This American Lie
I had plans to emigrate. The pandemic changed that. Now, my home is burning, and I’m spitting grievance and venom.
This past weekend — a weekend nearly unprecedented in modern American history in its chaos and brutality — was supposed to be my last as a resident of Austin, and of the United States. At the top of the year, I announced this move, and set the disembark date as June 1, 2020. That was Monday. Today is Thursday. I’m still here.
This was a decision I’d made long ago, and, in hindsight, a decision I’d made too late. I had my reasons… some personal to me, some blindingly obvious.
I first communicated the idea of leaving my home country while dining with my mom at Le Cellier in the Canada EPCOT exhibit in 2007. Not yet a writer, holed up in the Rust Belt, and fairly directionless, I thought it might be cool to move to Provençe and make wine. Yet that dream was just not doable. I was dead broke, came from not much, didn’t have the right degree. I’d never even traveled to France, or mainland Europe at all.
Instead, I sold off all my belongings, packed my cat and some clothes and the $300 to my name, and drove to Austin to start anew. This was, fortuitously and unequivocally, the single best decision I’d ever made.
What I really wanted — what I knew even then and what I still hold deep within my heart — was the chance to live “out of context.” I wanted to outrun myself, transcend my upbringing, grow into someone new. I did not know how it would look, yet I knew I’d never solve the puzzle of “Who Am I?” in a place I could not be found.
After eight years in Austin — one bad job, one ignominious descent into debt and destitution, one great job, and one dramatic rise and reinvention later—I finally made good on my promise to cross the pond and find the place my family’d left behind, when they came through Ellis Island in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Along the visit, I saw Paris, I saw Marseille, and the last house in which my family lived. I saw Barcelona and Madrid. Tangier and London. Porto and Lisbon. It took me until September 2018 to afford my own international vacation. I understand many Americans never ever get that chance. I wish they could. They’d learn a lot.
My month across the Atlantic changed how I saw myself, my life, my purpose. It recontextualized everything I ever knew, lived, and felt — about me, about what it means to be alive, American, human. It rewired my brain. It reinvigorated my soul. That whole journey, I felt the truth. Or, at the very least, something a little bit like it.
Overseas, I discovered I’d acquired a newfound sense of anger. At how we live, at how we treat each other, at what we believe here in the US and why we believe it. I’d known for quite some time these walls played tricks on us, yet until you’re able to be a fish out of water, you can never fully feel the seas in which you swim. I felt scammed and cheated in ways I’d never fully understood before.
As I sat on a rock staring out into the Mediterranean Sea, alone with my thoughts and the misty salt seeping through my pores, full from Bouillabaisse and dripping tears, I came to a fateful decision: I had to leave my home. America is not right … and I am not right for America.
So, after months of working 80-hour weeks across my corporate job and various side-hustles, including Medium, to stockpile a sum from which I could start anew, I pulled the ripcord. I quit my job, I started scouting, and prepared to sell things off, grab my cat and clothes and go. Now, I’ll explain in detail why.
Ultimately, my life is a lie. Candidly, so is yours. More or less, all of our lives are lies. In my lifetime, I’ve unknowingly endured a visceral, elaborate, interwoven, inextricable series of lies — some uniquely American, some universal, some personal only to me — that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand, and less than three years challenging in earnest. I’ll list them here.
The Pursuit of Happiness
You ever wonder the Declaration of Independence uses the peculiar phrase, “life, liberty and the *pursuit* of happiness?” Why is happiness a pursuit here? In so many places on Earth — in so many cultures — happiness simply is. It is not earned. It is not chased.
In the US, we’re unusually committed to the idea that happiness is a reward, a commodity, a finite public good only available to the hard-working and deserving.
Yet, objectively, happiness can be found anywhere, because you do not find it … it finds you. In words, in a fresh sliced tomato with olive oil and salt, in a Wu-banger, or with the whoosh of a warm summer wind.
Because we define happiness as a pursuit, Americans are notorious at performing it to appear successful, and compensate for not feeling it. (Hi, social media!) In America, genuine joy is rebellion.
