Excellent essay, thanks for the important contribution to understanding the current moment. However, a couple of small points. While I have never actually lived in Europe, I have spent weeks at a time, doing my own shopping in neighborhood markets . . . and not once have I ever thought "wow, this is cheap," especially after converting from pounds or Euro to dollars. In rural Mexico and Central and South America, yes . . . but not Europe. Second, you must not have been back to the states in a long time if you think "a minority male with a white-skinned female" is a rare sight. I believe the most common color of new babies in America is soon going to be neither black nor brown nor white--but mostly caramel. Which is a good thing and will contribute to abandoning racist divisions and terminology . . . if only the woke left would let it die and not insist on exacerbating everything into racist categories.
Good points--I'd clarify that I was living Seattle in the United States, which has a high cost of living and absurdly expensive grocery stores. And Seattle, like Portland and San Francisco, is a deeply white 'liberal' city with woke politics but much less racial integration than more "conservative" and east coast cities. Thus why France (except Paris) came across as so damn cheap for food and also why every European city I lived in had more prevalent "mixed" relationships.
Brave stuff. Nothing is harder than interrogating our own worldview. Those forests sounds like a perfect place to do it. In a world gone mad, the woods may be the last sane location.
I'm reading Thomas Merton's "Thoughts in Solitude", which I think pertains here:
"Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society—or to refuse that gift...
When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate."
I live in Wisconsin and am very familiar with this case. Everyone here knew he would be acquitted. What Europeans don't understand is American gun culture and the laws that protect it, and how the U.S. Constitution has been distorted to support those laws. So not only did the prosecution do a terrible job in the Rittenhouse case (the closing argument was pretty much the only coherent thing they presented), but Wisconsin gun laws pretty much allow this kind of behavior. Guaranteed something similar will happen again. It will not help that little Mr. Rittenhouse has agreed to appear on Fox News and do an interview with a guy called Tucker Carlson, himself an irritating little rabble-rouser. At any rate, the fact of the matter is that Kyle is the darling of the right, and that is not any sort of "woke" opinion, it's just a fact. Watch them turn him into their poster boy.
My experience living in Europe was in Italy, and I still have that EU passport that will get me back there if and when things fall completely apart here. We stay in the U.S. for our grandkids and daughter, that's all - and I now understand why people didn't flee Germany when they could in the run-up to WWII. Anyway, I digress. Vegetables are cheaper in Italy, and so is olive oil. OTC medications like aspirin, however, and other random products are phenomenally expensive. In the end, it's just different, that's all. You get used to wherever you are. I got used to walking for 25 minutes to get to the nearest shop for milk and eggs. I bought cheese from the farm next door, and when we found maggots in it, we just cleaned them off. It was still good cheese. It was all part of life where I was. And I agree with the person who mentioned the amazing diversity of American couples these days - far more diverse than anything I ever saw in Italy or anywhere in Europe, except maybe Paris. It's slowly changing even in Italy, though, with the influx of immigrants, though Salvini and his gang really hate it.
FWIW, I visited Seattle once and did not like it. So expensive! So fast-paced! So much traffic! It was just too much for me and I've never wanted to go back. You made a good decision to leave it for the woods.
I absolutely agree that the right will turn Rittenhouse into their poster boy, much like some on the left tried to turn the people Rittenhouse killed into anti-fascist martyrs. The effects of this will be maddening to watch, and yes--I cannot imagine ever going back into the fray. I'm glad that you still have a EU passport in case you need it, too!
