Wrong Country

[Vilcabamba, Ecuador on 8/18/23, as photographed by an American, Jim]

In 2013, I received my first email from Jim. Responding to my article about Atlantic City, Jim related his experiences growing up in Jersey. Each year, Jim went with his chicken farmer dad to AC for a poultry convention. There, his dad bought a set of encyclopedias. This enabled Jim and his three siblings to plagiarize for school.

A more life changing experience, though, was seeing Bill Haley and the Comets, plus Duane Eddy and the Rebel Rousers, “I was probably in 7th grade, just hitting puberty. While standing outside, we saw Duane Eddy and the guys running up the steps! They had sideburns!!! and an attitude!!!”

At an AC bar, a Colombian said he would help me buy land if I wanted to move there. Though it sounded fishy, Jim said, “Don’t dismiss that as drunken babbling. Latin Americans wear their hearts on their sleeves and when they issue an invite, they mean it. But Colombia? That’d be one of the last South American countries I’d want to live in, another being Paraguay. I left the US nine years ago, three days after Bush won or stole his reelection. I live on a rundown farm in the mountains in Costa Rica. You are invited to visit if you ever pass this way.”  

I should also consider Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador, Jim advised, though the last was a magnet for clueless mainstream Americans, “Not the type of folks I care to hang out with. They ruin the area they move to with their ignorance, gringo money and gringo ways.”

In 2013, I still thought my future was in the USA, and the country itself had a future, if only scaled down or guttering. I was conscious of resource depletion. Joe Bageant’s move to Belize was intriguing and inspiring, and I was in touch with the man. Like Jim, he also said to come on down.

In an 1/7/14 email, Jim added that 9/11 “was really the main reason I left the US. My disdain and despair that my fellow leftists and anti-war activists refused to look at the evidence regarding 9/11. Especially Cockburn, Chomsky, David Corn, Matthew Rothschild.”

Whatever your political leaning, that collective blindness regarding 9/11 was the country’s death knell. With Covidiocy, the plywood coffin is dumped into a flooded ditch. Braindead, you’re dead, so it doesn’t matter if you can still vote or have some longing, nostalgic hardon. Biden, Trump, RFK Jr, DeSantis or whoever will make sure you’re committed to Israel. Nothing else matters.

Jim on 1/30/14, “Chris Hedges has also been contemptuous of those questioning 9/11. A few years ago he attended some official proceeding in DC and lamented about ‘the usual 9/11 Truthers,’ ‘you know the type,’ ‘torn jeans and dirty tee shirts.’  Can you believe he wrote something like that?”

Like its politicians, America’s dissidents are mostly dodgers and hedgers, if not chronic liars. Keeping the conversation within kosher boundaries, they buy time for the master criminals, so are colluders, in short. Cloaked and cringing, citizens join circle jerks to feel empowered!

Before leaving the US, Jim had tried alternative communities inside it. In 1969, Jim was arrested at bayonet-point by National Guardsmen after a protest at Berkeley’s People’s Park, “Anyone who looked young was captured in the roundup. I attempted to escape by going into a natural foods store. I even bought a small yoghurt so I could wave the receipt at the Man when he came to get me. I’m just a customer! A few national Guardsmen entered the store and the one in charge was ordering that certain people be taken prisoner. I piped up, ‘You don’t have to go with them, you have your rights!’ or some such nonsense. The head guy turned and pointed to me, ‘Him first.’”

Jim on 5/13/14, “In the 70’s I lived in Kent, OH where I had gone to college. We were trying to build an alternative culture, my part was baking whole wheat bread and granola to save the world. There was a lively live music scene in the bars, friends of mine put together a good country/rock band. The lead singer’s girlfriend was a part of our crowd. She later moved to Gainesville, FL, as did a lot of my friends who were tired of northern Ohio winters. She found there was easy money in taking her clothes off at adult clubs outside Gainesville. She was an exotic dancer. One night a guy she had met at a Rainbow gathering showed up so they went out.  He tied her up, raped and tortured her to death. He got 7 years in prison.”

Even in healthy societies, there are those who reject common paths to success, so they won’t aim for law or medical school, kiss ass habitually, or go along with any bullshit. Even when I could barely pay rent in Philly, my father advised me to learn how to play golf, because that’s how you meet influential people and move up in the world. Heeding this, my brother also figured out how to ski. Other parents may push their kids into the military, so they can go to exotic lands to murder or be killed. A mother may urge her daughter to spread her legs eternally to some old creep. Well, not eternally, because he has to die at some point, after, say, two decades of terminal illnesses. “It pays to wipe his ass a million times,” mom says.

Colluding, you get paid, so journalists lie, professors teach bullshit and doctors prescribe deadly Jewjabs to hundreds of patients who have trusted them for decades. “Your baby needs a booster,” they’ll even say in that reassuring tone.

