The Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller advised his fellow expatriates to keep America "always in the background, a sort of picture postcard which you look at in a weak moment".
That way, Miller claimed, "you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space."
It's difficult these days, however, for an expat to see anything postcard-picaresque in a hurricane-damaged America, mired in a disastrous war in Iraq, which offered its own horrific TV images this week of the Baghdad bridge stampede.
Nonetheless I had, like Henry Miller, a weak moment just this past July: in Tara Street railway station when, on the platform opposite, a US choral group in red and white striped fisherman's shirts, awaiting the Waterford train to the Tall Ships Festival, suddenly broke into a sea shanty accompanied by accordion.
It was a bravura performance, and quintessentially American, I thought, in its confident, good-hearted spontaneity. My next thought, after the applause from a delighted audience died down, was how cruelly random life is: our individual train journeys that evening were blessed by song, whereas 56 Londoners had died on their trains that very morning - not to mention the scores of civilians, going about their daily business, who die in Iraq of a Tuesday or Friday.
There are, of course, millions of Americans opposed to both the Iraq war and the broader neo-con quest for world hegemony underpinned by control of Middle Eastern oil. Americans such as Peter, an old college pal, whose mother fled Nazi Germany at age 15, and who earlier this year wrote to me of his dismay at the codified torture of prisoners by US soldiers at Guantanamo.
"It's easier now to see how people acclimated themselves to the Nazis; you know intellectually that hideous crimes are being committed at Dachau and Oranienburg every day; yet gradually it isn't the first thing you think of every morning, or the second, until a few years pass and you are as used to it as wallpaper."
It is fellow Yanks like Peter who give me a glimmer of hope yet for America - compatriots like Cindy Sheehan, who camped last month in a ditch outside the "big, patriotic, open space" of President Bush's holiday ranch in Crawford, Texas, hoping he might explain to her for what "noble cause" - his words, not hers - her 24-year-old soldier son Casey died in Iraq.
Or Sue Neiderer, another grief-stricken mother, who last September was taken away, handcuffed, in an unmarked van after she held up a photo of her 24-year-old son Seth, killed in Iraq, at a Republican rally in New Jersey addressed by Laura Bush.
A despicably defanged US media paid little attention to Sue Neiderer, but one American who noticed was Bernard, whom I met after he came, practically in tears, into the Democratic campaign headquarters in Plantation, Florida, needing to talk to somebody about the TV footage of Neiderer's arrest, which he had just seen on the news.
He could not believe this had happened in our America - the same America, I learned, to which Bernard had emigrated after being advised to leave Guyana, formerly British Guinea, following the assassination of his friend Dr Walter Mosley, an acclaimed academic and political activist, by a car bomb in 1980.
Having a mother who escaped the Nazis, losing a son in a misconceived war, or having to flee political oppression in South America no doubt helps you to see the totalitarian bent of the Bush administration for what it is. Being an expatriate arguably allows a kind of clarity too, a distance from which to see the dangers and disasters of a militarist agenda that, according to some commentators, even now has Iran in its sights.
But for many Americans, those who get their so-called news from network TV, those who have no family members at war overseas, the soaring price of petrol - though still far below what we pay in Ireland - is more to the fore this September than the mounting toll of nearly 1,900 US solders killed and over 14,000 wounded in Iraq, or the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed since Bush claimed his mission was accomplished.
It is also harder in America to stay tuned to what happens elsewhere, unlike Europe with its multiple, contiguous, neighbouring states. Consider, for example, what one TV pundit infamously responded, when asked about the scant concern at home over the slaughter of more than 50,000 Shia Muslims in southern Iraq, when they failed to get US support for their uprising against Saddam at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. "Well, it's spring," your man replied, "and we have baseball."
It remains to be seen if the growing US anti-war movement will embolden Democratic senators and congressmen to call for the phased withdrawal of
US troops from Iraq, and by so doing offer voters a clear choice in the 2006 mid-term elections. Meanwhile vice-president Cheney, whose "other priorities" kept him out of the Vietnam War he supported, has the brass neck to say "the US won't relent in Iraq",
tossing about words like "honour" and "sacrifice" as if he were actually acquainted with either.
Better by far the words of Rocky Anderson, mayor of Salt Lake City, speaking at an anti-war rally last month on the same day President Bush blew into town: "Those who stand up to deceit by our government - those are true patriots."