The old joke - "I was told that anybody could become President and I'm beginning to believe it" - seemed more apt than ever this year. The wisecrack was coined in the 1930s by US lawyer Clarence Darrow and, were Darrow still alive, George Dubya or Al Gore would surely confirm his cynicism. Neither of the drawling duo is even remotely inspirational or charismatic. Imagining their faces on Mount Rushmore produces a vision of monumental banality.
They could be golf-club captains, Rotary Club big-wigs or some other sort of clubby business guys. But world leaders? Hard to see it. Then again, in this corporate era of the New World Order, the President of the US is principally a world manager. In the past, when Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson spoke of a New Deal, a New Frontier or a Great Society, Americans could believe that their presidents were offering genuine visions and not just disingenuous sound bites. But few expect even wannabe US presidents to sound like imaginative visionaries anymore.
Then again, the US itself has surrendered much of its grip on our imaginations. It is still the most powerful and dynamic country on the planet, but it has exported so much of itself and its ways that, to western Europeans at least, it is no longer remote and exotic. Affordable travel has further eroded US mystique and, ironically, the America of the imagination is shrinking in direct proportion to the consolidation of the real America's status as the world's sole superpower.
There has long been an America of the imagination. Even in antiquity, tales of a magic land to the west were common in Europe. For centuries now, America has known and exploited this. In our own time, Hollywood, through films and television, has been the greatest propaganda machine in history. The US, it relentlessly told us, really was the hub of the action, and even the best of the rest couldn't compete. In fairness, it wasn't always an idle boast, although its prime target invariably seemed to be US citizens themselves - making them among the most propagandised people on earth.
Anyway, the US continues to lead the world financially, militarily and technologically. But the gap in living standards between the US and Ireland has narrowed and continues to narrow. Look at the gap-toothed Irish grins in photographs snapped during the 1963 Kennedy visit and compare these with the Americanised, dentally-sublime Irish smiles flashed when Bill Clinton arrived 32 years later. The eyes may be the window to the soul but, in such a context, the teeth can be the window to the bank balance - the core of the American soul.
Not that displaying a mouthful of sparkling gnashers makes a person an American or even a proxy-American. There's still more to it than that. But shining teeth are symbolic of the image-conscious American Way, necessary for those smiles in America's unique constitutional pursuit of happiness. "Only in America" goes the phrase and in casting happiness as practically a duty, the phrase is right. There remain though, even more fundamental mentality gaps between America and Europe and these will certainly be magnified, if, as is likely, Bush wins.
To most Europeans, the grand irony of the US is its unshakeable fealty to the raw contradictions of conservatism and innovation. It really does seem strange that the world's most obviously 21st-century state should adhere to so many 19th-century values. Thus the death penalty flourishes alongside the most advanced life-saving science; in turn, that medical science is really only for those who can pay for it; globalisation is fuelled by the US, yet it remains notoriously provincial and inward-looking - its national game, baseball, for instance, playing a "world series" by itself.
It's irony piled upon irony even though American conversation is, ironically, almost irony-free. Try an ironic comment in the US and you're likely to have insulted or, at least, perplexed somebody. For all their acumen in business, there's still a straightforwardness about most Americans. Europeans regularly interpret this to mean that Americans are "naive" or "superficial" or "gauche" in some respects. But the original American vision, determined to free itself from the spite of Europe's historic bitternesses, is, at heart, the larger and more generous. The most bitter irony of all, though, is that this original vision has been perverted by the propaganda of capital to produce obscene inequalities, domestically and internationally.
Because the US is so powerful, it's easy to forget that it was founded in revolution
- and, as a result, Americans often feel urged to guide the world according to their own ideological principles. It is not always simple dominance (though winning is hugely prized) that Americans seek, but conversion to the light as they see it. The evangelical strain in the US is not confined to religion, and even those Americans who don't treat the words as synonymous feel at least as deeply about the worldly dollar as they do about an other-worldly God.
IRELAND'S relationship with both real and imagined America remains officially deferential - sometimes even obsequious - yet, like child-parent relationships, it is often privately contentious. Irish and British nationalisms, which form the major political fault-line on this island, are scarcely less antagonistic on the other side of the Atlantic. That the US is, in its establishment's essence, a Protestant republic speaking the same (well, almost) language as Britain and Ireland, complicates the ideological positions on all sides.
