AMERICA

Here in Europe, we have always watched you from afar. Through television screens and computer screens and little screens we carry around in our pockets. America in high definition. 24/7.

We felt like we knew you.

When I was a little girl growing up on the western coast of Ireland, I watched you across the ocean. I would go on hikes with my mother that always ended with us stood on the tip of Bolus Head, staring straight out to the vast Atlantic. My mother would say the same thing every time – America was out there, beyond the waves.

I still remember the wistful glint in my mother’s eye as she pronounced your name, America.

I was given to understand that you were a special place. A large and prosperous one. The country where my mother’s brothers had gone to live. Those uncles I would never meet who had done so well for themselves, whose postcards would arrive from places called Staten Island and Arlington Heights.

It was easy for a kid from County Kerry to fall in love with the idea of you. Back then, you were the America we saw in Home Alone. You were enormous houses with garbage chutes. You were long, snowy driveways at Christmas time. You were 12 pepperoni pizzas delivered to the door. You were jumbo jets and four-poster beds. You were soda machines and milkshakes. You were the promise of Disneyland, one day, maybe. You were more, bigger, faster, sweeter.

You were more like a harmless uncle then, America. You said some embarrassing stuff and the rest of us rolled our eyes behind your back. But you always sent me twenty dollars on my birthday and mostly, you stayed out of the way.

Some people never grow out of their childish obsession with excess. Some grow up and emigrate to your shores, America. But I, gratefully, did grow out of it. By the time I was a teenager, I had lost interest. I still did not think there was anything nefarious about you, but I sensed, without understanding, the spiritual emptiness beneath your surface.

When I was seventeen years old, I lost my virginity and a month later I watched through the television as brown-skinned men with unpronounceable names flew airplanes into your heart. I was becoming a woman, and the world was becoming a violent place, and you, America, were at the centre of it. I cried for you. And I wondered what you had done to deserve such hatred.

Later, I went to university, and I became a big grown-up person. I read books and learned what you really were, America.

I learned how your name wasn’t really America at all. How you’d stolen that and so much more from your neighbours. How all throughout history, you have crept into other people’s houses under the cloak of night. How you have taken for yourself the family heirlooms, torn the father from his bed, and left the door open on your way out.

But all of that was in the past, wasn’t it? Huh, America? Now, you were different. Now, you could be trusted.

So, I jumped on a plane and touched down in Chicago. It was a summer of love, of cowboy boots and miniskirts. Of happy hours at Kingston Mines and dates under the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. On the TV news they were talking about bombs falling on Iraq, but I was singing “all things go, all things go” at Lollapalooza. It was easy to pretend, America. To compartmentalise and deflect. You liked little Irish girls. You paid for my drinks. Your people were kind. The problem was your government.

But what are you now, America? What have you become? As things stand today, I will never return.

My uncles’ children are wearing MAGA hats on Facebook. At Thanksgiving, they post videos of their deep-fried turkeys. They’ll never know how much they lost by becoming Real Americans. They got it all wrong, so wrong in the end. The best Americans are the ones who stay close to their origins.

And here in Europe, we just stare at our phones. All day long. High-def. 24/7. On and on and on.

But there’s no sense to be made of it.

No denying the truth.

This is fascism.

This is you, America.

Do you hear me?

This is you.