Time & Perspective Quote by Tommy Chong

Chong isn’t offering a travelogue; he’s staging exile as a punchline with teeth. The offhand cadence - "You know" twice, the casual "got in", the shruggy "my instincts" - is the delivery system for a sharper claim: certain presidencies don’t just change policy, they change the emotional weather. He frames Reagan and George W. Bush as cultural tipping points that made staying feel like complicity, or at least like tolerating a national regression.

The subtext lands hardest in "I’d felt that we had grown above that". It’s not a wonky critique of platforms; it’s a disappointment in the story Americans tell themselves about progress. Chong’s persona matters here: a counterculture icon whose career was built on making authority look ridiculous, and who later became a real-life target of federal prosecution tied to drug politics. So when he talks about leaving, it reads as both satire and self-preservation. The joke is that his "instincts" are political analysis; the sting is that instinct has been proven reliable by experience with the state.

France isn’t random, either. It’s the shorthand American refuge for artists and dissidents, a place you go when you want distance from Puritanism, culture wars, and the punitive streak Chong associates with conservative rule. The line “we had grown above that” is the heartbreak: not that the country changed, but that it never quite did.