"The America I loved is gone" - Stephen Marche - "It was a nation of dreams, built for the screen. Then it shattered" - Easter Sunday April 20, 2025 - ATTENTION USA

The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.

You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.

The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.

And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.

America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.

Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.

Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.

MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada