An American Expat Living in America (Or, The Evolution of a Blog)

One challenge of being a blogger is figuring out what to write about — especially when you’ve committed to putting a blog out regularly, whether you have any inspiration or not. This was a tough slog for me even in the best of times, and it became even tougher when my life (and blogging inspiration) took a major turn in 2023. But the creative muse has a way of filling in these gaps. Lately that muse has inspired me to pound the keyboard with a fury, just to get all the angry thoughts out of my head.

We’ll get to that later. But first, some background.

I started this blog six years ago – February 25, 2019, to be precise – with a short introduction about what I hoped to accomplish. My main goals were to promote my fiction writing and share my experiences as an American expat living in London. I knew I was late hopping aboard the Blog Train. I also knew that blogs had already become a little passe in this era of vlogs and podcasts.

But no matter. Blogs are a written medium, and since I make my living as a writer, blogs were the only medium that made sense. I was just happy to scale the minimal technological requirements and launch a blog that at least looked like it knew what it was doing, thanks to my wife’s help with the design and visuals.

Blogging became a habit over in the UK, something that was occasionally a pain in the ass but that I mostly enjoyed. I committed to a blog a week and stuck to that probably 95% of the time. It gave me an opportunity to write about fun stuff instead of the finance-oriented web content that provides me with an income but doesn’t exactly let you stretch your creative muscles.

With a blog, I could pick my own topics. I could write in any structure I wanted, at any word count, in any cadence and rhythm that struck my fancy. I had a self-imposed deadline of one a week but it didn’t matter if I published it at noon Tuesday or midnight Saturday. The blog was mostly something I did for myself, but I did manage to build up a mass readership of about 50 readers per blog, based on those handy WordPress stats.

That average of about 50 readers still applies to this day. I am a global literary/media badass who simply cannot be contained, my friends….

Maybe the biggest benefit of having a blog is that it chronicles your life – sort of like a diary, but for public consumption. I can look back at it and relive our travels around Europe, the pandemic experience, our evolution as a family, or what was rattling around in my head at any given time.

I can also look back at what was a fairly productive period of fiction writing and publishing, which included a new novel and a few short stories that won various awards (you can read about it in the “About Me” section of this blog, if you’re so inclined).

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The reason I bring all this up is that the two main motivations for starting this blog no longer apply to my life. We moved back to the States in July 2023, so I don’t have an expat experience to blog about anymore. Around the same time, my fiction writing began to dissolve into nearly nothing. That’s partly because I’m too busy writing web content for pay, but also because I’ve sorta lost interest in writing fiction, though I can’t really say why. I’ll probably blog about that at a later date.

For now, though….

I’ve taken a stab at chronicling our lives here in New Jersey – which holds fascination for almost nobody outside of New Jersey. We’ve traveled a few places here on the East Coast, and I’ve blogged about that. I’ve blogged about food. And music. And cutting the grass. And the weather.

When you start blogging about cutting the grass, and the weather, well…..

So, like I said: I thought about just pausing the blog, or at least cutting it down to a handful a year. But then the United States went through another of its periodic and inexplicable psychotic episodes, and now I have something to blog about. I’ve been blogging about it pretty regularly lately, and will blog about it again now.

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I didn’t think I would blog about the current Forces of Stupidity that have kidnapped my homeland. I’m not sure I really wanted to. I tried to convince myself to just ignore it. Life’s too short. Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Focus inward, not outward. Etcetera.

But I can’t ignore these forces. I just can’t. They keep getting more bizarre, vile and reckless, and they need to be addressed. They need to be shot out of a cannon and exploded in the air for all the world to see and hear.

A blog reflects not only your world, but the world at large. Being a journalist by trade, I have occasionally blogged about global events in addition to my own personal experiences, whether it was the death of Queen Elizabeth, the war in Ukraine , or how my indifference to British politics was a welcome respite from my frustration with American politics.

Speaking of which….

I am back in America, but it’s not my America. It’s not the America I was born and raised in, or the one I spent decades living in, warts and all. I feel like an expat again – only this time I’m an expat in my own country.

In a matter of weeks, the USA has become an alien land controlled by a warped regime that was given power by a voting populace that continues to set new standards in ignorance, childishness, and shortsightedness. The very people who voted for this new regime will get hurt the most by its batshit policies, but they can’t see that yet. They will see it, in due time, when they find out that they’ve been swindled (again) by a fraternity of sleazy hucksters who want to get richer while you don’t.

