Brendan Hoban: America’s friends have reasons to be worried   

Western People 2.5.2023

Dear America,

From the distant years of my earliest childhood, America seemed oddly close to me.

I put it down to two factors. One was that three uncles and an aunt – my father’s siblings – had emigrated there, and though only one visited home (and that only very periodically), they were an enduring presence in our lives.

The other factor was my consuming interest in the Wild West, first fuelled by cowboy comics like ‘Kit Carson’ and ‘Buck Jones’ and later by visits to ‘the pictures’ when our school on the Glen Road in Ballycastle was converted at weekends into a make-shift cinema and film stars like Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott rode the plains of the Wild West.

America seemed an interesting and exciting part of my early youth and when an occasional parcel from America arrived, I loved the peaked cap, the jacket with ‘University of Notre Dame’ emblazoned on the back and the loud colours of American shirts and pants. Once, after turning myself out in the more garish uniforms of American life and strolling down Ballycastle’s only street imagining I was cutting something of a sophisticated dash, my reverie was interrupted by a neighbour whose greeting was a definitive put-down – ‘I see ye got a parcel from America’.

America may have regarded itself as ‘a city upon a hill’ and ’a beacon of hope’ ­– declarations of exceptionalism in the currency of politic rhetoric – but for us it was a land of possibility and promise, where the good triumphed, where right always prevailed and where films like ‘Shane’ represented a moral statement in a changing world.

Like Shane, America represented honesty, justice and freedom. It was on the side of the under-dog, it protected the innocent, it fought for what was right and true and good. Now I‘m not so sure.

I’m writing this letter because I’m not quite sure where America has got to now.

The very vastness of America, the enormity of its contribution to literature (Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as Emily Dickinson, Arthur Miller and many others), the way America provided the signature music of our lives and how it assumed so effortlessly the political leadership of the Free World – all became part of its accepted centrality and dominance in our lives.

The eight-year Vietnam War was a blow to its confidence and reputation. As was the later pretence that Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify the foolish Iraqi adventure of President Bush and prime minister Blair, both seeking to augment their legacy. And then there was Trump.

While the history of American presidents is impressive in terms of right, responsibility and due authority, Trump was a spectacular exception. Regarded originally as something of a joke candidate, what emerged was the extraordinary resonance with millions of Americans of his daft and often dangerous policies. Apparently without any susceptible moral compass and beyond any sense of reason or respect for truth, he has left a trail of destruction after him and has made America a laughing stock around the world.

Yet, in the 2016 election he received almost 63 million votes and in the 2020 election roughly half of ‘the Catholic vote’. And even though, despite the litany of court cases including felony charges facing him, his reputation devasted, his incompetence obvious and his role in the attack on Capitol Hill under investigation, the Republican Party still seems unprepared to distance itself from his possible candidacy in 2024. Who could possibly make any sense of the Trump phenomenon and what is it saying about America? Where has shame gone?

The same question could be asked about the Catholic Church in America. Rather than the gospel of the poor being brought to bear on the lives of the rich it sometimes seems as if the gospel of the rich sits in judgement on the plight of the poor. Even though ‘In God we trust’ is the official motto of the United States – even appearing on its currency – America doesn’t seem to have grasped the distinction between ‘the things of Caesar and the things of God’.

The dollar, we’re told, is king in America and those who have it or get it are lauded as achievers and heroes while the poor whom Jesus particularly loved and expects his followers to mind are blamed for being poor. Little wonder that Pope Francis  is often reviled and attacked by Catholic bishops in America because he is placing gospel question-marks against the wonky American Catholic dream.

So much of America today seems beyond reason, not least the grip of the gun on the American psyche. When I watched Colt 45 in the Ballycastle ‘cinema’ as a young boy, I knew (and if I didn’t it was explained to me) that Randolph Scott was not actually killing Red Indians who were mere actors being paid to play dead. Or that the gun was a indispensable personal or household possession.

To most reasonable people the American attitude to the gun may be understandable in the light of their early history but is also foolish, incongruous, ludicrous. And anyone not agreeing with that view has only to survey the long list of gun crime, including the multiple shootings of children in schools, perpetrated by people whose minds are obviously unbalanced and who have inflicted incredible suffering on others.

Making guns, including real weapons of destruction of the innocent, available in shops on the high street, seems a bizarre dismissal of reason and intelligence.

Thank you, America, for what you have done and are doing for Ireland. But, at the court of reason and sanity, your friends sometimes worry about you.