But to put things into perspective, Rhyd – I went walking twice today. The first time, it was still unseasonably warm and I barely needed a jacket. Just a few hours later, the wind had shifted, roaring out of the north from the Arctic across the northern Great Plains and on into the Great Lakes region where I live, with its cottonwoods and bur oaks and tattered prairie remnants. My ears were frozen under my wool cap. I went to a little lagoon where I have seen foxes, muskrats and Canada geese, but the wind kept howling in the heavens and I only saw four ducks swimming in the rippling water. All the trees have now been stripped of their leaves, and the oaks and maples were swaying wildly above me, their branches clacking like bones, or someone playing the spoons. I saw a solitary hawk take flight, then what I first thought was a little bird darting around - but it was a leaf swirling ecstatically in the air, lifted by the fierce breath of the Great Mother. And I felt her magnificent indifference. I sang to her, and my voice was sucked into the wind. She doesn’t care if I sing, but it makes me feel good to do it, so I do. I shout out in my tiny insignificant voice, a speck of a representative of a novel species that may or may not become extinct in the very near future. To tell the truth, extinction is probably a certainty sooner or later, but the Great Mother doesn’t care, she’s seen a lot of species come and go, a lot of destruction, a lot of fire and ice and death and rebirth. It’s all the same to her. And that’s why I sing.
It's certainly an interesting time; watching narratives unravel and seeing many people cling desperately to them, unmoved by any evidence and burrowing even deeper into their own narrative bubbles.
It can make conversations pretty tricky: you can never quite be sure what people are still hanging on to. I had a friend get extremely angry about Trump & Russia on the news of recent indictments and investigation of Clinton campaign associated figures and insist it was still all factual. My boss, on the other hand, was a pretty strong Trump supporter but was surprisingly self-aware about it, admitting that politics was basically (American) football for him and he was cheering for a team more than anything else.
Thanks. I imagine it won't be popular with some, but I'm deeply grateful for the support from readers I'm getting.
I haven't followed up on people's reactions to the unraveling of the entire Russiagate falsehood, but from what I remember of people who were heavily invested in it, I'm sure they've dug in even harder. It's a human reaction regardless.
And yes, I've encountered some Trump supporters who were a lot more circumspect about their "loyalty" than most I know who supported Clinton or Biden. I don't fully understand why that is yet, but I suspect there is a kind of practicality that conservatives tend to have that can handle obvious contradictions better. On the 'left,' they usually deny there are any such contradictions in their positions, while on the right you're more like to hear, "yeah, of course. So what?"
"And yes, I've encountered some Trump supporters who were a lot more circumspect about their "loyalty" than most I know who supported Clinton or Biden."
I strongly suspect that that is because Trump all but came right out and said "alright we're doing politics as entertainment here". No wonder that his followers (the smarter ones) accepted that going forward. While the Dem politicans pretend overboarding sincerity...
Yeah, totally. Even his most die-hard fans understood this, I think. It was all pageantry and spectacle, which is what they all wanted. That's also how they got Democrats to look so ridiculously stupid, because so many of them were taking everything so damn literally.
One funny thing someone finally explained to me is why even highly religious Trump supporters didn't flinch about the 'grab her by the pussy' remark. For them, it was an obvious play on sales talk ("grab them by the balls"), while liberals constantly appeared to never make that very simple connection.
Good essay, encountering another culture can certainly illuminate one's own.
I don't know how long it's been since you've encountered the US situation, but the pandemic has been another illuminating event. So many cracks in our society widened so much they are harder to ignore, though of course there are those who will rise to the occasion.
Being in a liberal social milieu (Portland, Oregon) is difficult for me. Discussion is not possible unless the premise is the previous administration was terrible and the current one is just fine, let alone other woke staples. The simple fact that there are as many people dying of covid every day now as there were last summer when Trump infamously said of the toll, "it is what it is" cannot be mentioned.
It's been about 5 years since I've last visited I guess. I've heard from family members and friends that everything is breaking apart there, and people are all still super angry at each other for not getting vaccinated fast enough or not wearing masks all the time, and those reactions are what I would have expected. Here, the vaccination rate is much higher and masking was heavily enforced, yet we have high hospitalizations (half of them were vaccinated...) and are likely to see more shut downs. So even doing everything "right" availed us little here.
Portland, though...oof. I still remember a day while visiting where I watched a (probably non-binary) person step over a homeless person in front of a Stumptown coffee shop. I went into the same cafe, and later noticed the person was reading a print copy of Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble."
