Heading abroad again. After seventeen years I\u2019m finally on my way to Ireland. There will be pubs. There will be pints, although they will almost certainly be taken a half at the time. There may or may not be singing. There will be very nice accommodations in transit and we\u2019ll almost certainly have a room booked for every night before we leave. There will hopefully be no 90-degree heatwaves or sudden-onset sinus infections to confound us as in years past. And hopefully the GlobalEntry registration will make it a lot simpler coming and going and avoid making a scene with the Border Patrol.<\/p>\n
Because there\u2019s no getting around it: this is a difficult time to be an American in the eyes of the world. I\u2019ve said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating: America, in 2017, is the Alabama of the world. How you feel about that and how you react to that probably says as much as anything about what kind of person you are. I\u2019m no stranger to being vaguely embarrassed about whence you came and feeling like you have to demonstrate that you\u2019re not<\/em> about what your home patch screams to the world \u201cthis is what we\u2019re about.\u201d My one hope is that I can point to California on my hat and at least get the benefit of the doubt – hopefully our state\u2019s branding is strong enough to say \u201cif there\u2019s one part of America you can count on being Never Trump, it\u2019s the Golden State.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be honest: the last trip to London, problematic as it was, still had a nasty undercurrent even after correcting for the heat and the sickness. It wasn\u2019t \u201cwhat if we could move here,\u201d it was \u201cwhat if we had<\/em> to move here?\u201d and I would be lying not to acknowledge that there\u2019s a lot of that weighing on me right now. There are a handful of folks whose fortunes we have to worry about in America and 2017; if they were going to be all right and\/or we could take them away with us, I\u2019d be all in on decamping to this place where they speak English yet are still in the EU, where some of the politics are iffy but there\u2019s no actual Nazis involved in governance, some place out of the front line of fire of a North Korean maniac where you don\u2019t have to spend days begging the government not to blow up health care for millions of people to line the pockets of rich assholes, where there\u2019s a burgeoning tech sector that hasn\u2019t taken over the entire local economy and caused it to disappear up its own ass while ordinary non-Eloi have to work twice as hard and rent their rooms and drive side hustles and the like just to keep what they have. Some place where unlimited talk and text and 15 GB of data will cost you $24 a month prepaid with no commitment. Some place where the national motto is literally \u201ca hundred thousand welcomes.”<\/p>\n In other words…if I go to Ireland, will I be willing to come back?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Heading abroad again. After seventeen years I\u2019m finally on my way to Ireland. There will be pubs. There will be pints, although they will almost certainly be taken a half at the time. There may or may not be singing. There will be very nice accommodations in transit and we\u2019ll almost certainly have a room … <\/p>\n