Richard Hogan: My open letter to America — what a state you are in

Richard Hogan has fallen out of love with the USA. In a searing open letter to that country, he ponders where it has all gone wrong

'You were always someone I admired, America, a big brother. The place my grandmother came from. But your light is fading...'

DEAR America...

What can I say? I don’t know how to write this letter. How to heave into words my feelings.

You were always someone I admired, a big brother. The place my grandmother came from. The birth of the blues, Elvis, Ford, the Wright brothers, Arthur Miller, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Sylvia Plath, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Philo Farnsworth (born in a small log cabin in Utah, went on to be a major pioneer in television invention) descended from Danish immigrants.

And that’s the magic of your country, it is the great impossible dream, made possible. The rubbing along together of humanity. A living Tower of Babel. Not perfect but the great social experiment.

Growing up in a small village in Cork, I never really knew what that felt like. Everyone knew each other, which was beautiful, but I didn’t see much of the world growing up in Douglas in the ’80s. I spent most of my time looking out the window of a dusty prefab, into the gun-metal grey wet morning, dreaming about you and what it was like to wake up under your sky.

Imagining the sun in California. The mighty redwoods. Wondering what skunk smelt like and what Marty McFly was up to at that moment and do hover boards really exist? And can cars really talk to you? I wondered did petrichor on the sidewalks smell the same as it did on our pavements.

You lit the fire under my imagination. There was no diversity in my small town, only what I read in books or on the Trócaire box I forgot to bring to school most days.

I watched movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, ET, American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, The Lost Boys, Grease, Stand By Me, Home Alone, etc. You seemed mythical to me; the diners, the burgers, waitresses on rollerblades, the cars, the clothes, the sheer invention of your people and magnitude of your landscape.

The Prairies, the Wild West consumed my early mind. Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Wyatt Earp.

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When I saw Dances With Wolves for the first time, I fell in love with the native American story — the Sioux and Pawnee tribes — and then I read that the Choctaw Nation sent relief to Ireland during the Famine; I felt we were in some way linked. We had struggled under oppressors too. We had our own ‘trail of tears’ on our famine roads.

Your presidents always felt some inexplicable draw to us. I remember standing outside a pub in Ballyporeen to catch a glimpse of Ronald Reagan, and again in College Green in 2011 when president Obama came back to find the apostrophe his family had lost along the way.

I remember looking at pictures, as a kid, of John F Kennedy going over St Patrick’s Bridge. His words validated something about being from Cork. “This is not the land of my birth but the land of my blood.”

I used to dream about meeting you, America, while I listened to Bob Dylan describe the north country; where the wind hits heavy on the borderline. When I finally did, you did not disappoint. I still remember coming up out of the heat of the subway, steam rising through the grills, to the noise of Times Square. Dwarfed in the shadow of buildings, I stared up, ‘my god’. I had finally arrived.

But America, you are in serious trouble. On the precipice of a reputation extinction event. 

Ruled over by the bloated carcass of a narcissistic bozo. A garish, nihilistic reality TV star, posing as some sort of deus ex machina. The one-time friend of a man whose name has become a byword for child molestation. Fake prayers uttered by fake gods to please the yelping dogs of Maga.

He is a rough beast whose first slouch towards the presidency should have been over the moment he bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia. But nothing seems to stop this Teflon Don. 

He has put a bulldozer to the people’s house. He is surrounded by weak, venal characters. Only interested in their own advancement, uninterested in the suffering all around them. Feeding off the old grift of decline and regeneration.

Making you great again is an old trope that places the locus of your fake decline on the door of immigrants. The very people who built you in the first place.

Compassion doesn’t weaken power, it strengthens it. But to a weak person, compassion is frightening.

America, you were not being destroyed by immigrants. 

But you did have serious problems your politicians were not addressing adequately; a huge number of teenagers addicted to heavy drugs, extremely high mortality rates from drug overdoses, incredibly expensive services — medical, university, housing, poor maternal and child health care, and high infant mortality.

You had far too many poor families for such a rich country; you only seemed to care for those who had money to care for themselves; you replaced kindness for idolatry of fame and wealth. You had poor-quality school education, inadequate state budgets, and large national debt, a huge trade deficit. 

You moved endless manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs overseas because you misunderstood the concept of ‘free trade’; you neglected infrastructure and offered poor protection from natural disasters.

The lobbying of your politicians means they are under the influence of bad actors, and so children are slaughtered in their classrooms.

I could go on and on, America.

All of these problems made you ripe for tyranny, and for the rise of a grifter promising regeneration and a return to your glory days. But he has done nothing to address these pressing issues in your society, only lining the fabric of his own corrupt pockets.

America, the tectonic plates under which you stand are shifting, your light is fading. You have turned your back on your closest allies. I fear, when this is all over, the damage will be too great to reverse. And I seriously doubt your new-found friends will be there to help.