Today’s column is excerpted from 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Five: The end of the beginning (1989-1990), an installment of my serialized memoir of a career in beer. Part 76 was published in March, and more are on the way as time allows; read them free of charge at my website, and find the series overview here: The 40 Years in Beer Compendium: links, previews, and coming attractions.
—
According to conventional sources of Internet wisdom, a Europhile is “a person who is fond of, admires, or loves European culture, society, history, food, music etc.”
It must be conceded from the outset that certain other digital sources are neither benign nor forgiving, suggesting instead that Europhilia is a self-inflicted mental illness prompting sufferers to lose sight of their rabid and periodically delusional America-first patriotism.
It will have become evident to readers of this series that I can only shrug and expedite the tendering of my guilty plea. That’s me, to a tee—a Europhile, by both definitions, lacking any inclination whatever to apologize for it.
Europhilia has defined my very existence since college, and traveling through the continent just shy of 50 times since the mid-1980s naturally has cemented these bonds, leading to a legitimate question: Shouldn’t I have long since pulled up stakes, opted for full immersion, and chosen to become an expatriate? I know several Americans who have opted for this remedy, and envy them unreservedly.
All I can say is, “Welcome to my personal existential struggle.”
It remains that I’ve always been a slow learner, a late bloomer, and prone to a tenacious (some might say consistently self-defeating) stubbornness. Becoming an expatriate as recourse to the foolishness of American exceptionalism has appealed to me for decades, but fleeing the country hasn’t ever seemed an honorable response.
Rather, a long time ago I grudgingly accepted the drunken stork’s tragic error in unceremoniously depositing me atop the Ohio River mud flats, rather than near the Rhine, Danube or Tagus; as a way of sublimating my eternal Euro itch, I’ve resolved to scratch it by counter-intuitively staying put: teaching, sharing experiences, and when I’m lucky, annoying the jingoistic America-First crowd.
Taking all this into consideration, we return to the end of my travel year 1989, when this internal dialectic began releasing its findings.
In retrospect, I felt an expanding urge to bring a little bit of Europe back to Indiana, if only inside the four walls of home or work,...Read more
