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 wasinvolved 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.

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?

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.