What is the dominant emotion as our senses are assailed night after hare-brained night by the bronchial Trumpian death rattle of American decency?
For the very many of us for whom the United States' most celebrated city - Trump's home town - has long offered a passport to joy, a place that exists as a triumph of the human imagination, a beloved bastion of gritty, unfiltered magic, the prevailing sense is one of suffocating despair at the potential rupturing of something precious.
A waterboarding by sadness and dread.
As the ruffian wind of America's new age sweeps across the Atlantic, I am consumed by one entirely selfish thought: Will I ever again set eyes on bewitching, intoxicating, heart-quickening New York?
Though 3,000 miles away, a vast expanse of ocean between here and there, so many Irish regard Gotham as a home from home, a 33rd county comfort blanket, perfect for an uplifting long weekend or a coming of age J1 adventure.
The spluttering engine of a tired psyche is instantly energised by the city's mighty jump leads.
Yet, as Trump, an architect of chaos, makes America a cold house for outsiders, NYC has rarely felt so distant or unappealing. It is a grim truth that bruises the heart.
Manhattan, with it's exhilarating, trip-hammer vitality, its avenues towering like groves of immense, sparkling, glass redwoods, a glimmering super yacht anchored by the Hudson, is a poem to the notion of being alive.
I nod in agreement when I read Ayn Rand's line: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline...What other religion do we need?"
So many of us find spiritual uplift from the simple act of worshiping at this always animated cathedral where the extraordinary is everywhere at every moment.
Many of my most memorable days on the walk through life have been spent amid Manhattan's 22.83 square mile acreage, a playhouse where hyperactivity and serenity happily co-habit.
An island oasis of cultural treasures, architectural masterpieces, stimulating galleries, character-infused drinking dens and citizens composed less of flesh and blood than of chutzpah and certainty of opinion.
Here is a city laden with people-watching urban parklands, indomitable century-old steel bridges, a palace of ideas and possibilities that feel as skyscraping as its landmark buildings.
Home to Broadway, a vast stage that allows the broken-winged to fly, and to the glitzy, vulgar, neon overdose of Times Square.
Where the entertainment Mecca of Madison Square Garden sits shoulder to shoulder with the National History Museum's celebration of curiosity.
Wall Street convulses as a capricious, unhinged President yo-yos cluelessly on tariffs, while nearby the 9/11 memorials and Lady Liberty offer an opportunity for the deepest reflection.
For the Irish, there are so many historic umbilical chords conjoining us to Gotham: Sail by Ellis Island, hear the story of Annie Moore and you are reminded this was, for hundreds of thousands, a famine-time escape hatch from starvation.
The consequence of that almost two century old mass migration are acutely felt to this day.
Only last weekend Galway played New York in the Connacht Championship at Gaelic Park and for the maybe 8,000 who gathered on an American spring Sunday, most uniformed in the maroon of their birthplace, this was a journey home.
A reminder to exiles of who they are, where they come from: The very essence of the GAA writ large.
Manhattan, for those of us who find the American story beguiling, has for the longest time been an invigorating caffeine-rush.
It is 100 years since The Great Gatsby was midwifed into life by F Scott Fitzgerald, yet one line might have been written this very morning: "The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."
I have been to New York maybe 50 times. Like revisiting a favourite bar or replaying a preferred song or catching up with a lifelong friend, it evokes memories and feelings that are immune to the passing years.
Walking across Brooklyn Bridge, sunshine reflecting off those mighty man-made mountains; watching the world go by from a Bryant Park perch. Sidling into PJ Clarke's for an early afternoon beer, history and mischief oozing from the walls; surrendering to what Billy Joel calls "a New York state of mind."
The scale and ambition and inquisitiveness of Manhattan inspires awe. It promotes great writing.
America's poet, Walt Whitman, got to the nub of it.
"There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die."
Yet our idea of America is perishing in front of our eyes. As Trump turns the country inward, renders it a place of shrivelling possibility, a giant emaciated by fear and uncertainty, its attraction to the outsider diminishes.
Even before the incoherent tariff obsession, disquiet at Trumpian politics had seen economists revise a pre-election forecast of a 9% growth in inbound travel to the US to a projected fall of 5%.
The world has watched the 47th President break all the conventional rules and has responded by waiving a giant red card at America.
Border crossings from Canada have plummeted by as much as 45% amid unconscionable White House bluster about it becoming the 51st state, passenger bookings between the two countries are down 70% compared to last year.
Some 37% of the 66.5 million international visitors to the United States in 2023 came from Western Europe. Ireland, as anybody who has strolled through Central Park or down Fifth Avenue will know, is disproportionately represented.
As the lens through which previously friendly nations view Uncle Sam darkens (a recent survey found 74% of Danes and 63% of Swedes had an unfavourable view of Trump's America), it is projected that $18 billion less will be spent by international tourists to the US in 2025.
My paltry few dollars wlll be among those remaining at home.
There is a powerful line from the book American Mother that observes "we are the accumulation of where we have been."
Few people visit New York without its vitality and energy invading their bones.
Strolling among those skyscrapers at night, the ultimate light show, as if we have pulled down the stars to do our bidding, is something everybody should experience at least once.
But the strangeness besieging what was once the Land of the Free has somehow dulled the appeal of NYC's glittering immensity.
Never mind that, even before the tariffs have properly taken hold, it has grown unsustainably over-priced. In January, the London Independent ran a feature headlined: "Has New York Become Too Expensive For Tourists?"
With accommodation outlay for a week sufficient to purchase a second-hand car and beer prices that would make Temple Bar blush, the conclusion of many is that it has crossed the affordability line.
Worse again is the volatile mood in that great nation across the pond, a disquiet at where America is headed and at what might happen next.
That quote from Ayn Rand earlier in the piece concludes thus: "When I see the city from my window - no I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city to protect these buildings with my body."
If she were alive today to be buffeted by that wild ruffian wind, Rand might be inclined to conclude that the time had arrived to launch such a daring and urgently required act of self-sacrifice.
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