Yankee Go Home

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 18:45

It's Wednesday afternoon and now the sun is out and the sky is clear, this weather is psychotique. There was a movie i once wanted to rent way back in my dollville days in the midwest. something like the Natural History of Parkinglots. Or maybe it was or should have been titled the Unnatural History of Parkinglots. Either way that was my American Life. This American's Life Trapped within the Unnatural Ecology of Parkinglots. Parkinglots connected to multilane roads, tarmac aligned to the transcontinental compass points, flanked by powerlines, all night flourescent glow stores set back from the road behind the ubiquitous parkinglot. Sodium street lights towering over the roads edge. The smell of diesel mixed with the sour smell of nicotine in the air. Signs displaying the trappings and vices of unrestrained relentless capitalism on its death eating march. Not a tree in sight. Grass only growing along the forgotten chainlink fences between unconnected parkinglots. Aging cracked cement for a seldom used sidewalk - all under the brownish haze of fuel exhaust competing with the oxygen level of the atmosphere. This is the infrastructure of home i remember and do not miss. Not that we dont have this way of life imported over here! We most certainly do! (Thank you Mr. Marshall Plan). It's just there is also a pre-automotive urban fabric more predominate than the automotive infrastructure so its possible to actually escape to some degree these sorta roads to nowhere.
Not that standing at a payphone along such a nowhere street under an old neon sign to the "No-tell Motel" on a hot and hazy, humid summer day, shirtless in jeans, feet stinking in their shoes, doesnt have a certain sexy street appeal at least to some passers-by. Thats the me there in l'Amerique du Nord i remember even if stuck on such a nameless broad street headed west with nowhere to go and no way to get there anyways.
It was on such a european version of this kinda street that i was bicycling my way to swimteam practice. Me on my twenty year old sturdy dutch bicycle american ex-pat when get this! a big black SUV with windows up who cannot navigate such a wide vehicle on narrow european traffic lanes runs me off the road!!! and the f*cking SUV had VIRGINIA state license plates!!! on streets here you can bike as fast as cars with all the red lights stopping traffic. So big black imperialist SUV drives me off the road not once, not twice but three times... i guess their windows were up "for security reasons" because Amerikkka is after all AT WAR! Against what? Oh yeh Terrorism. i forgot. Big black Japanese SUV with STATE OF VIRGINIA license plates careening down a Brussels street heading toward the EU quarter! Definately from the George W jr and daddys Uncle Tom's administration Cabin-et. You know the one i mean featuring Auntie Condoleeza just so we dont think the oil corporations in the White House are white supremists or anything. By the third time i was run off the road by the big black SUV with state of VIRGINIA license plates i was yelling "F*CK YOU! YANKEE TAKE YOU AND YR WAR OIL FUELED SUV BACK HOME!!!!"
What a picture - two americans abroad strangers to each other one in a big gas guzzling (and do you know the price of petrol on this continent!!!) SUV obliviously running another american on a slightly more ecological vehicle off the road. Image a nameless heavily traffic'd narrow euro street with a SUV with what i guess is a republikkkan, working for the corporate economic colonialism of the bush family regime's administration, cluelessly driving next to a bicycling free thinking left leaning unemployed fellow american ex-pat who is waiting on a Belgian work-permit.
So it seems papa bush already bought baby bush another four year lease in that infamous mansionette at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And just when you thought the rest of the world could'nt hate the Americans anymore than they already do! well then just stay tuned for the next term!