The Gaslight Shines At Home
As a child, my parents told me endless lies — either intentionally or inadvertently. Of course, that doesn’t make ’em bad people, necessarily … They were a strong pair at making sure I grew up fairly insulated from too much pain and suffering — minus their own tempestuous and ill-fated partnership.
The lies they told comprised — and this is by no means an exhaustive recount — their insecurities, biases, assumptions about my capacity and character, and memories of their own youth. There’s mostly faulty logic under every one of those rocks. Then, they kicked those rocks to me.
As I got older, I began to realize I wasn’t the image of myself that I’d constructed from their image of myself. The older I got … Maybe starting at age 31 or so, I began to realize so much of what I was, or am, was based on absolutely nothing grounded in reality, but on my parents’ preconceived notions of who I was, and who I’d become. I began to further explore. I’m afraid I’m still exploring.
Our Schools Don’t Really Teach
The American education system functions as nationalist propaganda, capitalist incubation chambers, and obedience training for skin-puppies.
It feels, as though, we’re taught what to know, and not how to know. We learn lessons, not wisdom. We are given no skeleton keys to open all doors, but specialized keys to open the doors into rooms we’re allowed into. Not everyone’s allowed into the same rooms.
Standardized tests are the equivalent of making us all wear the same size and color three-button blazer on a runway and grading us all on our attractiveness. Our University system is a pyramid scheme that further stratifies a preexisting caste.
We Think of Love All Wrong
Love in America is a low-grade form of insanity. What we believe is the search for a soulmate is really just a window of opportunity in our 20s to enter into a legally binding union, under the guise of a cultural rite of passage.
We’re all terrible at choosing life partners. Swiping for dates is a gamified capitalist dystopia. Genuine romance is M.I.A. Codependency runs rampant. We treat marriage like jail and divorce like liberation.
Engagement diamonds are a sham custom, steeped in the blood of African miners. The Wedding Industrial Complex is usury. Damn near every married couple you know suffers from closet infidelity.
Yet, we perform love all the time. The fawning posts about our spouses. The optics are so twisted — I know an IG influencer who referred to her man as her rock … in a pic she posted mere days after separating from him.
Getting High and Lonely
Americans have an incredibly — pardon the pun here — toxic relationship with alcohol. At times, so do I. Whether it’s wine’o’clock or beer-30, we do tend to drink our problems away.
We also pop pills to solve our problems or numb our feelings. I, myself, have a low-grade benzodiazepine dependency. We drop Molly and dance to EDM at festivals to escape the hell of real life. We snort cocaine at the after-parties off Wall Street. We “innovate” on adderall in Silicon Valley. How many of us are not on an SSRI? How many targeted ads for Roman have you seen, replacing the Cialis tubs that aired for seemingly decades? Do we really require meds to fuck? Speaking of …
This Country Makes It Hard to Fuck
That’s the chorus from a Fever Ray song. She had a point. God, are we ever starved of good sex. Men rape. Women don’t get off. No one’s taught how to have fun with it, or how to decide if someone’s worthy of it. Sometimes it feels we’re fucking just to remind ourselves we can.
Sex’s function in American society is taboo and is more capitalistic and utilitarian than it is a means of expression or of actual connection. Kink and foreplay are shunned. Courtship is passe. Most men can’t find the clit, or find sex at all (a staggering amount of men ages 18–29 had no sex at all in 2018, and that figure keeps rising), most women are numbed into hetero-pessimism.
LGBTQIA+ couples boldly make a decent go at it, but they, too, complain that they’re doomed to replicate some of the mistakes of the faulty endemic programming from American heterosexual norms.
We’ve Lost the Plot of Money
Here in Capitalist America, money is not means to an end. It’s the end itself. It’s horrendously inequitable as to who has, or gets, it. We’ve conflated wealth with worth. We don’t value human life, we measure ROI. Money is meaningless, capitalism is predatory, business is corrupt, and we are run by an oligarchy.