That moment has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for the Portland zeitgeist...
I agree with most of the points in your article. However, I think it needs to be reinforced a little more how all of this came about from irresponsible decision making on everyone's part--especially KR. I didn't really follow the trial, because, what would be the point? I think hyperfocusing on these types of news events is neurotic behavior. There is nothing you can do about it--and casting everything as having potential apocalyptic implications--as both main stream and social media does--is a great way to make yourself mentally ill. This is why I am also not on social media. Regardless, the little I learned about this situation, it does appear that by the narrow definition of Wisconsin law, the verdict was correct. However, much like George Zimmerman in the Trevon Martin situation, that does not absolve Kyle Rittenhouse of guilt of some form. This was a typical dumb-ass American kid with a particularly American childish love of fire-arms, who is all-in on the death-cult that is the American conservative vision of reality. As a minor he should never of had easy access to that gun, should never have been let out of the house with that gun, and should never have crossed state lines (whether that state was right next door or not) to inject himself into a bad situation and make it worse. Sounds like his parent or parents are trash as well--where were they? They share responsibility as well. Though this does appear to be a case of self-defense, it is also what happens when stupid decisions with the potential of very bad outcomes happen (cynically I am aware that the fact he killed a child rapist could be considered a positive, but anyway . . .). This idiot is not a hero, and is not surprising that the right is making him one. The upside is that KR is still very young, so he has the chance to use this situation and grow from it--to become an actual responsible human being, rather than remain a perpetually adolescent GI-Joe boy-man. However, the fact that he is being feted by fascist-fluffing parasites like Tucker Carlson mean his chance for redemption will probably never happen.
Excellent essay, thanks for the important contribution to understanding the current moment. However, a couple of small points. While I have never actually lived in Europe, I have spent weeks at a time, doing my own shopping in neighborhood markets . . . and not once have I ever thought "wow, this is cheap," especially after converting from pounds or Euro to dollars. In rural Mexico and Central and South America, yes . . . but not Europe. Second, you must not have been back to the states in a long time if you think "a minority male with a white-skinned female" is a rare sight. I believe the most common color of new babies in America is soon going to be neither black nor brown nor white--but mostly caramel. Which is a good thing and will contribute to abandoning racist divisions and terminology . . . if only the woke left would let it die and not insist on exacerbating everything into racist categories.
Good points--I'd clarify that I was living Seattle in the United States, which has a high cost of living and absurdly expensive grocery stores. And Seattle, like Portland and San Francisco, is a deeply white 'liberal' city with woke politics but much less racial integration than more "conservative" and east coast cities. Thus why France (except Paris) came across as so damn cheap for food and also why every European city I lived in had more prevalent "mixed" relationships.
Brave stuff. Nothing is harder than interrogating our own worldview. Those forests sounds like a perfect place to do it. In a world gone mad, the woods may be the last sane location.
I'd go insane without them, mate.
I'm reading Thomas Merton's "Thoughts in Solitude", which I think pertains here:
"Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society—or to refuse that gift...
When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate."
Thanks to both you and to Paul.
Wow talk about prescient.
What an excellent quote. Merton was often deeply wise.
I live in Wisconsin and am very familiar with this case. Everyone here knew he would be acquitted. What Europeans don't understand is American gun culture and the laws that protect it, and how the U.S. Constitution has been distorted to support those laws. So not only did the prosecution do a terrible job in the Rittenhouse case (the closing argument was pretty much the only coherent thing they presented), but Wisconsin gun laws pretty much allow this kind of behavior. Guaranteed something similar will happen again. It will not help that little Mr. Rittenhouse has agreed to appear on Fox News and do an interview with a guy called Tucker Carlson, himself an irritating little rabble-rouser. At any rate, the fact of the matter is that Kyle is the darling of the right, and that is not any sort of "woke" opinion, it's just a fact. Watch them turn him into their poster boy.
