How the Dutch fucked up my politics, Volume I

God my dad would be proud

I promised to offer a few key moments here in The Netherlands that complicated my political perspective. The fourth one ended up MUCH longer and more complicated than I expected, but fuck it. Let’s go with it.

To begin, allow me to recap the political trajectory of my life thus far:

Child: Republican because my parents were, but also attending Dead shows because my parents were, which was confusing. Pretty sure my parents knew everything.

Teenager: Mostly drinking. Asked questions like, “Why is there no ‘white club’ at school?”Realized parents knew nothing.

Undergrad: Mostly drinking more. Went to Spain, world blew open but it was the 90s and Clinton was president and other than his blow job nobody cared about anything. Realized I in fact knew everything.

Grad school: Marxism! Critical race theory! Postcolonial! The subaltern! Foucault, Said, Derrida, Butler, Fanon — EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER BEEN TAUGHT IS A LIE I AM A MARXIST THE USA IS THE WORST COUNTRY ON EARTH I AM VERY RADICAL AND THAT IS WHY I AM YELLING. Knew everything plus how I was lied to. Extremely not “center.”

30s: stayed that way, entrenched deeper into it all with the election of Trump and the rise of the Trump right. No for real this time I know all the things and I’m better than everyone who doesn’t know what I know because there is a correct way to think and if you don’t think the way I think you are a fascist colonizer.

40-now: Moved to The Netherlands assuming I was a leftist going to one of the most progressive countries in the world and all of my Very Correct Ideas would be reinforced and reflected back to me as Very Correct. Almost immediately smashed into pieces. Back to knowing nothing.

I’m not sure we’d call this a process of “enlightenment.” I feel vaguely dumber. I am certainly less SURE, and that’s uncomfortable. However, whatever I’m in now feels significantly more true. Whatever that means.

Lao Tzu said “The further you go, the less you know,” and while I suspect he was talking about how seeking answers in the intellect and outside oneself causes us to move further away from where truth actually lies, within ourselves, I would like to apply this quote more literally. A sort of simpleton Tao. The further you travel, literally, with your body, the less you know, literally, with your brain.

Why am I quoting Lao Tzu?

Anyway that’s what happened.

Why couldn’t I have been struck by some ontological glory and become a mystic? Maybe a Jungian analyst in Sweden, or a shaman in Istanbul. Instead, I’m just another wobbling idiot on the internet who will make somebody mad no matter what she says.

There have been a few key moments contributing to this process. I’m going to give you four of them. The most transformative part of Dutch culture, though, gets an essay to itself, but I’ll tell you now: the openness of ideas and discourse. But let’s start with these.

1.) Wherein I Have it Worse than an Asylum Seeker from Venezuela

I was in The Netherlands for one week. A woman at the bus stop for my kids’ school asked me why we moved here. I launched into my well-worn rant about how awful things are in America. I said all of the normal things we echoed back to each other in the liberal California town I had just moved from. I spoke with absolute confidence even as her face began morphing into an expression I can only describe as “well aren’t you adorable” but without the condescension. Undeterred, I press bravely on.

Finally I stop speaking and ask her about herself. Turns out she’s on an asylum visa from Venezuela.

Like a brick across my addled brain, I realize I am whining to a woman about a country she would have loved to live in. In fact it was more or less her dream to live in. The humiliation was visceral, my naïveté center stage. I realized in one moment that I was A CONFUSED HUMAN with a seriously limited understanding of the world. I saw with perfect clarity that the USA, with all of its flaws, remains a country many, many people around the world risk their lives to live in. The fact is I had truly forgotten that the USA is not the worst country on earth. I wish this were hyperbole. It was as if a perspective-eating amoeba had made its way into my brain, and the woman at the bus stop, with one single kindly, penetrating glance, killed it.