Valuations are vapor. We print money backed by nothing but imagination. Even the blockchain-centric financial market, Cryptocurrency!, sounds like sketchy as fuck or dead already.
We have hedging, shorting, flash-trading, club deals, family offices, venture capitalist sharks. 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The average american dies $62K in debt.
Identifiable Markers of White American Culture Lack Seasoning
Let’s be honest: White American art, food, music, coffee, drink, cinema, literature and dance is total shit. How shit? “American” cheese isn’t even cheese.
We’re off-brand versions of other cultures, watered-down to appeal to the broadest possible global demographic, scaled up to move inventory, stripped of all remnants of character, and homogenized into a stew of trend-forecast-y quasi-cool. It’s not that we have no culture, it’s that we have shit culture we actively disown in favor of appropriating all others.
What are we known for? Fast food? Arena rock? Summer blockbusters? Clapping on ones-and-threes? Criminally underseasoned food except for “ethnic” cuisine? Which … the fuck does “ethnic” even mean? It implies that Americanism isn’t an ethnicity — which it absolutely is, it’s just so vanilla and unseasoned that it doesn’t warrant special recognition in the Hall of Flavor. Say what you will about the white North Americans, at least the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek can cook. Flood these fucking shores with more of ’em. (That is to say, more of me.) Industrial agriculture is killing us.
Our music is brain-numbingly dystopic and fails to pop or swing, our cinema is a endlessly recyclable series of 6–7 franchises based on comic books, we stopped telling new stories, our books don’t crackle with prose so much as they crumble on shelves, the era of infinite television is paralysis analysis, and our nihilist memes are decimated by typos people don’t seem all that hell-bent on spellchecking.
Our №1 cultural identifier is size and volume. Seriously, go to Europe. If you’re not loud, artificially happy, and enormous, you might get away with being from “Niagara Falls” — which, graciously, means Europeans think you’re Canadian, and therefore treat you with all the reverence they reserve for non-Americans.
Someone, Free the Press
Media is mostly corporate-owned, and that’s just the more credible outlets. Some more salacious press outlets — or what passes for them, here — include deliberate disinformation with malicious intent.
Modern journalists are mostly elitist twitter influencers who went to J-school, with parents wealthy enough to float them through the lean intern / copy-editor years, the better connected from bluer blood shoot all the way to the top of the profession while the rest retire to the boneyard of technical writing and advertising.
We have deep fakes. AI bot swarms. Partisan media. State-run media. Media as entertainment. Arguing that counts as dialogue. Truth is so difficult to parse through in the press that to do so requires a metric ton of C4 explosive to raze the hall of mirrors.
You can’t believe anything you read, watch or listen to without also footnoting everything that sounds not quite right. We’ve built debate-centric echo-chambers where either:
- everyone agrees and radicalizes each other
- people blow their stacks at each other for sport.
Our Science is Capitalism
Science is largely funded by endowments, corporations or family offices, and who is to say we are endowing or researching the right things, with the right intentions.
Even the science that’s not cluttered by noise in the signal, falls upon a mass audience steeped in anti-intellectualism. The number of people who believe the earth is flat is rising.
23-and-me is a genetic data harvesting ruse predicated on knowing how easily we can tantalize white people into wishing they had a culture that doesn’t totally suck. (See a couple doors up for more info.) Fuck you, you can’t have my genes.
We learn new shit all the time and although some of its true, more truth is on its way, but we largely don’t get to decide what we know or how we find out. The public goods of knowledge and wisdom are dispensed by largely bad-actor gatekeepers.
Authenticity is Bullshit
Social media has turned us all into micro-imperialists lording over our kingdom of carefully curated lies. We artfully arrange our lives more than we live them. We lie to impress, we have body dysmorphia brought on by Snapchat filters.
Bots are everywhere, altering the overton window irrevocably, swarming and harassing, adding to an already epic avalanche of information no one human brain’s equipped to handle. We are hit with more content in a given day than most humans a decade ago got in a week, or received in a month just a generation ago. We can’t retain it all. We panic and shutdown like the robots most algorithms think that we are. We can’t process or organize it, fact-check it, and we broadcast in lieu of conversation.