My experience living in Europe was in Italy, and I still have that EU passport that will get me back there if and when things fall completely apart here. We stay in the U.S. for our grandkids and daughter, that's all - and I now understand why people didn't flee Germany when they could in the run-up to WWII. Anyway, I digress. Vegetables are cheaper in Italy, and so is olive oil. OTC medications like aspirin, however, and other random products are phenomenally expensive. In the end, it's just different, that's all. You get used to wherever you are. I got used to walking for 25 minutes to get to the nearest shop for milk and eggs. I bought cheese from the farm next door, and when we found maggots in it, we just cleaned them off. It was still good cheese. It was all part of life where I was. And I agree with the person who mentioned the amazing diversity of American couples these days - far more diverse than anything I ever saw in Italy or anywhere in Europe, except maybe Paris. It's slowly changing even in Italy, though, with the influx of immigrants, though Salvini and his gang really hate it.
FWIW, I visited Seattle once and did not like it. So expensive! So fast-paced! So much traffic! It was just too much for me and I've never wanted to go back. You made a good decision to leave it for the woods.
I absolutely agree that the right will turn Rittenhouse into their poster boy, much like some on the left tried to turn the people Rittenhouse killed into anti-fascist martyrs. The effects of this will be maddening to watch, and yes--I cannot imagine ever going back into the fray. I'm glad that you still have a EU passport in case you need it, too!
But to put things into perspective, Rhyd – I went walking twice today. The first time, it was still unseasonably warm and I barely needed a jacket. Just a few hours later, the wind had shifted, roaring out of the north from the Arctic across the northern Great Plains and on into the Great Lakes region where I live, with its cottonwoods and bur oaks and tattered prairie remnants. My ears were frozen under my wool cap. I went to a little lagoon where I have seen foxes, muskrats and Canada geese, but the wind kept howling in the heavens and I only saw four ducks swimming in the rippling water. All the trees have now been stripped of their leaves, and the oaks and maples were swaying wildly above me, their branches clacking like bones, or someone playing the spoons. I saw a solitary hawk take flight, then what I first thought was a little bird darting around - but it was a leaf swirling ecstatically in the air, lifted by the fierce breath of the Great Mother. And I felt her magnificent indifference. I sang to her, and my voice was sucked into the wind. She doesn’t care if I sing, but it makes me feel good to do it, so I do. I shout out in my tiny insignificant voice, a speck of a representative of a novel species that may or may not become extinct in the very near future. To tell the truth, extinction is probably a certainty sooner or later, but the Great Mother doesn’t care, she’s seen a lot of species come and go, a lot of destruction, a lot of fire and ice and death and rebirth. It’s all the same to her. And that’s why I sing.
This is another great essay.
It's certainly an interesting time; watching narratives unravel and seeing many people cling desperately to them, unmoved by any evidence and burrowing even deeper into their own narrative bubbles.
It can make conversations pretty tricky: you can never quite be sure what people are still hanging on to. I had a friend get extremely angry about Trump & Russia on the news of recent indictments and investigation of Clinton campaign associated figures and insist it was still all factual. My boss, on the other hand, was a pretty strong Trump supporter but was surprisingly self-aware about it, admitting that politics was basically (American) football for him and he was cheering for a team more than anything else.
Thanks. I imagine it won't be popular with some, but I'm deeply grateful for the support from readers I'm getting.
I haven't followed up on people's reactions to the unraveling of the entire Russiagate falsehood, but from what I remember of people who were heavily invested in it, I'm sure they've dug in even harder. It's a human reaction regardless.
And yes, I've encountered some Trump supporters who were a lot more circumspect about their "loyalty" than most I know who supported Clinton or Biden. I don't fully understand why that is yet, but I suspect there is a kind of practicality that conservatives tend to have that can handle obvious contradictions better. On the 'left,' they usually deny there are any such contradictions in their positions, while on the right you're more like to hear, "yeah, of course. So what?"
