KICK TRUMP OUT OR ELSE
AMERICA IS ALREADY GREAT, NOW IT MUST BE BETTER
STAY where you are, we were told – the building is in lockdown. It was November 2012 and, on a trip to Washington DC, I got tickets for the public galleries of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US Capitol building. Until that point I was enjoying seeing faces I knew only from television – Nancy Pelosi here, Marco Rubio and Dianne Feinstein there – and the thrum of power was palpable. Now, I was nervous.
We never did find out why the building was locked down, but those 45 minutes were scary. The United States, day in and day out, is a target for extremists of many hues, and you start thinking, just my luck this is where I’m going to die.
Then you remember they take security very seriously indeed. You enter the Capitol underground, where you are searched more thoroughly than you would be before a flight, and even as you are led around, there is no departure allowed from the areas open to the public.
The most impressive of these is the National Statuary Hall, a roll call of the most famous people in US history. You can see everyone from George Washington to Sequoya, who created the written version of the Cherokee language, Mormon leader Brigham Young to Father Damien, the Belgian priest who set up a mission in Hawaii for those with leprosy and who was canonised in 2009.
On Wednesday night, that hall was desecrated as it was stormed by a mob incited to commit mayhem and violence – by the President of the United States himself.
A grinning domestic terrorist, and there is no other word for it, smiled for the cameras as he walked through carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. Not far away, another was sitting on the chair in her trashed office.
Security men stood at the door of the House, guns drawn to repel invaders. And, in one of the most bizarre images we ever will see, grinning, bare-chested Jake Angeli, known as the QAnon Shaman, his face painted red, white and blue, stood on the podium of the Senate while wearing a fur-trapper hat with horns.
HONESTLY, as I watched jaw agape, my heart was broken. I love the United States and always have done, though I am far from naïve about its frequent abuse of its dominant place in our world. When I was young, I was addicted to movies, and always stayed in the cinema until the very end of the credits. On St Stephen’s Day 1975, I saw Jaws in the Adelphi on Middle Abbey Street and there was a message at the very end that read simply: ‘ Next time you’re in California, visit Universal Studios.’
The sheer glamour of the come hither was intoxicating, but also beyond reach. I was a council house kid from Ballybrack, and they might as well have added a line saying ‘next time you’re on the Moon, don’t miss the Sea of Tranquility’. It never was going to happen.
It did. In 1986, I had saved enough to go to New York and Florida for three weeks and I vividly remember taking a taxi from JFK to a friend’s apartment on 34th Street.
As we hit a crest on the Long Island Expressway, the Manhattan skyline revealed itself and, far from being thrilled, I felt something different. I had seen it so often in movies, I was thinking something else entirely. I was thinking I was home.
It was the first of 51 visits over the last 34
years. In 1987, I flew to Tempe, Arizona for the very first night of U2’s Joshua Tree tour. In 1988, I finally got to Universal Studios in Los Angeles. On December 1, 1989, I got engaged in Windows On The World on top of the World Trade Center – I still wonder if any of the staff who clapped us that night were on duty on September 11, 2001, when appalling carnage saw two of the world’s most iconic skyscrapers reduced to toxic dust, leaving 2,606 dead in the rubble.
All my trips there have been memorable. I sailed from Cork to New York on the QE2 in June 1998. As I arrived into Manhattan, I phoned my parents from the deck and described i t minute by minute, and my dad was as excited as I was; two years previously, as a Christmas gift, I had taken him to see cousins in Dallas and then on to New York for a few days, and he loved it. My sail-in took on added poignancy just weeks later, when he died suddenly while on holiday in England, and I often look back on that excited chat from the deck of an ocean liner as a special moment to treasure.
I’ve been to 20 of the 50 states, and seen wonders unimaginable – from the overwhelming grandeur of Yosemite and the sighting of a moonbow, a rainbow made by moonlight at midnight in the cascade of Yosemite Falls, to a helicopter flight into the Grand Canyon for a champagne picnic.
I’VE played the tables in Vegas and Atlantic City, driven across t he Golden Gate Bridge, been to the claustrophobic observation deck on the Gateway Arch in St Louis, toured the Gilded Age mansions of Newport in Rhode Island, got drunk with my nephew i n the dive bars of Philadelphia, even watched Ireland beat Italy in Giants Stadium in New Jersey in the 1994 World Cup.
I’ve ridden rollercoasters in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey again, where I plucked up the courage to get on Kingda Ka, the world’s tallest and second fastest.
I’ve been to the Oscars twice, the Tonys once, the MTV Video Music Awards in both Los Angeles and New York. I watched ice hockey and baseball, and tennis in Madison Square Garden, and I’ve had sad moments too, travelling to Orlando for the funeral of my cousin’s husband when he was killed in a motorbike accident, only to return 18 months later when she too died, of cancer.
When I add it all up, I’ve spent over a year of my life there, and I have loved it, but I also have seen unpalatable change. A few years back, talking about Barack Obama, a relation I love dearly, a woman who was a lifelong Democrat before switching her support to George W Bush, called him by the N word – and I froze. I had never heard it used openly in the US before, and it felt like everything I ever knew about the country and its incredibly hospitable people was a rug whipped from under me.
Travelling around, I heard all the now familiar lies about Hillary Clinton and a paedophile ring operating out of a pizzeria in DC. I heard with my own ears the dismissal of the elite, which largely proved to be anyone with more than a High School education.
And I heard the creeping new insularity – ‘if you don’t like it, don’t come here’; ‘you can’t say what you think anymore’; ‘if you want t o be American, you shouldn’t speak Spanish’, and so on.
It has been incredibly depressing, and all of it stoked by Donald Trump, whose brooding coarseni ng of public discourse and demonisation of minorities only ever was leading to one place, the sacking and pillaging of the very heart of democracy.
Five years ago, my nephew and I stood in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the republic itself, and while it was founded on practices such as slavery that we find repellent, it still seems unthinkable those Founding Fathers ever foresaw a time when the failsafes they included in their blueprint, the checks and balances of the legislature, the judiciary and the executive, would prove so flimsy when torn up by one power-crazed, narcissistic and deeply flawed man.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have a Herculean task on their hands trying to pour salve on the deep wounds in American society. These are not new, but Trump gave the unspeakable not just a voice but a megaphone. His dogwhistling has been exhausting, and I’m tired of living life on Eastern Time, watching CNN every night for months now until the wee small hours of the morning.
THERE is, however small, a sense of hope now, a singular chance to restore the image of the US. There is no need to make it great, because in so many ways – from movies to music to innovation – it already is. There is, though, plenty of room to make it better, for children who should feel safe in school, for Americans of colour, and for the marginalised who genuinely were left behind and who became such easy prey for a black-guardish populist who convinced them he was their saviour when instead he could not have cared less about anyone but himself. Wednesday night’s failed insurrection, coup, whatever you wish to call i t, was sad beyond words, and all who fanned the flames – from the vile senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to their enablers in Fox News and Breitbart, from the National Rifle Association to the shadowy billionaires who pull the strings in the background – need to have a long chat with themselves.
There is much work to be done and two ways to do it, the right way and the wrong way. We can but pray. The first task at hand is to make America better again, in t he health s ense; Trump’s response to the pandemic has been pathetic and that must change now.
After that, I hope to return for Trip 52, and witness in person once again the sentiment of America The Beautiful: ‘O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
‘America! America!, God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood,
‘From sea to shining sea!’