All this just keeps increasing, gluing us to screens, enslaving us to addicting apps, endless surveillance and data mining, continuing to depress us, divide us, sapping us of our inherent humanity.
But Seriously, Our Culture. Just … What the Fuck Is It?
If I had to assess the dominant bugaboo of American culture here, I would call it: adolescent. We’re a culture growing up, rebelling against our parents (the Old World) in all the wrong ways, because our parents were overprotective, overbearing and abusive.
We are so committed to the wrong traditions here. We don’t even have any holidays that aren’t problematic in some way, save New Year’s, which is the celebratory equivalent of the white American male half-heartedly and non-rhythmically ejaculating inside a woman without making a sound.
We don’t change things here unless we appropriate other cultures or it becomes financially beneficial to do so. We are violent and angry, melancholic and moody, and performatively happy. Everyone’s an individual but nobody has any real courage. We are exceptionalists in the worst way.
We wrap our sports up in patriotism; the pledge of allegiance came from a marketing campaign to sell more flags. Our defining characteristic at the logistical level is a ruthless commitment to efficiency in everything we do except for the things we need to be really efficient. The DMV takes forever but by golly if you don’t hit your quota in the Amazon factory because you needed to use the restroom, well … enjoy the bread lines, comrade.
We’re Fucking Up Religion
Look, I hate to break it to you believers, but your god and the way that you worship him, here, in the US, is mostly shit.
Religion itself is a means of control that predated nation-states, a means of explanation that predates science, a code of ethics that predates … Ethics, a means of communion that predates sports. Religion’s, mercifully, been replaced by better and more specialized piecemeal versions of the same thing … No deity required. This is awesome, yet we resist it.
And you spiritual folks who get too woo-woo for you-you? The universe has your back because you’re pretty and privileged and well off already and the staggering nonsense of the nonsensical language you use to justify that to the rest of your friends at soulcycle is as empty as the heavens above.
Americans *Did* Perfect One Thing … Racism
The American racial hierarchy is a vagrant holdover from an era when people thought the earth was flat. In the interest of economic and geopolitical gain, self-interest begat prejudice begat fear begat hate begat violence … nowhere else in the world did, and does, race matter so much as it did here in the new world.
We live in a caste system, and the only “real” Americans are the ones we exterminated when we got here in 1492 and in ways both overtly and subtly violent ever since.
I mean … Blacks as three-fifths? Chinese exclusion acts? Concentration camps on the border with Mexico? “Speak American?” Slavery? Jim Crow? WTF? We’re so racist we use our own racism to justify not giving social services or a safety net to white people … just so black and brown people can’t have it, either.
Our Politicians Don’t Work For Us
Politicians are mostly, if not all, bought out, by some interest group or family office or corporation. Deals are made with lobbyists, or wealthy black sheep / black swan scions.
Climate deniers — Roger Williams, TX-25 — in office are just appealing to a saber-rattling base that’s been failed by science and education, and even if they behind closed doors know climate change is real, they won’t admit it to their anti-intellectualist, myopic base.
There’s corruption in campaigns, Kafkaesque policy procedures, endless red tape, bad budgeting, the tax code is convoluted and the wealthy pay nothing, nothing gets done and we are locked in a cryogenic chamber of partisan gridlock.
American Mythology Is Actively Harmful
The Founding Fathers were drunks, agitators and slave-owners. The Puritans and Pilgrims were basically fanatic cultists who thought they’d found the promised land. Thanksgiving. Columbus. These didn’t happen who we learned them.
Nobody can agree upon the constitution in the supreme court. The electoral college is an atrocity that merely exists to justify electoral horserace journalism and to prevent this nation from — lawd, mercy — becoming too progressive.
