (yes, these exist).

Street Brawls at the End of Empire

Talking to an American friend who lived a long time in the United Kingdom about all this, we found that we had both arrived to the same conclusion. What is happening in the United States in such events is a lot more like the football (soccer for you Americans) hooliganism in European cities. It’s a street brawl, with two sides fighting in defense of egregoric entities to which they have no real relationship. Manchester fans aren’t Manchester players, nor are they really defending anything, anymore than Antifa or Proud Boy brawlers are really defending the principles for which they claim to fight. They’re all just there to fight, and the justifications for those fights are post hoc justifications.

The same thing has happened to the rest of us. We take the sides of players in terrible dramas as if we are on their team, yet they do not know us and we most definitely do not know them. Woke people were rooting for a conviction, convinced such a result was the obvious moral conclusion because their worldviews needed it. On the other side were the opposing team of fan(atic)s, believing Rittenhouse was a proxy for their own political frameworks.

But to the rest of us, there were just the events themselves and the trial evidence. I watched a lot of it, and I can say without a doubt I’d have made the same decision as a juror, despite wanting to scream that everyone should have just stayed home that night and masturbated to riot porn, rather than starring in it themselves.

That being said, I only can say this now after confronting all the awful feelings of culture shock once I learned how false the narrative I had accepted really was. It’s both embarrassing and also terrifying to see how easily I had just consumed what was fed me because it already fit into my ideological framework, and it’s deeply terrifying to realise how “foreign” I’ve become to this way of thinking now.

I allow myself a weekly 15 minutes of time on social media for research purposes for my upcoming manuscript (I’ve a timer to keep myself from falling back in). In the 15 minutes I used this week, I read woke people vowing to kill Rittenhouse themselves, pontificating about white-cis-hetero-male supremacy, declaring that anyone who agrees with the verdict is a fascist, sharing self-care tips and rituals to deal with the “trauma” the verdict caused, and quite a few repetitions of the disproven falsehoods about the case.

This all makes sense, though, at least if you’ve ever dealt with culture shock. Culture shock isn’t always an enlightening moment, and never the sun-drenched hills of Tuscany with a woman finally finding love. Sometimes it’s a lot of kicking and screaming and getting very angry, like a child having a tantrum. I’ve been there myself many times, and seen it in others just as often. Sometimes you’ll see an American tourist repeat themselves really loudly in English to a confused store clerk, unconsciously assuming that increased volume might give their words meaning. “Expatriate” groups are full of screeds about how stupid and absurd some local custom is, though these people have invariably just arrived to their new home.

That is, we do a lot of things to protect ourselves from that shock, often clinging desperately to how we think things should universally be in the face of evidence that they aren’t universal at all. In these moments, it’s fully possible to close yourself off, to shut down your senses so there is no more new information to disrupt your framework. You’ve no doubt met tourists who’ve done this, people who return from international trips fully unchanged except for possessing an even stronger belief that America is “the best place on earth.”

I think the woke, especially, are experiencing a shock and trying—like those American tourists—to shut down. They are trying to renew their faith in a fragile cosmology in which the world is a war between two opposing sides and only only side is righteous. Rittenhouse doesn’t actually fit into their cosmology, but they’ll do what they can to make him fit in their minds.

They have it easier right now, though. Had the trial gone the other way, they’d all be gloating while also struggling to reconcile their anti-prison politics with their glee at one of their villains getting locked up.

The many death threats on social media are particularly concerning to me. After seeing quite a few of them, I then saw someone else warning people to stop broadcasting their plans (“security culture,” anarchists call it). I’d like to think no one is so idiotic to try such a thing, but I know too much about America to discount such a possibility. Such a person would of course think they were doing something heroic, just like Rittenhouse thought when he went armed to “protect” people and businesses, just as Michael Reinoehl thought he was an antifascist freedom fighter when he shot and killed a right-wing protester and then fled the state to avoid arrest.

Watching this all from a rural village in the Ardennes, I can only shrug. It takes a lot to interrogate your worldview, to question your own ideology, and to decide that such work is better and more fulfilling than pretending to be a hero. And from here, it is hard not to notice this is all happening in the streets of cities in the center of capital and power itself, imperial citizens fighting each other outside empty coliseums as the Empire crumbles around them.

The United States is falling apart, and its subjects are re-enacting that disintegration in live-action role play and fandom, distracting themselves as best they can from the increasing fragility of their false cultural framework.

There will be more. And more. And more, until the entire world is foreign to them and to the rest of us, despite how loudly they repeat themselves in a language we understand but no longer care to hear.

1. There is actually a lot of woke writing on how any mixed-race relationship will always be unequal and therefore should be avoided at all costs. This, of course, leads to the exact same result that racists who opposed miscegenation would like to see.

2. This drive takes 28 minutes, about 30 seconds longer than the average daily one-way commuting distance to work in the United States.