Britain, the world's major power in the 19th century, continues to espouse Atlanti
???-cism over European integration and claims a "special relationship" with the US on world issues. Nationalist Ireland, however, believes it can, at least periodically, claim a special relationship with a republic which successfully revolted against British rule. In this, the matter of 19th-century values in a 21st-century state underlies the tension between characteristically conservative Irish-America and liberalising New Ireland.
Irish-Americans' views on the North, in particular, are often deemed simplistic, even atavistic. But it can be reasonably argued that this reflects the conservative 19th-century American mentality just as much as any frozen 19th-century Irish grudge. Hyphenated Americans, be they Irish, Italian or African, are still Americans and perceive their roots through minds made in America. In Ireland's case, the bitter legacy of the forced mass migration caused by the Great 19th-century Famine potentates anti-British sentiments.
Yet, Irish success in the US was achieved against and by discrimination. Subject to racism, the Irish in America organised themselves politically, if less than ethically, to combat a less than ethical establishment. In turn, Irish racism was vented against other competing groups in a "melting pot" in which, despite the propaganda, all the ingredients were never intended to melt at the same rate or to the same extent. All Americans are equal, yet some Americans are more "American" than others. The result is that, even today, racism remains the biggest stain on America's conscience. Bush's anticipated victory indicates that the 21st century's first President will, in this respect, be no stain-remover.
Victory in the Cold War has, of course, boosted American belief and self-righteousness. Yet because of the hairline margins of Election 2000, it's clear that there are still undercurrents of dissent which cannot easily be dismissed. Faith in endless progress and limitless frontiers through technology is easily sustained during an economic boom. But during the last US recession, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Christopher Lasch's The Myth of Progress struck a resounding note with many thinking Americans. The next downturn can only add to its resonance and Ireland too will hear that note.
THE 20th century was the American century. Now the US has chosen its first President of the 21st century, and it is inconceivable that the country, despite Chinese and Indian advances, will not remain the world's major power for decades to come. But the 21st century may not be an American one in the way that the 20th was. Back in the 1920s, the US was producing 40 per cent of the world's total industrial output. By the 1950s, when America's lead in living standards over the rest of the world was greatest, the price of success was rampant paranoia.
Without an enemy as formidable as the Soviet Union of that period, a return to comparable levels of manufactured paranoia is unlikely. But a victory for Bush's regressive notion of a 19th-century America means that the US has, once again, turned inward. It would also confirm European disapproval of the country's swaggering, gun-toting mentality. America as a notion and America as a nation have never been concepts that are easy to reconcile - either domestically or in world terms. Gore tried to argue that consolidation of itself as a nation was the most noble option for 21stcentury America. However, despite winning more than half of all votes cast, he appears to have lost out to an electoral system more suited to the 19th century.
Bush's appeal to older notions of American identity shows us that almost a century and a half after the Civil War, there's still, at least ideologically, an isolationist state-within-the-state in the US. In that, the most dynamic country in the world is, paradoxically, the same as it ever was. In US politics, it's invariably a question of emphasis and the Bush vote, achieved through a combination of the interests of blue chip corporations and redneck citizens, colours the US for the immediate future. The mentality which convinces a single country to hold a "world series" ("Well, Jed, where else really matters, for Chrissake?") prevails in more than baseball.
STILL, there's a delightful irony in this "Information Age" that the major "information-providers" in the US - the TV networks - called it first for Gore, then for Bush, then for neither. The nation's prime conduits in maintaining America's propagandised notions about itself ended up without a bull's notion of who had won. In misleading the public, albeit inadvertently, because of the rush to satisfy advertisers by being first with the results, the business agenda of the US media mangled its civic agenda to produce reliable information.
Anyway, the fact that ratings for the fictionalised West Wing (set in the White House) trounced those of the real race for the White House tells us, as clearly as does Bush's likely victory, that, in its heart, "America" remains a romanticised notion within a pragmatic nation. No wonder they don't "do" irony in the divided United States - it does them.