American mythology is just that … Mythology. We aren’t a chosen people. We aren’t the Greatest Nation on Earth. It’s propaganda. Always has been. We’ve never once topped the Human Development Index. We are currently somewhere near Estonia on the list, and trending in wildly opposite directions.
Borders Are A Dead Technology
We can fly anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours. We can send money or video anywhere, from anywhere. We can livestream military coups. We now, officially, have access to all knowledge and history, all news and experience, from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world — anytime, all the time, instantaneously. It’s fucking beautiful. We don’t need countries anymore. From space, you can’t see them anyway. We’re just land, water and some cloud-clusters of cyclones spinning around.
We are a global resource pool. Yet we do not share globally. Nationalism is resource inefficiency. It’s hoarding. We are hoarders here in the US. We fight wars over “our way of life.” What way of life? Freedom? Justice? For all? The districts are gerrymandered; the borders are imaginary lines halfway between nowhere and here. Tell me what’s the difference between someone in El Paso and Juarez, or Niagara Falls and … Niagara Falls.
But, sure, a wall. Why not.
Perhaps We Should Ease Up On The Wars
God, the wars, man. So many wars. Official and unofficial. World police. Drone wars. Star Wars. Space wars. Culture wars. Cold wars. Cola wars. Civil wars. War on drugs. War on Terror. But we are always at war. Somewhere. With someone.
No one’s taken a look at the Military Industrial Complex since Dwight Fucking Eisenhower warned of it back when microwaves were still cool. Which Iraq war are we on? Is this a trilogy? Wait, but we hate them less than Iran? Are we at war with them, too? To what degree are we frenemies with notoriously democratic nations like North Korea? Russia? China? I can’t tell anymore. Our Rifle Diplomacy feels like bloodsport for funzies.
The Self is A Mythical Construct
And, just when you think you can’t think straight for yourself, you forget that the concept of the self is flawed, too. Humans are connected. We are coral and the reef. Think not? Think again.
There’s fundamentally no difference between humans and any other fractalized expression of the universe. We cluster and migrate, pool resources, and the success of any depends upon the success of all. Naturally, we’re killing the coral as we proliferate. Are we next?
No, you are not an independent entity. No, you are not 100% sovereign. You are a data-collection point in an operating system (reality), and humans are more like the novel coronavirus than we think.
The self is fluid, inextricable from the container. The self is a myth. Self-made? Nope. Just the latest vintage of human … The communal organism that cannot survive in a vacuum and depends upon the whole to empower the individual, and on the individual to empower the whole.
Plus, our brains are filled to the brim with an endless array of lies, damn lies, an American exceptionalism.
The Narrator Remains Unreliable
Plot twist: My life is a lie. And from that faulty foundation of lies, damn lies, and self-interest, I tell and dispense, spit and disburse, iterative expressions of even greater lies to serve my needs and satiate my ego’s lust.
Furthermore, I am ever-evolving, ever-changing. My ideology changes. In 2000, I voted for Bush. In 2008, I voted for Obama. Since 2016, I’ve skewed farther to the global left than most of you amateur communist cosplay enthusiasts could even. I drift any farther left, I’m going to fall off the side of the earth near the international date line.
My personality changes, too. I’ve learned to embrace anger. I’ve learned to direct at entities besides myself. I don’t drink the way I used to. I don’t mope the way I used to. I sing like a canary, I hunt like a hawk, I sting like a bee. I delight in the pleasure of diving between a woman’s thighs like I’m stealing home, and so the fuck do they. I’m wholesome and raunchy, irreverent and respectful. All depends on what I’m trying to do. These are all low-grade lies, but their authentic lies. Do I like that? Fucked if I know.
I’m a runner, a smoker, an asthmatic. On Instagram, I’m never quite where my pictures say that I am, and their filtered and saturated to death just for fun. I choose my words carefully, even in the stream of consciousness that hit like the tides.
On the Internet, I’m breathtakingly confident and articulate. In person, I’m hamstrung by insecurities and I make mistake after mistake, then judge myself for them harsher than anyone would except the police and my mother.
