I felt a little envious as I read the opening lines to Mark Steyn's column on Monday morning. Referring to the American presidential race, Mark declared that he is, "sick of this election".
Despite reminding myself that all things are relative, I couldn't help thinking that in comparison to the mind-numbing, fatigue-inducing boredom of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland, the battle for the White House ranks as entertainment of the highest order.
We're stuck in the political equivalent of a hamster wheel, with an all-process, but-no-progress charade that makes American politics, despite its faults, seem like the very epitome of democracy in action.
At the very least, Americans know that after the fanfare, razzmatazz and one-on-one debates are over, there will be a distinct outcome to it all. That certainty is a noticeable absentee from the political shenanigans we have to put up with.
Of course, competitive politics in Northern Ireland isn't always boring: but the problem is, when it's not, it's frightening. Society here oscillates like a manic-depressive between the bipolar extremes of torpor and high drama.
We have never quite managed (or perhaps have never really tried) to master the art of settling ourselves somewhere between the two. It's always either feast or famine, with us.
And there is only so much of that one can take, before, for the sake of your sanity at least, you look for refuge elsewhere. So, in the time-honoured fashion of Irish people down through the ages, many of us quite naturally cast our gaze across the Atlantic towards America.
Those who, for whatever reason, can't actually up-sticks and leave these shores do the next best thing, and find temporary respite by immersing ourselves in some form of American popular culture. For many, the interest goes way beyond escapism, and actually amounts to an abiding fascination with all things American.
Hence the high level of interest in the presidential elections, even amongst those who care little about Iraq, the war on terror or indeed, if truth were known, whether Bush or Kerry eventually emerges as winner. It's the all-things-possible dream of America that attracts.
I am no different than the rest, with American music being amongst my list of favoured distractions. As a long-time devoted fan of Bob Dylan and an avid reader as well, I was delighted when I recently received a copy of his autobiography, Bob Dylan Chronicles, Volume One.
I soon realised, however, that reading Chronicles was going to amount to far more than a mere exercise in escapism.
If Dylan's book is not quite a masterpiece, it comes very close. The writing is superb, with, in the stripped-down style of George Orwell, hardly a superfluous word in the whole manuscript.
Chronicles could be twice as long and still be a very good book, but extra text for its own sake wouldn't add anything to it.
In reading of his escape in the late 1950s from the rural heartland of Northern Minnesota to seek fame, fortune and Woody Guthrie beneath the bright lights of New York City, one is struck by Dylan's eye for the minutest of detail, not to mention his memory. His description of people, rooms, and even furniture, from more than four decades ago is remarkable.
Though, self-evidently, book writing is an entirely different discipline from constructing songs, Dylan still manages to deliver in that familiar style of his, all the while, painting sublime mental pictures with language. The book is littered with casual throwaway lines that most writers would die for.
Here he is talking of a couple who let him stay at their apartment in Greenwich Village: "They lived as husband and wife, or brother and sister, or cousins, it was hard to tell, they just lived here that's all."
Bob Dylan is much too intelligent not to be aware of the stark contradiction that runs through his book. While, genuinely I believe, abhorring the adulation that was heaped upon him - and, consequently, the level of expectation that came with it - it was he, after all, who hiked halfway across America to visit his own hero, Woody Guthrie, as he lay dying in a New Jersey hospital.
If Woody had been more popular, Dylan would only have been one of many thousands of fans turning up at that hospital and, in the process, probably frightening what little life was left out of the object of their affection. Not unlike the scores of adoring fans that were to make Bob's own life a misery in later years.
But then again, that contradiction goes a long way towards indicating what Dylan himself has been at pains to point out for years - that he is, after all, only human.
He talks in his book of another character who didn't allow himself to be too distracted by the relatively unimportant, little incidentals in life: " . . . he didn't sweat the small stuff."
In other words, he saved his energy for the things that really mattered.
That could well be what's wrong with society in Northern Ireland: we spend too much time "sweating the small stuff".