I saw in that moment that the story of “worst country” had become like air to me, so deeply embedded in my brain I had ceased questioning it. I had gotten to a point where my ideas were so solid, so sound, so impenetrable, that I could not see reality, what was in front of my very eyes. I was brainwashed, not enlightened. I was ideologically consumed, not thinking critically. If our ideas cannot withstand reality, our ideas suck. I learned that fast.

And many of my ideas could not withstand the new reality of The Netherlands.

Now when people ask me why I moved here, I respond, “The quality of life is higher here for our family.” And that is true.

2.) In which drunk Europeans keep telling me they appreciate America as an imperial monster

It’s true, Dutch people (even sober ones) would simply not stop telling me that they rely on the US military and are pretty happy about the whole “USA as watcher of the world” because they have no military to speak of and wtf are they supposed to do if a big ass country like the USA doesn’t protect them.

Result: immediate complication to my understanding of the USA as solely a predatory imperialist monster. Apparently there are a lot of people who, uh, like us like that. WHO KNEW. Settle down, I am not saying the USA has not damaged countries all over the world through it’s world-policing interventions and imperialist designs. I’ve read my fucking Chomsky. Rather, I had never considered that it’s more complex than that. You think I’m joking.

**

Quick intermission to our little idiot montage: This is all humiliating. And we should examine how I got to the point where I was this ignorant of so many things despite having read so much theory, history, literature. Despite being a generally intelligent person. How was I so captured? What caused my blind spots? How did I miss so much? I have a few theories and I’ll get to them in subsequent essays.

Just wanted to mention that I know that you know how pathetic this all is but this is how ideologies work, friends: They remove the ability to think in nuance and complexity.

**

3.) Kids Dying on the Shores of France vs. “Literal Violence” on Twitter

My trip to Normandy: Walking down the hall of the museum lined with the photos of the men who died on the beaches of Normandy, I cried. I did not cry in national pride and go team camaraderie. Rather, I realized in that moment that those kids, and they were basically children, went across the world to fight a war that was not on their soil, that they technically did not have to fight, and if they had not done it, Europe, and more likely, the whole world, would be a very different place. I really thought hard about my own 17-year-old son walking alongside me.

What hit me in that moment was the fact that I personally had no understanding or respect for what our country was in any larger form, or ever had been, nor had I ever considered deeply the men and women who gave up their lives to defend the free world.

What struck me was that I was a myopic, simple-minded twit with no clear perspective on my own country, let alone the broader world. I didn’t even know that European countries remain grateful to the USA, Britain, and Canada for showing up in those wars. I’d simply never thought about it. In my education and subsequent leftist circles, and in all the media I consumed, we talked about the death, harm, destruction, corruption of America. And that’s all true. What we did not talk about was literally anything else.

There’s a cemetery here in The Netherlands of American soldiers who died during the liberation of The Netherlands from Nazi occupation in WWII. Each grave is adopted by a Dutch family. All year long the families visit the graves to celebrate holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and every year on Liberation Day, there is a ceremony to honor them. Every damn year they return to say thank you. There is apparently a multi-decade waiting list for families who wish to adopt a grave.

The fact is I would have seen this sort of thing as a bit of that Republican boomer shit. Came too close to “American pride.” I just said that out loud. But we’re either honest or we aren’t.

My ignorance was stunning. I am still embarrassed. My dad would be so proud.

I saw my whole generation as a bunch of sniveling idiots and suddenly understood boomers a bit better. My dad would die in joy.

The USA, among developed nations, is a bit of a trash bin. I will never deny that. What I’m talking about was that the simplicity of my perspective struck me and it was shameful. It was my ignorance. It was my disrespect to those kids who died. It was the juxtaposition of those kids against the ones I knew, sitting in their middle-class homes reading Judith Butler and claiming “literal violence” of their coworker failing to use a pronoun they invented ten minutes ago.

It was my cosmic lack of perspective.

**

4.) Wherein I Become a Trump-loving Grandma-killer Simply By Following the Rules of My Country of Residence