My family was only American for one generation. Even if I were the second coming of John Adams, the country would have no claim on me. America raised me to believe in free republic, in cosmopolitanism and rationality, humanity, self determination, and in the inherent legitimacy of the will of the people.

It never stopped being an empire built on slavery, slavery is enshrined into law. It only briefly stopped persecuting a top-down class war, and Smedley Butler’s resistance has been all for naught. Every good value that American culture inculcated in me has been a hypocritical sham.

So we left. I never did fit in in the US, so I might as well live out my days as a misfit elsewhere. I’m like a local cryptid now, the man from a place that never existed.

You want to throw yourself into the gears of history to save a decaying empire, maybe you feel like you have no other choice? I understand that too, and even though the prospect sickens me to no end I cannot think less of anyone who chooses it. Try not to think less of me, either.