Chicago: We're at the ball park. Me and the kids. A sunny afternoon, Coke and hot dog deal. The batter hits a big one which meteors out of the sky right towards the bleachers just in front of us. A young guy with his name, Justin, printed on the back of his Chicago Cubs shirt rises from the excitement and thrusts his baseball-gloved hand into the air.
An Excalibur moment. Justin catches it. Everyone cheers. Then Justin fumbles the ball. Another guy, a guy with a gut, picks it up and just keeps it. High-fives his friends. Justin looks around. I make sympathetic eye contact with him. The kid is mortified. Then I hear the shouts.
Justin, you suck. You lose, Justin. Blow it out your ass, Justin. You dumb shit.
Welcome to Chicago. Big, unironic capital of the American Midwest. A town that boasts and beats its chest a lot. City of broad shoulders. City on the make. Breadbasket of America. No time for losers.
The rich live on the Gold Coast and shop on the Magnificent Mile near the offices of the Chicago Tribune, which, for most of the century, styled itself the "world's greatest newspaper". Not far away is the Sears Tower, now the world's second-tallest building, and if Chicago has its way a new wonder on Dearborn Street will soon make Sears the world's third-largest building. You suck, Malaysia.
Chicago hasn't got the frenetic energy of New York, or the cool self-awareness of San Francisco. It's big and lumbering and mid-western, a fine bellwether of American feelings and sentiments. A small town grown huge.
A.J. Liebling came here nearly 50 years ago to write for the New Yorker. In a series of essays called The Second City he skewered Chicago so artfully that (well, Liebling described it best) the effect was like dropping a handful of "sparkling salts into a goldfish bowl".
Chicago is like that. Insular. No sense of irony. A little self-obsessed. It handled Hurricane Floyd by endlessly projecting what damage a hypothetical big wind would do to Chicago. We'd take the sucker.
That's the first thing you notice. Americans live an Old Testament existence. They aren't maudlin about death unless it occurs on a foreign field. Sex is more shocking.
The week before we arrived here 60 people had died during a heatwave in Chicago. We touched down the next Monday expecting to find a city rigid with shock and mourning. The papers had none of it. Not a single line looking back in anger.
I asked a taxi-driver and he shrugged. "Hey, 550 died of heatwave in 1995. Last week wasn't nuthin'."
AMERICANS will happily die off at the hands of heatwaves, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, forest fires and lunatics with guns, but they'll fret for a year over the possibility of sex in the Oval Office.
We watched Fargo on television the other night and the script had been prissily bowdlerised with artfully inserted voiceovers. Even for latenight audiences.
"I'm tired of your phoney baloney."
"Well, fruit you, pal."
"Fruit you and your fruicin' mother, too."
And yet Peter Stormyhre stuffed Steve Buschemi gorily into the woodchipper at the end like a man juicing a blood orange. Only Buschemi's whitesocked foot was protruding when Frances McDormand interrupted him.
The civic discourse is body-in-the-woodchipper stuff, too. Unperfumed by public relations people. In Chicago when ComEd's ageing electricity system lets the city down, nothing brings on an executive crucifixion quicker than an attempt to hide behind a spokesperson or a prepared statement.
Mayor Richard M. Daley, the creepy son of the more ruthless Mayor Richard J. Daley, evolves to the style here. Daley the son is popular, having made his reputation as a details guy, getting parks railed off, train stations cleaned up and schools improved. Yet he has the bare-knuckle style that makes this city so exciting.
A few years back during the opening of a downtown park to honour cancer victims, the family of the donor of the million dollars which built the park took him to task for not naming the park in honour of the donor. There was a silence before Daley came back swinging the bat at the family. "Where do you think ya are?" he hissed at the cancer victim's family. "Kansas City? Florida? This is Chicago."
THIS is Chicago. And the politics are old-style and raucous. Strokes and scandals. Earlier this year Daley was re-elected, beating off Bobby Rush, the founder, back in the 1960s, of the Illinois Black Panthers. Daley's machine had hoovered up nearly 50 per cent of the black vote, however.
Chicago politics may be the last place on Earth where insults pertaining to "non-qualified white boys" or "cotton-picking" are still traded. Race is still a weapon. When Carol Mosely-Braun won a Senate seat in 1992 she apparently went on a spending spree with the rest of her campaign funds, blowing $250,000 on a month in Africa. Taken to task by a conservative columnist she announced that she was being accused of being corrupt "because he could not say nigger".
All that theatre is Chicago through a middle-class outsider's eyes. White eyes. It makes for pleasant entertainment but there is a desperation underpinning it. As an outsider I enjoy the gentle diversity but I'd be a fool to be convinced by the pleasure of seeing brown faces and white faces pour down the steps of my kids' school on sunny afternoons.
The sullen unnavigable south side of Chicago and big parts of the west side are crumbling and unemployment-ridden, the stashed legacy of another argument America grew tired of. Mayor Daley, the details guy, has, in fairness, worked hard on the problem but . . .
The America we watch through the prism of television is different from the America we see on the streets, on the buses and in the school. It's white man's country.
Nightly we surf the news with Brokaw, Rather and Jennings, skate through the comedies with Frasier, Friends and Ally McBeal and sample late night with Letterman, O'Brien and the impossibly lame Jay Leno. Not a dark face anywhere. You wonder what they're thinking on the south side.
You watch black guys and girls in shops and on buses and in bars and they have their own codes, their own world. Brothers and sistahs. They have their own language and their Chicago stories of Chicago's essential rawness can't ever sound the same as mine.
Tom Humphries will be reporting from the United States for the next 12 months