Opinion Colum McCannAs a green card holder in the United States, I have long felt politically mute. I have lived Stateside for over a decade and I've often debated the notion of turning towards the blue passport, simply in order to vote. But despite the fact that my kids are American and my wife is American, I have long resisted holding both passports.
It's difficult to be a man of two countries - you've often got your hands in the uncommitted darkness that lies between them. So I stay Irish. And voteless. It's a form of remembering: staying away from where I used to be and constantly going back at the same time.
It is also, in its own way, a form of cowardice: a sink hole into which I decoratively rest.
Increasingly, however, that's becoming a less conscionable choice on my part. It's not hard to see that these are some of the darkest times that American politics has ever seen; to feel a deepening anger and despair; to recognise that the small crumbs are devouring us. The best of the political pundits make you feel that yesterday was OK, while the worst somehow assure you that there's no tomorrow.
Nothing new in this of course. The shape of most countries is hardly a thing to make you feel like the first man ever to whistle - let's remember that Irish politics is hardly a cakewalk.
Banality, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but like a large number of people in America these days I'd rather be north in Canada, where at least issues of due process are not ignored and the debate is slightly above the Neanderthal.
But what can you do if you feel that you have - consciously or not - rendered yourself voiceless? The obvious answer is to get up off my arse and become a US citizen. Beyond that, as a consequence of natural participation (paying taxes, being a father of children, simply walking down the street), it is my right to bear whatever witness I can.
On one level that means trying to explain the small Iraqi coffins to my own children. On another level it means speaking out publicly and running the risk of an opinion - I hardly mean "risk" lightly, since many US writers (including Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Russell Banks) have recently found themselves delayed at ports-of-entry after speaking out against the Bush administration. (If this sort of outrage happens with major cultural figures, one can only imagine what it might be like to be a Muslim trying to step back on your own American soil.) On yet another level it requires involvement with the process, from voter registration, to considered debate, to actually getting your hands mucky if you can.
Collisions happen in curious ways. I recently met two young politicians who lit a fire in the chambers of my heart. The first is Martin O'Malley, the 38-year-old mayor of Baltimore, a young man who turned his city around using charm, rhetoric, empathy, style, intellect and the even six strings of his guitar. The second is another Irish-American, Joseph Driscoll (39), brand new to the whole political scene, a former real estate developer, now running for Congress in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.
Driscoll has a lot going for him - two Harvard degrees, 32 shining white teeth, grandparents from the oul' sod, and the knowledge that the only things worth doing are the things that might break your heart. "I got into politics when I looked at my own kids and thought that there had to be some other frontier than the ones they were presented with," he says.
It's hardly a new chant, but the blunt fact is that Driscoll is giving up a lot - privacy, money, family security and other futures - for a task that can often be largely thankless.
The problem - as one soon discovers if, like me, you dip a little toe in and try to write a press release for someone like Driscoll - is learning how to say something interesting without treading on 10 million other toes. It is next to impossible. One immediately feels a sense of rust in the words. Freedom might begin between the ears, but it generally stops at the press officer's desk.
For Driscoll and others it is increasingly difficult to say something new without alienating the American people. The soundbite rules. Politicians must be so terribly careful of what they say that, before they know it, the centre is the only place that they stand. The yearning for simplicity doesn't always result in the maintenance of dignity. Life springs from these sort of difficulties, but in this, the most verbally-camouflaged of times, it is increasingly difficult to commit to something pure without seeming like a stark raving idiot.
Politics operates like the sort of standing wave that one can find in certain rivers. These waves develop where water runs over shallow bedrock. In the trough between the shallow waves there are times when you can actually trap a body, or a canoe, or even a life-raft, and it remains stationary while the rest of the river flows on. You occupy a place within a place, anchored by the river, yet still in a flux. How to manage all this without drowning is the key for Driscoll, for O'Malley, and perhaps us all.