An open letter to the United States
by Michael Maiello

In a week, I leave Ireland after three months living and working in the west coast town of Galway. I've sipped tea watching the waves roll gently on the Bay of Galway. I've gulped whiskey and watched nightclubs spin around me. I worked the club scene, the art scene, and everything that caught my interest.

Soon, I will be in New York. The city which has everything you ask for, but looks like a slice of the third world on a bad day. I'll be trading country roads for clogged freeways and lines at toll booths, foggy morning walks for subterranean subway travel.

Not that I'm not thrilled to be coming back to the old U.S.A. America represents real life, real pressure to find meaningful employment or find a good graduate school. Decisions must be made. So why not stay on this side of the Atlantic? Why return at all? Work visas are easily extended, citizenship easily changed. There are practical answers -- it would be tougher to find employment in my field. But that's not the real answer. If I really wanted to stay, I'd find a satisfying job. Somewhere.

Truth is, I'm drawn back.

There's an American style I actually miss. There's a whole hunk of land I actually miss. After about two months on a small island nation with great public transportation, I've been seized by the idea of taking a road trip between New York and Albuquerque, stopping in Baltimore and New Orleans to see friends. The highway, with semi trucks and RVs, the open roads of the Midwest and west, desert landscapes and fields of nothing but corn, wheat and Stuckey's has been calling me, so loudly I can hear it across the Atlantic.

I had a funny discussion in a pub a few weeks ago with a girl named Claire. Claire is studying English literature, concentrating on modern American poetry. She told me how much she hated Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", but how much she loved Allen Ginsburg's "Howl". I thought it was odd to like one but not the other. Ginsburg was mimicking Whitman, and their poems sound the same to the ear, feel the same on the tongue.

But Claire, who spent a year in the States, argued that the true America is closer to "Howl", that descriptions of a drunk on the subway have more to do with America than the glowing landscapes gorgeous homoeroticism in "Song of Myself". She backed off the position when I told her that I've seen more senile, addled, drunk yelling people in Irish bus stations than I have drunks on New York subways. It doesn't make Yeats any less true.

So, all our cultures have our rough spots. I've reread a lot of American literature since I got here. The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, and Catcher in the Rye all stand out because, reading them abroad, they reminded me of American Romanticism. I'd forgotten the idea living at home. But it's still with us. We're a young nation, still Romantic. It might be slipping into cynicism, but it's not dead yet.

I left America with a question in my head "where do we go from here?" The 1990s have been a time of angst, apathy, and indecision. Existentialism has always been part of Romanticism, though it usually lurks beneath the surface. It was all good. We needed to divorce ourselves from the American Dream, once and for all. One dream for so many people is a dangerous idea. The Great Gatsby shows how it leads to tragedy.

But there's something special about America. I'm not talking nationalism. I'm talking about a vast and varied land matched by its people. We've caused a lot of problems, and for awhile, they all seemed impenetrable. I moved away and realized the potential in what I left. You read and discuss enough, you meet enough intelligent people, and you start to lose faith in both religious and philosophic ideals. But that leaves people. I can feel a bit of Romantic Humanism creeping in, filling the holes left in a mind that learned not to believe in anything.

Michael Maiello is back home (relatively speaking), though not necessarily altogether pleased about it.

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