My capabilities change. My memories warp and fade, my thoughts distort and take leaps, my expectations very rarely come true.
My life is a lie. I spit lies into the universe, which is already filled with lies. I’m full of shit, and I’m also the shit I am full of.
Nowhere do lies seem more elemental, visceral, damaging and deletrious than right here in the United States — a country I left to escape its burning, right as it began to burn, and now I’m trapped in an inferno of my own making, and I’m going to yell like hell as the whole grease-bucket bursts into flames.
After all that, what’s true?
I mean, just look at this cascade of lies: happiness, family, education, love, drugs, sex, money, art, media, science, technology, culture, religion, race, politics, mythology, borders, war … Even the self itself. And, lastly … Me. All lies. What’s true?
1. Now is. Your heart is beating. You’re here. Really reading this. The present moments, as they find you, are true.
2. Death is. We all have an expiry date. We don’t know when that is. But this hourglass is bolted to the earth, and we are all losing sand. You will die, and so will everything you love, and everything to come.
3. Change is. Look at any world map. Trace your lineage back. People just migrate and move. Technology changes. People change. Circumstances change. I mean, hell. What’s changing faster than right now, in a fresh era of mass death? That’s why life feels so real it’s surreal now. Because this is some real shit, and we’re so used to lies that the real seems surreal.
4. Care is. You can’t fake it. You just can’t. It’s the thing that by virtue of being faked ceases to be … and everyone cares about something. You care. I care. People lack empathy when that care is directed at insular, solipsistic and narcissistic interests. (See: Trump, Donald)
So you take those four truths, and you do with them what you can: As for me: I have now, I will die, things will change, I care. If I know all those things are true, what do I choose to do?
I choose to believe better lies. I choose to leave this place. I choose to reject it and renounce it, to extricate myself from the tragicomic context that is my upbringing. Lies, like turtles, all the way down.
I exist to call bullshit, and so I do, with more bullshit. And I chose, and still choose, to do so from Lisbon — or, San Francisco on a Cleveland budget, in a country that’s one of the most miraculously risen social democracies of the past 50 years.
Yes, my heart said Lisbon. I gave myself enough time to get it together. To start anew. To seek simplicity. To fall in love. To maybe make some wine. And write … Write always. And write clearly, and unlike anybody else. Maybe a book or six. Maybe I’d play guitar. I would definitely speak Portuguese. I can now. Um pouco, anyway.
But that came not to pass. After all the work I did throughout my life, including monolithic, seven-year sojourn of learning to write, changing careers, going from sleeping a Walmart parking lot in a rental jeep, to becoming an independent literary entity too big for the $100B tech conglomerate that pulled me out of the hellhole I found myself, stashing enough away to not just visit, but move, after years of desiring to do so, it all fell apart because a virus-carrying bat flapped its wings at a wet market in Wuhan [this is metaphorical and alliterative, not the actual events], and because of all the underlying American lies that made a pandemic go viral and do the bulk of its dirty work here.
Still, it’s hard not to internalize that as my own failing, as I myself, if I was adequate and committed enough, would’ve found a way out already, if I was hungry enough. If I hustled enough. If I was good enough.
But all that’d be a lie, too, based on some combination of the above lies.
Nobody really banks on a pandemic in their future calculus, and now America’s exploding. But, make no mistake, I will get there. I will seek out what I am looking for. I deserve at least that much and candidly you all do. Every last one of you. You deserve to be unshackled from this cavalcade of lies.
You deserve what you want. To the best of my knowledge, it usually isn’t much. Good food. Good weather. Good friends. A place to call home. Something to look forward to. A craft to perfect. Someone to love. I wish you those things, I wish you your Lisbon. I wish you your truth.
And, goddammit, I wish you happiness. Not the pursuit of it, as discussed at the top, but as a prerequisite for your pursuit of truth and everything else. Lies morph and dissipate. Truth endures and strengthens.
So the pursuit of happiness is a lie, joy lives forever once we renounce it.
So hype springs ephemeral, hope springs eternal.
Don’t believe the hype.