My semester abroad would be more than simply exporting Wesleyan University to another dot on the globe. It would be a chance to quit philosophizing and see the world in action, a chance to run from the experienced and instead experience myself.

“Send me an e-mail, stay in touch,” my friends said as I hugged them goodbye.

“It’ll only be a few months, what can happen?”

I left for Cape Town on Sept. 4, ready to lose myself in another country.

What can happen?

Skylines can be amputated and worlds can have facelifts. And 20-year-old kids abroad can have sudden urges to look homeward for comfort.

From the moment I turned on the television and saw the second plane collide with the tower, I have developed a serious attachment to wires. Modem wires that bring words across the world, television cables that bring pictures and telephone lines that bring voices. I have spent my time away trying desperately to get back, to reattach myself to a nation I wanted so desperately to leave.

I spend two hours a day in downtown Internet cafes with picturesque Table Mountain sitting idly behind me. I hang out in dingy hotel bars for entire evenings pleading with the bartender to turn up the volume on CNN. Then I go to a pay phone and use the last of my money to call my father and talk.

None of it has worked. Wires can bring the nation to me, but they cannot bring me to the nation. While they can relay information, they’re incapable of carrying emotion.

Upon hearing my voice, South Africans have a variety of responses. But they inevitably see me as the voice of America. There are those who joke with me, saying that I’m safer on the streets of Cape Town (where a murder takes place every minute and six seconds) than I am at home. There are those who call me “comrade,” and ask, “why don’t you just nuke the whole country?” And there are those who are angry that the headlines of their newspapers are cluttered with news of a war that doesn’t affect them.

“Five thousand people died? I am very sorry for that, brother. But 5,000 people die every fortnight from AIDS in this country. Is that on the headline of your newspaper, is that ever the lead story on CNN?”

Then there are those who give me hugs and bless me, consoling me for a loss that I understand no more than they do.

“You must be happy to be here, or at least not to be there,” people say, when I tell them I’m from New York.

My friends at Wesleyan were some of the first to take to the streets in protest of American retaliation. They have spoken of the ineffectiveness of bombing an enemy they cannot find. They have spoken of the severe loss of civil liberties in the United States. They have spoken of the role of oil. They have spoken of the theory that violence simply begets more violence, and they have spoken of the looming humanitarian crisis that could potentially take hundreds of thousands of lives. And they are not alone. There have been protests and teach-ins in Cape Town, as well as every other major city in the world, voicing the problems with the reaction thus far.

I will go home in early January, although I imagine it will hardly feel like anything I’ve previously known. I will return to a school gripped with fear and to a nation transformed.

And though my attachment to wires will fade, my semester abroad will remain firm in my consciousness. For it was my time away that made me realize how important my home has become.

title: “An American Abroad” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-21” author: “Tyler Crimi”

The other French people at the table agreed not at all. How can one rank les chanterelles below les girolles? The passionate discussion lasted until the cheese arrived–prompting a new discussion involving cheese rankings, counter-rankings and debate. I stayed out of it. Because, like all good Americans, my favorite kind of cheese (not to mention mushroom) is the kind you find on pizza.

Classifications, rankings, sets and subsets–these are truly French passions. They can organize anything on paper, which goes far in explaining the European Union, with its explosion of councils and commissions and committees. For those of you keeping score at home, the European Commission is made of Brussels bureaucrats with enormous power: the Council of Ministers is a powerful group of bureaucrats appointed by the individual member states; the Committee of Permanent Representatives is a group of bureaucrats from member countries, with membership weighted to reflect each country’s size and population. I mean, the whole thing just seems so French.

You can see them now, the Brussels crowd, leaning back from 300-euro lunches, slapping their palms on the table and declaring, “I think my four favorite European Union organizations are, in order…” Trouble is, what works for cheese does not work for government. Nor are mushrooms and bureaucrats much alike, except that both need careful washing.

Americans are surprised at how rapidly Europeans have ceded power to the tangle of institutions that is “Brussels.” We’re amazed that they’ve given up so much of their idiosyncratic oddness. “Don’t you miss the franc?” I asked a French friend. He scoffed. “Why would I miss such a thing. It was… it was…” He groped for the right word. “It was so illogical.” (Will he say the same when his unpasteurized Reblochon–among the Top Cheese Faves at dinner–bites the dust, victim to the EU’s agricultural standard-setting?)

Yet there’s the rub. Even the French recognize it’s possible to have too many boxes on the organizational chart, when extreme organization becomes chaos. The EU reached that point about two years ago. Now it’s in what Americans call “crisis mode,” albeit in its oh-so-European fashion. Logically, the solution was to form a new group to sort it all out–the Convention on the Future of Europe, whose job is to rationalize the competing missions and jurisdictions of the various councils and commissions.

It’s often compared to our own Convention of 1789, when James Madison and Alexander Hamilton figured out how to make the United States government the efficient, humming machine it is today. But there’s at least one big difference between our zany, messy country and the hyperrational super-state birthing in Brussels. Europe’s Convention on the Future is really just a squabble settler among large government groups. America’s Founding Fathers, by contrast, knew that their success or failure rested on not just the states, but on how much they deferred to the grass roots–the “fix those potholes, ya bum” local government that America excels at.

For all of their love of individual farmhouse cheeses and specific regional mushrooms, the French (like the Germans) have no tradition of strong local government. They can tell you which parcel of land and which slope gave up the grapes to make the Burgundy you’re drinking, but they couldn’t tell you about its earthy politics. It’s not that they don’t have the makings of a pretty colorful local political class. With his secret cash hoards and mysteriously opulent vacations, Jacques Chirac seems like a cross between Boss Tweed and the young Lyndon Johnson. And is it just me, or do Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jorge Haider both have a creepy old Dixie-crat vibe to them?

The problem, as Chirac and others are just now realizing, is that when you create a lot of layers at the top of the chart, you end up demoting yourself. With the anointment of one more European committee or commission, everybody else moves down a notch. In a few years’ time, Europe might very well end up with the same kind of nutty, eccentric, effective but mildly corrupt local government we enjoy so much in the United States. But it won’t be grown from the bottom; it’ll be squeezed down from the top. Think about it: Jacques Chirac, the boss of France County. Talk about illogical.