If you don't like the political part of the US election, there is always the soap opera element, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
HOW ARE you going to spend election night? The most politically addicted friends are in the United States already. They hopped on the plane automatically, like bird watchers racing towards a rare species, like hippies heading for a solstice. They had to be there. The rest of us are limping rather lamely behind them, wondering whether we're going to be able to stay awake for the whole thing.
It is interesting to see Irish and British people, who are so patronising and even contemptuous of almost everything about America, swept into that country's glamour once more, thrilled to be seduced again. Any doubt that the United States is the cultural touchstone of the West must stop here. Despite Peter Clements's interesting letter in last Saturday's Irish Times - in which he wondered about the relevance of so much RTÉ coverage of the US election to someone who could neither vote in it nor live there - the Irish media is completely hooked. If you don't like the political part of the election - and politics does seem to have been a bit lacking in it recently - then there is always the soap opera.
Over the weekend we had Sarah Palin duped into thinking she was talking to French president Nicolas Sarkozy. We had Barack Obama losing his legendary cool with a camera crew who had overstepped the agreed boundaries and filmed him taking his children to trick or treat. Was Obama visibly irritated because he is by nature a control freak? Or simply because he is exhausted and just wants the whole damn thing over and done with? These debates went on in kitchens across America.
Many Irish people would say that, after one of the most inept budgets in history, our confidence in politicians is at an all-time low. This time we don't think our politicians are corrupt (that was a couple of crises ago) - we think that they're thick. It's not a great attitude for an electorate to have towards the men and women who are supposed to be managing, if not actually running, our country. Yet grown men look at Barack Obama with stars in their eyes. He has become an almost religious figure - so totemic, so extraordinary, so attractive - that he hardly seems like a politician at all.
There was another Chicagoan at the margins of the news last week. Studs Terkel died at the age of 96. Studs Terkel never had Barack Obama's wide appeal. But there are those of us to whom he meant a great deal. He was an actor is his youth, and that was when he adopted the name Studs, after the fictional character Studs Lonigan. He was a radio host for 45 years. But what he was best known for were his interviews with ordinary American people. He loved listening to his fellow citizens, as revealed in books such as Division Street; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Working and The Good War, his collection about Americans during the second World War, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
As the US and the rest of the western world dashed towards celebrity culture and personality politics, Studs Terkel rowed firmly in the other direction. He never seems to have tired of talking to ordinary Americans, whether they were members of the Ku Klux Klan or old ladies remembering their first days working in a factory. As he said of himself: "Curiosity never killed this cat."
It was not that Terkel was not interested in politics. On the contrary, he lost his acting career, working in the early soap operas of Chicago broadcasting, when he and his wife, Ida, a social worker, were blacklisted as communist sympathisers. Terkel had a fatal weakness for signing petitions, saying that he'd never seen a petition that he didn't like. Really, he was a man from another Chicago, from another time. A time when being interested in politics meant that you took part in communal activity, and not that you just sat on your couch watching news programmes into the early hours of the morning (guilty, your honour).
To journalists, Terkel means - or should mean - a lot. He revealed the beauty of small stories, and how, in respectful hands, they can go to make up a much bigger one. In many ways, as he later acknowledged, being blacklisted was the best thing that ever happened to him, forcing him into areas where other writers did not wish to work. His ability to listen may have come from his childhood, when his mother ran a rooming house, and he listened to her guests coming and going. Of his mother, who had a sick husband, he later said: "What nobody got from her was warmth and love, or least not a display of it." This, perhaps, was the grit from which a lot of oysters were made.
Of course, Terkel would have been an Obama supporter, and would have loved Obama's life story, as well as loving that of John McCain. He never forgot that the big guys only matter because of the little guys, and that this simple article of faith used to be the American dream. And surely, on Tuesday, Terkel would have been in Chicago if he could, microphone in hand, listening to people saying "God bless America". God bless it, indeed.