The regime is led by a petty, geriatric half-wit whose only goals in life are to settle scores and line his pockets. He has surrounded himself with a tribe of talentless, equally petty goons, thugs, morons and frauds who want to tear down the federal government and replace it with something that billionaires and corporate interests can divide up among themselves.

The heavy lifting here is being done by Elon Musk, the mega-billionaire douchebag who suddenly has the power to oversee government spending in a country he wasn’t even born in, and whose immigration rules he might have run afoul of (and who now wants to kick “illegal” immigrants back over the borders en masse. Oh, irony).

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, the new regime is dismantling the U.S. federal government with all due speed. We are seeing the biggest shift in the nation’s capital in nearly 100 years.

I’m not sure why so many of these guys (pretty much all guys) want to tear down the federal government. I’m guessing greed has a lot to do with it. Beyond that, they just like knocking things down, the same way a 2-year-old likes to knock down a Lego structure for the sheer joy of watching it splatter in a hundred different directions.

The standard refrain here is that the federal government has gotten too big, too unwieldy, too corrupt, too expensive, too entrenched, too powerful, too this, too that. They claim that government spending is out of control. Taxes are too high. Our rights and freedoms are being taken away. Gun laws are too restrictive. Abortion laws aren’t restrictive enough.

People buy these arguments without bothering to check how accurate they are.

Well, here are some facts, since you didn’t bother looking them up yourself:

• The United States ranks 52^nd globally when it comes to government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, according to 2022 data from the World Economic Outlook Database. This means the governments of 51 other countries spend more money in the context of GDP – including wealthy countries like France, Japan, Germany, Canada and the UK.
• As of 2021, taxes at all levels of the U.S. government represented 27% of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the Tax Policy Center. That compares to a weighted average of 34% for the other 37 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). What this means is that the U.S. has lower taxes than just about every other rich country you can name.
• The USA has the easiest, least restrictive gun laws in the world, according to an analysis from Insider Monkey. It’s harder to get a legal firearm in Mexico, Honduras, Serbia, Yemen, Guatemala and the Czech Republic than it is in the United States.

I won’t glaze your eyes over with more data. Suffice it to say that the United States government, for all of its shortcomings, is not and never has been too big or unwieldy when compared to the rest of the world. Taxes here are not too high, and freedoms are not too restricted. This is one of the freest, least tax-intensive countries in the world. Those are the facts.

But many Americans don’t care about facts. They care about narrative. They care about having their own biases confirmed, regardless of how wrong those biases are. If some dude has to give up 22% of his paycheck to the federal government, he thinks he’s getting reamed – even though that 22% is a bargain in most other countries that provide decent infrastructure, services and social programs.

Meanwhile, if this dude’s house ever gets flattened by a hurricane or earthquake – or if he finds himself unemployed and up to his ass in debt – you can bet he’ll be first in line to get the government’s help. Except that now, thanks to the new regime he supported, that help might no longer be available.

Entire government agencies are being shuttered. Thousands of government workers are getting the pink slip. The world’s richest person (Musk) is leading efforts to gut agencies that were created to make things easier on poor people. I might not know much, but I do know this: If I were born rich and grew those riches into a net worth of about $400 billion, I would not spend my time trying to fuck over poor people.

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I take certain small comfort in the fact that these fascists will end up failing in their quest to turn the United States (and other parts of the world) into their own private playground. They’ll fail – you can bet on it. Fascists always fail. When you add wholesale incompetence into the mix, then they are pretty much guaranteed to fall flat on their asses.

Soon enough, the people who put them into power will turn on them. It’s already happening in some parts of the country.

Farmers who voted for the new regime now face the unhappy reality that they are going to lose lucrative government contracts. States that supported the new regime will lose a shit-ton of federal government jobs and funding that help prop up their slack-jawed economies. Poor people who supported the new regime will find essential benefits slashed. Tariffs on imported goods will lead to more inflation – the very thing the new regime promised to fix.

The USA has many problems. You could fill an ocean with its problems (like most countries, frankly). But an out-of-control government isn’t one of them. At the end of the day, the USA is a rich nation that works pretty well from a purely logistical standpoint. Life is pretty damn easy here. Travel just about anywhere else in the world and you’ll see just how good you have it, my fellow Americans.

I don’t like the direction America is heading. Folks are going to feel a lot of pain because of a small cadre of greedy, pathetic bastards.

But hey, at least I’ll get something to blog about.

Note: The photo is of our American flag, which I bought last year, and which currently resides in a closet. Our house in NJ came with a flag holder by the front porch, so I figured what the heck, I’ll get a flag to put up on national holidays. I’m not sure I have much interest in that anymore. Below is another photo of happier flag days.