Introduction - Part Two

Returning two days later due to scheduling. I've sent a curriculum vitae to a university in Chile. They are on summer break down there, so nothing will happen before March. When they return to look at it, they might find its two books, twenty or so publications in refereed journals and perhaps twice as many presentations at meetings to be impressive. Perhaps such achievements will be better received in Chile than they have been in the United States of America, though admittedly that is not saying a whole lot.

The small scale issues, pros and cons. The pros: my academic career is again deteriorating, this time due to the economic crisis. With my course load reduced from five (livable, just barely) down to two (not livable), it is definitely time to look elsewhere assuming academic employment remains desirable at all. And in the United States of America, it probably is not.

In fact, I would warn anyone reading this and thinking about pursuing an academic career: don't. It is a thankless job, low-paying, unstable, and very political, with universities now so beholden to political correctness that real education is extremely difficult at best - obtainable, but only if you are independent-minded. Adjuncts such as myself can probably get away with more than a tenure-track faculty member could, because aside from end-of-the-semester teaching evaluations almost no one pays us any attention. So long as we are meeting with our classes on time and students are not complaining, we are left alone. This may be the sole advantage to being an adjunct at a university. It is not enough to make up for the starvation wages; and more importantly, it is hardly a permanent arrangement.

Moreover, when university money is tight, adjuncts are invariably the first whose heads are placed on the chopping block. Just last week in one of the institutions where I've been "adjuncting," an email went out from the department chair about next fall's budget. He's been asked to write out the fall class schedule, but without a guarantee that the department will be able to offer every section on the schedule. Read between the lines, and I see a less than 50 percent chance that adjuncts will be returning in fall semester. With the prospect of joblessness ahead, there can be no rational reason for not looking elsewhere. And with the situation in the country, there can be no rational reason for not looking outside the country.

Hinting back to this large-scale issue, the United States of America is simply not an intellectual-friendly country. A professional intellectual here is usually a university professor who is at home nowhere else; there are very few other venues where he can use his/her skills except in the classroom. (There are "think tanks," but without the right connections, obtaining funded positions there is more difficult than obtaining an academic appointment.)

It is no wonder so many intellectuals have turned against American capitalism. You don't need to read Karl Marx. All you need to do is examine how money, power, and authority structures operate in this society, and you'll soon realize that those with money and power, and in the authority structures, don't want the masses to think. Discouraging too much intellectualism comes naturally. All this is unfortunate, because the United States of America was originally founded on a set of principles that require at least some intellectual training to grasp properly. These principles (embodied in phrases like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" or "Constitutionally limited government") are all but lost. They have no influence with the educational "mainstream" which gets more and more vocational all the time ("School-To-Work," etc.). The U.S. Federal Government is not fundamentally different than any other government based on intimidation, force and violence, and the country's political system became an oligarchy a long time ago. The American sheeple, one might as well call them, graduated from U.S. government schools devoted more to producing compliant consumers and obedient employees than to graduating an intellectually independent, self-reliant people. Countless books have been written on the fall of education in America, what amounts to the deliberate destruction of the American intellect (my own favorite is this one). The upshot: the American sheeple can no longer put two and two together. They are unable to see, or even much care, that they are being manipulated. Many possibly do care, but are too inundated by endless streams of tasks and assorted busywork to do anything. Hence our political system can no longer elect statesmen. It is easy for those with real power in, e.g., the Republican Party, to block the ascent of a Ron Paul while nominating a weak-sister candidate like John McCain who had no chance against a skilled orator like Barack Obama who had the sheeple (along with the corporate media) in the palm of his hand.

This post, however, was supposed to be about small-scale issues, so I will return to that. The biggest pro favoring becoming an expat, is the realization that I will never have a decent academic career here, or probably any other career. I've been working (somewhat) at finding niche markets for products on eBay (or perhaps on my own site), and while I could conceivably be successful at that it will never excite me as much as teaching and writing philosophy and writing about contemporary issues has. But even absent the worst economy since the Great Depression, I could not remain an adjunct for the rest of my life; in the absence of some other such career I would end up in abject poverty. In many respects I have never really been at home in the United States of America. Its materialistic and money-driven values are pretty much alien to those of a culture that is decent and humane, much less informed. In a lot of respects, this really is a culture of death. Which is probably why so few of us have problems about abortion and also why we wage wars on sovereign nations that didn't attack us first - regarding both their lives and ours as expendable.

