If one were to analyze the psychological reasons behind how I became a West European "wannabe", I think the origin point of it all would be very obvious: Deapite being born in the USA as a citizen, I never , throughout my life, felt "quite a part" of any currently existing sphere of US society. I was a white boy born in a small white neighborhood in the midst of a city that was 3/4 not white.
In a sense, it was - and remains- a very weird position to be coming from: On the one hand, I couldn't really relate with any of the minorities with any true intimacy, and on the other , I also couldn't relate with the American whites who came from the other regions of the States. I especially, for that matter, could not relate with the ones who lived in the deeper suburbs out beyond my own "non white" city. For, you see, I was made to feel inferior to them, almost in a similar sense that the minorities were made to feel. Except, again, I had no real minority community of my own to feel "allied" with. I felt a similar resentment for the suburban , middle class American whites that minorities felt - but almost had no one, on a wide scale, to really share the emotion with. This aspect of not being able to share the resentment I felt for the middle class US white culture is important, I feel, because basically I accidentally became locked out of a type of "communal therapy" that I do think exists within minority communities. For example, minorities within the USA generally tend to have a whole slew of jokes and insults and so forth that they've worked out amongst themselves, to use against their oppressors and their outcasters. The jokes don't much solve anything in reality; but they do at least solve feelings of inadequacy in the moment. I had no such system. I was alone. If anything, as a lower white in a 3/4 minority city, I was supposed to be all the more inspired to eventually join the group of deep suburban whites that I felt were my enemies. This was supposedly my "gift". As you can imagine, it was a gift I didn't want. And this especially became the case for me once I discovered the existence of Wesr Europe and just what it was , exactly.
How come? It's simple: When I discovered W. Europe, and I then came to discover how well it functioned in comparison to the USA, I basically felt that I had finally found someone who, it seemed to me, was undoubtedly superior to the white Middle (or even upper class) Americans . Sure, it's true: the Europeans don't have any real military power in comparison to the Americans, but what they do definitely have are considerably more functional daily lives. They also have all that other important stuff that the middle Americans desperately want in their lives: They have elegant wines, cozy museums, beautiful quaint cities and towns, histories that stretch back forever, etc. If the middle Americans have that "posh" stuff at a rate of 30%, then it wild seem to me the West Euros have it at a rate of 60%. This especially becomes evident once you discover just how many jokes exist as well, in West Europe--- jokes that center completely around insulting Americans for being "cultureless hicks", more or less.
Like any other American boy, but especially like a low class one, I obviously grew up, as referenced, not really knowing what Europe was on any intimate level. I also, like any other boy here, grew up being told incessantly and repeatedly that this country was the greatest country, etc. I suppose that I believed it somewhere inside, even in spite of the fact that I came of age in what was clearly a completely decimated United States city. My basic childhood understanding of the world outside the borders was limited to all the countries that truly are terrible , in comparison to the mighty US: I was told endlessly about people starving in China, about mud huts in Zimbabwe, about evil communist regimes in North Korea, and of course about things like gulags in Russia. Beyond that too, of course, there was also always the ever present threat of the southern half of the American continent itself, where I was told countries like Venezuela and Mexico and so forth were little more than scathing hell pits that would eat me alive, If I were to ever go to them. This vision of the outside world was reinforced by the news, by patriotic uncles, by friends, video games, films, everything.
Oddly enough, of course, the one part of the outside world that was never mentioned was West Europe. Naturally, everyone knew that it was a place, certainly, but it was also as though this place had just sort of fallen out of existence at some point in the past. To most Americans , I'm convinced that Europe is nothing more than some thin almosr "Disney world" esque stereotype. It is a place widely thought to have ceased existing, a place that we are all convinced has never entered the modern world. It's politics and culture is thus sort of ignored. If American children grow up playing video games, browsing the Internet, and wearing fancy sneakers, the European child in a country like France must still be wearing a beret , old fashioned shoes , and yearning to be a painter like Renoir in the 1800s. This is really the idea somewhere in the US mind: the Europeans are not stupid - but they're stil "behind" in some other sense. I myself, in my opening period of deep European intrigue, even basically ran with this idea in mind, I always say: I wanted to go there to live, not because I thought the politics were superior and more functional, but rather because I wanted to wear that beret and smoke Gitanes and sit on some Parisian boulevard, writing poetry in a chapbook. In my early years , I was a European wannabe, the same as I still am, but my reasons were totally different. It never occurred to me so much as a single time that the modern politics there were better. That was unthinkable, as I stress. If anything, I assumed they were worse. I was happy to go live there regardless of course ...it was my "poets duty".
