Though I hadn’t lived there since 1998, when I was 16 and Bill Clinton was in power, I’d always defended America. Sure, it had flaws. Big ones. It had gun problems, drug problems, healthcare problems, race problems, problems winning wars. But, by Jove, it was still the end of the rainbow. It still had the highest concentration of good of any country on earth. 

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Then Donald Trump inaugurated a new era in which the US went weird, and not in a good way. Not only did the problems with opioids, guns, wars and healthcare only get worse, new catastrophic fault lines opened. The bizarre reign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was hardly a comforting interlude. 

And now, word on the foreign street has coalesced around the idea that America is no longer a good place to go. People have cancelled holidays. An air of misery has attached itself to the long-standing air of chaos and uncertainty, and even tragedy. Tourism rates are way down.  

And yet, and yet. The American idyll still exists, and it is just where it always was: California. Despite the homelessness, the addiction, the death and strife and fury and poverty, it turns out it is still possible to swan in on a £300 return flight and feel the pulse of that great cradle of ambition and optimism: the thrum of commerce, vanity, and all nice........

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