Every couple of months it seems like a first-person narrative of an American expatriate living an European social-welfare existence—most recently like Russell Shorto’s account in the New York Times magazine—pops up. Every time I read one of these I long for the time when the US comes to its collective senses and institutes this kind of a social undertaking on a massive, all-encompassing scale, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh be damned.
When are we going to wake up, come to our senses, and realize that Gordon Gekko capitalism is just, well, wrong.
Face it, the taxes are about the same all in. But instead of reinforcing the American oligarchy, the collective wealth is used in these European states to benefit everyone.
Oh, sure, there are problems. Europeans ride bikes for real, drive too close to each other, and that plastic wrap in European groceries is just too much. The one that really gets to me, though is “consensus and conformity.” As if conformity isn’t the demanded norm in the US. The idea of the American pioneer, the great non-conformist is a myth. It died 30 years ago.
I figure I’ve got no more than 20-30 years of this life left; probably less—maybe a lot less. The question, which becomes more pressing every year, is whether I want to live in the land of Gordon Gekko and his somehow malformed inherently inferiorly designed clones or something more; something else. I used to hope the European social movement would come here, but after the last half of 2008 and most of the first half of 2009 it’s never been clearer that’s not going to happen in the US. Not ever. All that’s left is to put Gekko’s profile on the money.
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