Therefore, the reader can imagine the absolute shock and surprise that unfolded in my mind when I came to discover that Europe was not just a great place to be a poet like Rimbaud; but that it was also even just a far better place to live than the States, in any given regard. When I came to see, for example, that university was free, that the prison system is almost not a prison system at all , that the cities are not universally destroyed, that joining the military isn't the only way a poor man can make it, and that everyone has healthcare and even, in North Europe, a multitude of welfare benefits from birth until death , I was literally in a state of utmost shock.
Alas, it was in that moment, I think, of this discovery , that something very crucial happened for me: I suddenly found a weapon of sorts that I had never known before. That weapon was the basket of insults and jokes I now suddenly realized were at my disposal for the middle class white Americans I had always felt so unloved and outcasted by, etc. And the thing about this weapon that I found was that it was radically different from the one that, as I said before, the minorities here in the States tend to use to defend themselves with. Usually , down here in the furnace of America, our weapon against the middle Americans was that they were "wimpy" and "unable to fight" and had no "street smarts". These insults of course fell on deaf ears: middle class Americans are not ashamed to have no street smarts; if anything, they're proud.
This weapon and these insults, however, from this "posh European" angle, I immediately saw, were insults that would potentially make an American cry. To get under white american skin. These were insults that would make an American feel as inferior as i myself had always been pressured to feel, in relation to their "middle class" "suburban" culture. Again: this was an insult that was clearly coming from above, rather than below. The European way of life, with all its benefits, clearly exposes all of America's deep inadequacies. In fact, I've brought up Europe with many white Americans, and if there's one thing I've noticed without fail, it's this: mentioning Europe tends to open an angry, sad wound in white American skin, even if the white American in question claims , obsessively, to be totally against the generous, liberal policies that Europeans have in place. It's able to do this for very simple reasons: White conservatives look to Europe and Cannot avoid the fact that they're seeing a place of far deeper white traditions than they've ever known. They're seeing "pleasant" cities that they know they'd like to browse around and see, but that even the wealthiest among them are forced to feel distant from. They're seeing the civilization that they so often obsessively claim to be apart of (when they're berating blacks in the inner city, for example) but that they actually know next to nothing about. And there's no doubt about it that this is all very painful for a white American to look at.
After all, imagine for a second that you've lived your entire life as some obnoxious white Republican from suburbia , whose hardly ever known a city intimately, and all your politics often revolved around were how "lower class blacks" don't deserve a helping hand, and how welfare is disgusting, and how whites "do things for themselves". And now imagine that you've just, for the first time, come to discover that the "actual white people" in the place where white people "began", are all, it turns out, living in enormously generous welfare states that literally make the hardly existent welfare system in America look like a game of peanuts & crumbs. If the reader, for example, thinks that I , as a white boy who was always sympathetic to Democrats & who was always in the 3/4 black city, and who never had a problem with welfare policies whatsoever , found the European liberalism shockinf, just imagine how shocking one of these ferociously anti welfare suburban Republican sorts must find it?
I think, quite honestly, that many of them are simply unable to completely compute it or fathom it. Beyond this, there's also the fact that, again, I don't think most conservative Americans even truly realize that this is the case anyways. I really cannot stress enough just how belligerently unaware 90% of Americans are wjth Europe. Especially conservatives. Remember: Most conservative Americans are in situations very far removed from the one that led me to thinking of liberal Europe in a modern light and researching it as heavily as I did . For starters, I was from the city and I was unhappy with the US culture, having felt left out, in the second place I developed an interest in old time poetry which led me to reading French writers from the 1800s, and third, the biggest fact of all, my family is italian and has much closer roots to Europe then most Americans in red states do. I firmly believe that my chances of even hearing about liberal Europe in any detail would have been considerably slim if I had been from, say, Kentucky, instead of New Jersey. It's almost as though the red state people are simply too far from Europe to remember it at this point, and what has happened as a result of this distance, is that they have literally reconstructed and rewritten what they believe "white identity" means. To them, being white goes hand in hand with being conservative. They are totally ignorant to the fact that, on a global scale, white West Europe is more liberal & generous to its own citizens - and organized-- than almost anywhere else on Earth.
And I suppose that I can't help but endlessly wake up and find this complete disconnect beyond fascinating ....
- notes
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