In the absence of decent prospects for intellectuals in the U.S., if such prospects emerge in a place whose culture is less materialistic and where it is cheaper to live, why not pursue it actively?

The biggest set of cons to consider when I consider abandoning the United States of America: my elderly parents, both 85. Without getting into the specifics, both need round-the-clock health care. Both should have gone into assisted living long before circumstances compelled them to do so, but that is water under the bridge now. To make a long story short (I have a detailed account offline and private), my dad had a bad fall near the start of last summer - June 8, to be exact - took my mom down with him, and both of them ended up in the hospital and then in physical therapy.

They've not been able to return to their own home, since it wouldn't be safe. The house is isolated and well away from any population center. It has a long and fairly steep driveway. As far back as early spring 2007 Dad was complaining of exhaustion from trekking up the driveway every morning to get the newspaper and every afternoon to get the mail. This is on top of his taking care of my mom, who had a stroke back in April 1999 that left her mostly paralyzed on the left side of her body. She was making something of a recovery, but then the two of them were in an automobile accident in 2002. Some blonde bimbo pulled out from a side street, and my dad couldn't stop in time. There was a lawsuit, which we won - but the settlement was absurdly small (the lawyer took a third of it, of course).

My dad fell again in August and this time sustained a hip fracture. He has been in skilled nursing ever since. He has also been suffering from dementia, resulting in reactive confusion about where he is, where mom is living, how she is getting back and forth, and so on. Always having had an active mind and lifestyle, he's having to deal with discouragement and sheer boredom. Meanwhile, staying where they are staying is costing them a fortune. I've had to take over the books: keeping track of these payments (one due this week), bills that previously went to the house, insurance on the cars, gathering tax documents and so on. Having a Power of Attorney over each parent is making things somewhat easier, but there are still massive obstacles to any major move out of this area much less out of the country. The house, as I said, is standing empty in northwestern Anderson County. It will need eventually to be sold. Two cars are standing there with no one to drive them; I drive to the house at least once a week to warm them up and check on the house (I often do laundry since I am there anyway). There are enormous quantities of furniture, books, dishes, tools, etc., in the house, all of which must eventually go somewhere. A huge driveway sale is a possibility, even out in the boonies. Living there had the advantages of being peaceful and quiet; but the isolation was already working against my parents' best interests long before last June 8 - Day 1. My living there after March is a definite possibility if I can tolerate the isolation in order to live rent free. That would make some of this easier. The issue remains of much needing to be done:

(a) putting the house on the market, in a depressed economy in which houses aren't selling.
(b) putting the cars on the market, in a depressed economy in which cars aren't much selling.
(c) selling or otherwise getting rid of the stuff that is in the house.
(d) obtaining for my parents Veterans benefits, to which they are entitled by law and by basic decency, both being veterans. (There are multiple exemplars here in the frustration of dealing with government bureaucrats.)
(e) perhaps setting up a bank account to absorb the proceeds of all these sales that would autopay the assisted living center each month. Such an account could keep my parents going for several years at least in principle - assuming the IRS didn't count it as "income" and tax the h*** out of it!

I am, of course, working under the assumption that my parents would not want to be relocated to a place like Santiago, Chile, and that an attempt to do so would be overwhelming.

I also have an uncle in Illinois who is isolated, and whose health will decline one of these days. I've no clue what to do in his case, since he is in Illinois and I am in South Carolina, beyond what has been done so far which is to get my name on some of his assets. (Without his doing anything, the State of Illinois would doubtless make a grab for them!) Eventually someone will have to settle his estate.

All these factors have me trapped here in a very real sense, at least for the time being. I cannot leave immediately, since there are tasks needing to be done on a weekly basis. No one else is available to do them. (I would not ask my sister to do them, as she has ended up with problems of her own.)

Those are the small scale pros and the cons of relocating to Chile. The major pro, based on a worst-case scenario: I could well be unemployed beginning in May, with no job prospects worth speaking of and nothing happening on eBay. Based on that alone, were it not for this mess with my aging parents, and given the latent and sometimes open hostility I've experienced towards independence of thought in this society, I would be already making specific plans. But the major cons are what they are: a house full of furniture and other possessions standing empty, cars with no one to drive them, my parents' personal finances to manage, and so on. The cons have won out so far. I'm stuck here!

Where we go next remains to be seen. Circumstances change. I will post new developments as they happen. I will also post information as it comes my way on the deterioration of the U.S. economy and its various effects that might enhance the desirability of finding a way out of this country.