When your society is mostly made up of colluders who would do anything to protect their perks and avoid censure or punishment, it can’t help but smell, and eventually look, like a world-class shithole, because there’s no citizenship left, just a shitload of people covering their own asses. “I’m not going to dox myself,” declared a brave one.

Having spent winters in Mexico and Central America since the late 1970’s, Jim relocated to the region for good at age 58, “I chose Costa Rica because land ownership by foreigners is more secure, though some still get ripped off through fraud.”

Growing coffee, Jim was hoping to make just $3,000 a year, a figure he never achieved. Worse, he was squeezed between two psychos. Relatives, they threatened Jim to make him sell his land for cheap, Jim figured. One even fired shots after trespassing on Jim’s land. Though friendly and courteous, the local cops were useless in solving problems.

Living at 3,000 feet up a 50 minute drive on crappy road from a bitsy town, Jim enjoyed buzzing insects, squawking macaws, a gurgling creek and the absence of combustion engines. There’s no TV at the nearest bar, so everyone talked. When a man enters, he shakes everyone’s hand, a practice I also observed in Zgorzelec, Poland, by the way. Chopping down hardwood trees on his property, Jim built himself a house. Taxes were mercifully low.

After dark, the most poisonous fer-de-lance [iron spearhead] pit vipers slither out to hunt, so Jim must stay inside. During the day, he must wear rubber boots to not be bitten by fire ants. He had a lovely horse he never got around to break in.

Still, Jim made his escape from America. With Covid, though, residency laws became stringent everywhere. Living so long among non-English speakers also got to him. Jim was depressed. Each brief trip back to the US was also disheartening.

After considering Nicaragua, Jim has decided on Ecuador. Arriving at the expat choked Vilcabamba, Jim found out two of the three households he knew had been robbed, with their owners severely beaten. On the plus side, there were Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Mexican restaurants, and many English speakers to converse with. Actually, too many.

On 8/18/23, so just two days ago, Jim sent me a poster offering a reward for information regarding the murder of an American in Vilcabamba. Like Jim, Francesca Williams had sought in Central America a simpler, more rustic life, and for ten years, she had found it with her father, husband and three daughters. On a 10 acre plot they paid just $10,000 for, they raised chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, goats, horses and pigs.

On 5/20/23, at least four men invaded their home. Her father was stabbed, her husband hit with a brick and she was shot dead. At least they didn’t molest her daughters. Now, there’s nothing to do but to bring her body back to Colorado, and to move back home themselves.

Other Americans, though, will continue to flee to Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Thailand, Laos or wherever, because back home is far from safe, and increasingly insane. For their physical and, most importantly, mental wellbeing, many must get out.

Three years before her murder, Francesca Williams expressed on Quora her concerns about Ecuadorian home invasions. She even said she would not have moved there had she known the situation was so bad. Having done so, she stayed on, just as people continue to live in Oakland, Gary, Camden, Cape Town or Juarez, etc., so Williams had a pleasant, even idyllic decade in Vilcabamba, a town of 5,000 she chose over Kremmling, CO, her previous residence.

Eighty two miles from Boulder, Kremmling has just 1,500 people, so it’s even more rural, and the landscape there is spectacular, but Williams had her reasons to divorce it. Across the country, millions of Americans also wish they could be somewhere else, if only through cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, tranc, Minecraft, Call of Duty or Chaturbate. Hearing the same tiresome songs millions of times also removes them.

Since leaving the US in August of 2018, I have spent two years in Vietnam, six months in Albania and Laos, five months in South Korea and Namibia, three months in South Africa, two months in Serbia, Lebanon, Cambodia and Thailand, and a month in North Macedonia, Egypt and India. As an online writer dependent on donations, I didn’t have to function in any of these economies, so I wasn’t as integrated as Jim or Francesca Williams.

Still, I was very much in alien environments, with their many complications and challenges. Only in Pakse, with its large Vietnamese population, have I felt somewhat at home, very relatively speaking.

At no point, though, did I wish I was still in Philadelphia, or suburban DC, the South Bay, Missoula, Boulder, Marfa, Salem or Tacoma, etc. Like Jim and many others, I’m just relieved to have extricated myself from the hologram.

Joe Bageant, “All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referent illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind’s interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.”

Freed of that Satanic spell, it’s a wondrously beautiful country. As is, it’s an endless buffet of bullshit sloppily arrayed, but hey, dummies are still streaming in. Stepping over the collapsed, they try to grab their glistening lumps. Gunshots pop, sirens wail, trains derail, crops fail, stores close, factories molder, zombies are everywhere but everything is still gorgeous on TV, until the news come on. Oozing corruption, Biden leers. With so many trees and houses burning, the sky turns blood red. There’s another variant, so roll up your sleeve and mask up again. It will take many lifetimes to flatten the curve.

[Vineland, NJ on 1/1/14]

[Los Angeles, 4/17/13]

[Redwood City, 4/16/13]

[Portland, OR on 8/6/14]

[Williston, ND on 7/8/14]