Many people who know me know I’m leaving the country for a time. Moving to New Zealand in 2009, that wondrous and simple country where I possibly spent the three most creatively fruitful months of my life, back in 2000, when I wrote the first draft of The Superhero’s Closet.
But as beautiful as it is, and as remote and unlike America as its scope suggests, people still ask me why I’m going? I’d like to be eminently positive about my decision, but I’m afraid it’s rooted in a lot of foul feelings about my country of birth and, more importantly, about those who people it.
The list you’re about to read is about order of magnitude. By this, I mean that, of course, I will encounter in New Zealand some of the “American” problems listed, but I will not experience them to the crushing, demoralizing degree that I experience them here. Here’s what I’m leaving — gladly — behind:
- A vapid consumer culture that rewards garbage.
- A collective corporate machinery that is more wealthy and powerful (if you measure mindshare) than the federal government and wields nearly as many rights as individual human beings (remember, you can’t sue AT&T for releasing your private records to the government).
- Politically acculturated Big Religion — based on fairy tales, fear, and prejudice — and its poisonous leakage into civil society and formal governance.
- American politics in all of its sleazy, tawdry forms.
- The industrial military complex, which accounts for more discretionary spending — for no defensible reason — than any other function of government.
- A population that gleefully and slavishly focuses on itself and how fantastic it looks in public.
- The deplorable delusion most Americans hold that corporate entities “interested” in the green movement replace their need to actively take charge of ecological conservation.
- Zappos adverts inside the trays you have to put your shoes in when you’re debased at the airport during a perpetual and meaningless threat level of orange (orange, apparently, is the perennial color of insupportable dread).
- Most American’s don’t understand basic American history, world history, or how governments form because of people to support the rights of those people.
- An incredibly foolish reliance on a 2-party system that delivers only flavors of ineptitude, arrogance, and self-interest.
- Incessant celebrations (facebook, SUVs, the iPhone) of the cynical spawning of new services and products as a proxy for true entrepreneurial innovation.
- The comatose state of secular discourse.
- American-style television, the ultimate pacifier of children and an authoritative source of news and education for many adults.
Invariably, this list will grow as I think about it, but I will unquestionably add one or more lists that address what I will miss about the States, and why New Zealand is a far better alternative for a person uninterested in the crass, stupid workings of an empire at the peak of its power to inflict cultural damage on itself and others.