I landed in San Francisco in the early 1990s, a young Irish man chasing the American Dream. I thought California was all sun, sand and cinema.
I thought I’d arrived in the land of Spielberg and Springsteen. And I had. In a way. But I’d also arrived in a land where the FBI was involved in a fire that burned 67 people in Waco after a 51-day siege.
So much for the American dream. I’d barely unpacked my bag and already it looked like a nightmare.
Thirty years later, I’m still in California. People ask why. I wonder “Why?” myself, sometimes.
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The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents in Minnesota was just the latest reminder of a country seemingly gone insane. It came just weeks after the fatal shooting of Renée Good by Ice agents in the same state.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah seems like a lifetime ago in this country which feels like it’s disintegrating before my eyes. The US collects killings and assassinations the way Kerry collects All-Irelands. John Wilkes Booth murdered president Abraham Lincoln in a theatre. Charles Guiteau murdered president James A Garfield because he had not been granted a diplomatic post. Can you imagine anyone assassinating the Taoiseach because they hadn’t been granted a job as an ambassador?
Leon Czolgosz killed president William McKinley during a handshake. And Lee Harvey Oswald turned Dallas into a shooting gallery. Each assassin a lonely, angry man with a gun and a grievance.
In Ireland, those lads would drink themselves into poetry or obscurity. In America, they get documentaries on Netflix. The Americans call them “lone wolves”. But how many “lone” wolves do you need before you have a frenzied pack?
And yet, America thinks it’s a beacon for freedom and democracy. Freedom from what exactly? Reality?
Away from the high-stakes political poker game, 46,728 ordinary Americans died from gunshots in 2023. That’s one every 11 minutes, all year long.
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That’s the equivalent of the entire population of Kerry wiped out every three years, not by war, not by plague, but by themselves, and each other. Isn’t that insane?
In 1996, while I was humping boxes for a moving company in San Francisco, Britain had its own horror.
A man walked into Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and murdered 16 children and their teacher. Outrage turned to action. Within eighteen months, the British parliament banned private ownership of most handguns.
No nonsense about “rights” or “freedom”. Just a collective recognition that children’s lives matter.
In 2012, America had what should’ve been its own Dunblane moment. A gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and murdered 20 children and six adults. I remember thinking, “This is it. This is where things change.”
But nothing changed. Nothing ever changes. Not in America.
‘Americans will tell you they need guns for self-defence, which is like saying you need more petrol to put out the fire’
The American response was thoughts and prayers, and another round of fundraising for the gun lobby. The conspiracy theorists came out in force, accusing grieving parents of being crisis actors. The right to bear arms proved holier than the right to grow old. If murdered children couldn’t move America to act, I realised, nothing ever would.
It made me wonder where this disease of violence had come from? Was it new? Turns out it isn’t new. It’s foundational.
Violence is the cornerstone of the United States of America. The country was born from the genocide of indigenous people, built on slavery, expanded through conquest.
[ Donald Trump the storyteller no longer has full control of the narrativeOpens in new window ]
Violence isn’t the glitch. It’s the operating system.
American myths glorify the gunfighter and the vigilante, the “good guy with a gun” who saves the day. US movies worship killers. Killer cops. Killer robbers. Killer robots. Their politics rewards bullies.
And yet both Democrats and Republicans look back to some exalted past. Some time when America wasn’t insane. But: when was that time?
Americans owned slaves and ethnically cleansed the native population for half of the country’s existence.
Since then, the US has dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, killed millions in Indochina, and was responsible for countless deaths in Iraq. And that’s before we launch into the 21st century.
So, when exactly was America a bastion of freedom and democracy?
During my time in California I’ve watched the US bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, conduct drone strikes from Somalia to Yemen, and keep military bases in 70 countries around the world.
The same state that can’t afford basic healthcare for all its citizens somehow finds infinite money for missiles.
Is violence Americans’ most reliable export? Is death, wrapped in the language of freedom and democracy, what America is really all about? Is freedom delivered at gunpoint like offering someone a cup of tea and then belting them over the head with the kettle?
[ Diarmaid Ferriter: It seems life and liberty cannot be balanced in the USOpens in new window ]
The pattern repeats. Alienated people, easy access to guns, and a culture that confuses fame and fortune and movies with meaning.
“On every street in every city in this country, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody. He’s a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he’s alive.” That’s Paul Schrader’s tagline for Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert de Niro in the film Taxi Driver. It could just as easily have been written about Oswald. America is akin to what happens in Taxi Driver, playing on an endless loop.
Americans will tell you they need guns for self-defence, which is like saying you need more petrol to put out the fire.
Americans will invoke their Constitution, written by slave-owning men who couldn’t imagine automatic weapons any more than they could imagine a microwave oven.
They’ll say it’s about rights, as if the right to own an AR-15 outweighs the right of a child to come home from school alive.
The American dream is real. For the lucky few. But so is the American nightmare. For the very many.
‘Americans still believe, against all evidence, that they live in the greatest country on Earth’
Underneath the sunshine and the cinema is an unsettling darkness that has become so normalised, you sometimes miss it: the homeless encampments that line the streets of San Francisco; the way you step over passed out bodies on the footpath as casually as you’d avoid a puddle at home; the armed guards at the posh shopping centres in Orange County.
This is the American reality that doesn’t make it into the tourism brochures or the Marvel movies. A place that tolerates levels of suffering that would spark revolution in any sane country. Americans call it “the price of freedom”. They’ve convinced themselves this is normal, that this is just how things are. But it isn’t normal. It is insane.
The American Dream still seduces, like The Wizard of Oz. It dazzles ‘til you look behind the curtain and see the small-minded men, with the small hands and the smaller hearts.
I arrived the year people burned at Waco. I watched OJ flee down the freeway. I’ve seen three decades of shootings, assassinations, riots, wars, and “thoughts and prayers”.
The sun still shines in California. The Pacific still washes against the shore. And Americans still believe, against all evidence, that they live in the greatest country on Earth.
They are a people of faith, faith that somehow, next time, the ending will be different. That their numbers will come up. That they will live happily ever after.
Part of me believes that too – that Bill Clinton was right: there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
However, part of me knows that, just like America, I’ve gone insane.
Jason Ó Mathúna is a Kerryman and content creator who has lived in California for more than three decades
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