A Loyal American Ponders Leaving the Country

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

And forget about escaping America's soulless consumer culture. You'll run into Starbucks and McDonald's pretty much everywhere on the globe these days -- whether you want to or not. "There is no running away," she says. The politically motivated expat is really no different from the folks who move abroad to straighten out their marriage or to boost their careers or inject some excitement into their lives. The issues at the core of their discontent don't stay home, Pascoe says. They travel as comfortably to your new address as any other piece of baggage. "There is a terribly romantic view of moving abroad," she says. "But all the issues are the same as living at home -- except magnified."

You've got to carefully examine your motivations for moving, she tells me. Don't flee the United States simply because you oppose the policies of the current administration. Don't run away in the hope that you can find the simple life in an ashram in India (it's not as cheap as you may think, Pascoe warns) or a rundown Budapest hotel. Some people have managed to pull it off, she says, but it's not easy.

That's certainly the message I get from Diana Johnstone, a journalist who was European editor for the progressive newsweekly In These Times for many years. Living in Paris, she managed to ply her trade (her new book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, has recently been published by Plato Press), raise a family, and successfully navigate French culture for more than 30 years. Johnstone, by all accounts, seems to be living the expat dream, yet she ferociously resists the stereotype. "I hate the term expat and certainly don't think of myself under that or any other label," she says.

Johnstone visited Europe several times before deciding to move there in 1971. There really wasn't any articulated decision-making process involved, she recalls, just a series of leaps into the unknown. "Each time I made the move it was like jumping from one trapeze to another without a safety net." And she doesn't accept the notion that fleeing America is necessarily a good thing for the progressive-minded -- or anyone else. She admits that her decision to emigrate had some political overtones (the opportunities to study Vietnamese history, a project linked to her antiwar views in the '60s, were more plentiful in Europe than in the United States), but she's not at all sure that the "political" decision was the right one. "Politically, I tend to think I might have been more useful had I stayed in the United States," she says. "I've tried to compensate by writing about European politics for people back in the USA, but I'm not particularly satisfied with the results."

Mostly she was looking for a better academic environment for her daughter. "She's the one who rose to the crucial challenge," Johnstone recalls. "She learned French so fast that within a year she was top of her class." Her daughter went on to marry a Frenchman and is raising four children and teaching history in a bilingual Paris lycée. She's published two books in French.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print