A Loyal American Ponders Leaving the Country

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In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq last year we took to the streets with millions of other Americans in a futile effort to convince President George Bush and the other chickenhawks in his administration to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to do their job. Our inability to counter the deceit and arrogance at the heart of the Bush administration's Iraq campaign left me and Sharon -- and a lot of our friends -- feeling bitter, angry, and hopeless.

Sharon, a normally optimistic sort, suggested that we might be entering a "new Middle Ages" -- a move backwards as a culture to a sort of pre-Renaissance world fueled by fear, superstition, and naked military power. Did we want to support the government that was championing that vision? This was more than a theoretical question. In five short years, our son, Martin, would be obligated to register for the draft.

None of this made much sense from a purely rational point of view, but we figured rational people don't invade sovereign countries without provocation or recruit meter readers to spy on their fellow citizens. So we talked about the south of France ("a little stone farmhouse" was Sharon's ideal), or maybe Vancouver or Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. Iceland even seemed an attractive alternative. I began scouring Web sites for immigration insights as we boldly allowed our fantasies full rein.

At work, I stumbled upon the story of a Los Angeles couple and their two kids who pulled up stakes and moved to a small island in the South Pacific called Raratonga to "escape our overscheduled Los Angeles existence." I discovered a utopian ecovillage in Ecuador run by an expat Californian basking in a rural paradise far from the "pit of consumerism" that America has become. And I tracked down an old Minneapolis radical who had chucked it all for the good life in Mexico.

Stan Gotlieb told me he first visited Oaxaca in 1973. He returned briefly in 1992 before settling there for good two years later. "I came down here to study Spanish in preparation for a 'new life' somewhere unspecified, but south of the border," he says. "I was sick of my job and had some savings."

Ten years later, he's still there, a fact that even surprises him ("Inertia, I guess"). He met a woman from California with whom he now shares a home, and he says he has few complaints. "It's cheaper," he says of Oaxacan life, then lists the other advantages: "The food is fresher, the weather is good, the architecture is colonial, the art is first-rate, the crafts also."

The only downside, he says, is a lack of "good international cuisines" and a serious dearth of blues clubs.

When I ask him whether moving away has insulated him at all from the insanity of the current political climate, Gotlieb is quick to note that it's not that much different across the border. "We find ourselves having to respond to the attitudes of Mexicans, which range from hilarity to anger -- but almost never impolite."

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