"And yes, I've encountered some Trump supporters who were a lot more circumspect about their "loyalty" than most I know who supported Clinton or Biden."
I strongly suspect that that is because Trump all but came right out and said "alright we're doing politics as entertainment here". No wonder that his followers (the smarter ones) accepted that going forward. While the Dem politicans pretend overboarding sincerity...
Yeah, totally. Even his most die-hard fans understood this, I think. It was all pageantry and spectacle, which is what they all wanted. That's also how they got Democrats to look so ridiculously stupid, because so many of them were taking everything so damn literally.
One funny thing someone finally explained to me is why even highly religious Trump supporters didn't flinch about the 'grab her by the pussy' remark. For them, it was an obvious play on sales talk ("grab them by the balls"), while liberals constantly appeared to never make that very simple connection.
Another awesome essay with a good perception of what is going on here in the U.S, keep up the great work Rhyyd
Thank you!
Good essay, encountering another culture can certainly illuminate one's own.
I don't know how long it's been since you've encountered the US situation, but the pandemic has been another illuminating event. So many cracks in our society widened so much they are harder to ignore, though of course there are those who will rise to the occasion.
Being in a liberal social milieu (Portland, Oregon) is difficult for me. Discussion is not possible unless the premise is the previous administration was terrible and the current one is just fine, let alone other woke staples. The simple fact that there are as many people dying of covid every day now as there were last summer when Trump infamously said of the toll, "it is what it is" cannot be mentioned.
It was terrible then, and it's terrible now.
It's been about 5 years since I've last visited I guess. I've heard from family members and friends that everything is breaking apart there, and people are all still super angry at each other for not getting vaccinated fast enough or not wearing masks all the time, and those reactions are what I would have expected. Here, the vaccination rate is much higher and masking was heavily enforced, yet we have high hospitalizations (half of them were vaccinated...) and are likely to see more shut downs. So even doing everything "right" availed us little here.
Portland, though...oof. I still remember a day while visiting where I watched a (probably non-binary) person step over a homeless person in front of a Stumptown coffee shop. I went into the same cafe, and later noticed the person was reading a print copy of Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble."
That moment has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for the Portland zeitgeist...
Your perspective is a balm to the soul.
Thank you.
There are so many angry responses to this on facebook! You really struck a nerve.
It's damn good I don't actually look at Facebook anymore then (it's been almost 4 months since I have). I can only imagine what they are saying...
I agree with most of the points in your article. However, I think it needs to be reinforced a little more how all of this came about from irresponsible decision making on everyone's part--especially KR. I didn't really follow the trial, because, what would be the point? I think hyperfocusing on these types of news events is neurotic behavior. There is nothing you can do about it--and casting everything as having potential apocalyptic implications--as both main stream and social media does--is a great way to make yourself mentally ill. This is why I am also not on social media. Regardless, the little I learned about this situation, it does appear that by the narrow definition of Wisconsin law, the verdict was correct. However, much like George Zimmerman in the Trevon Martin situation, that does not absolve Kyle Rittenhouse of guilt of some form. This was a typical dumb-ass American kid with a particularly American childish love of fire-arms, who is all-in on the death-cult that is the American conservative vision of reality. As a minor he should never of had easy access to that gun, should never have been let out of the house with that gun, and should never have crossed state lines (whether that state was right next door or not) to inject himself into a bad situation and make it worse. Sounds like his parent or parents are trash as well--where were they? They share responsibility as well. Though this does appear to be a case of self-defense, it is also what happens when stupid decisions with the potential of very bad outcomes happen (cynically I am aware that the fact he killed a child rapist could be considered a positive, but anyway . . .). This idiot is not a hero, and is not surprising that the right is making him one. The upside is that KR is still very young, so he has the chance to use this situation and grow from it--to become an actual responsible human being, rather than remain a perpetually adolescent GI-Joe boy-man. However, the fact that he is being feted by fascist-fluffing parasites like Tucker Carlson mean his chance for redemption will probably never happen.