It was around the seventh inning when I felt the pregame beers begin to hit. Chicago was wet, and after discovering that the Cubs didn’t play in the rain, we had decamped to a bar for an impromptu lunch of Daisy Cutters and Old Styles. When the rain stopped, we’d filed into the stadium to our seats in the rafters. Eventually, with the Cubs several runs up on Arizona and my bladder needing relief, I descended into the quiet concourse.
On my way back to our section, I stopped when, through a gap in the stand, the Chicago skyline unrolled itself. There were Cubs fans huddled below the bright red Budweiser sign, and beyond them, stretching for miles, orthogonal suburban sprawl punctured by erratic irruptions of sandstone tower blocks.
The skyline was alien but instantly recognizable—how I’d experienced much of Chicago since arriving at O’Hare. The city I saw at Wrigley and on the L train and from our Ubers was so American. A 1990s Irish childhood—my childhood—was intimately familiar with American popular culture. We ate at their fast food restaurants, laughed at their sitcom jokes about people we didn’t know, and marveled at their high school politics. But living it—the roads, the scale, the relentlessly cheery customer service—brought home just how alien in-real-life “America” felt.
My alienation deepened the next day during a wander around Downtown’s thrusting optimism. It was all so unreal, Pax Americana incarnate. But it was grotesque too. Not just the steel and glass opulence, the cars and the grid, but its total deracination of the natural world and its foreshadowing of the coming climate crisis. Grotesque, but seductive. Certainly for the 20th-century European planners who, thinking they could replicate America’s success if only they abandoned centuries of Old World urbanism and instead introduced car-centric sprawl, left us living in a cheap knock-off of the skyscrapers and suburbia we saw on TV.
Seeking to quell my Stendhal Syndrome-by-way-of-Bauhaus, I escaped below ground to an underpass diner for a cheeseburger. The Cubs were playing in one corner and the White Sox warming up in another. There was a Lager on tap, and an IPA. We’ve got American IPAs at home now, too. Because Europe’s city planners may be kicking their habit, and Pax Americana may be waning—but it’s not yet exhausted.
