Bundles of the New York Post rest on a Brooklyn sidewalk as New York gears up for another day ... Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
I love Mondays. I live for Mondays. On Mondays, the new podcast of This American Life is available for download.
If I can stop myself from listening in the morning (more than once it has caused me to be late for work), then my friend and fellow American ex-pat Sebastian comes round for dinner. We gather around my laptop with bated breath, as our grandparents and great-grandparents once huddled 'round the wireless to listen to FDR's fireside chats.
We laugh. We cry. My flatmate, a lovely Antipodean, retreats to her room, where I am sure she thinks about how weird Americans are. But we don't care: for thousands of Americans in voluntary exile like me and Sebastian, This American Life is an essential lifeline to home. A totally imaginary home, where everyone is like us: from New York, ethnically Jewish, bookish, self-deprecating, and above all, left-wing.
In this anxiety-filled election year, this last facet of TAL is most important. Having stopped living properly in the United States in 1999, when Bill Clinton was still president and gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon, I am painfully aware that my conception of America is old-fashioned, even mythic: it has changed a great deal since I've left, and in many respects, not really for the better. I'd like to believe that Barack Obama will win the day in November and lead my homeland into a new era of change, but often - reading the headlines, watching the news - I feel pessimistic. I find it hard to believe that Yes, We Can.
But when I listen to This American Life, oh, I believe.
"Each week," quoth Ira Glass, the iconic host of TAL in his monotone and nasal godlike voice, "we choose a theme, and we bring you several stories on that theme." Despite the voice and the black-framed glasses which he sports which are bigger than his face, Ira somehow manages to be the coolest and most fanciable American man ever, because he is the bringer of this amazing, romantic, liberal fantasy. Ira is unassailable proof that just because you are bad at basketball and good at school, doesn't mean you won't become a massive sex symbol one day.
The themes brought to us by Ira are broad - poultry! Quiz shows! Twenty-four hours in a Chicago diner! Building superintendents! - but the messages are consistent. Almost every narrative is somehow redemptive: sometimes, they're terribly sad but at the end of each episode the listener is almost always filled with a sense of hope and faith that Americans are, at the end of the day, good and kind and self-deprecating people.
The editing is cannily done - the most gut-wrenching recent story, of a Muslim-American family harshly rejected by their local community following 9/11 was buttressed, as the weepiest ones always are, with hilarity: a sharp anecdote from writer Shalom Auslander about his comical efforts to write ad copy to flog American values to the Arab World. "I realised," he says of his assignment, "that if you switched 'freedom and democracy' for 'cool and refreshing', it was pretty much the same strategy as the one I'd been given for selling soda to African-American kids." I was so overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy that I had to lie down for a few minutes to recover.
Sometimes I wish that there was a new episode of This American Life every day, but actually I don't think I could quite handle the emotional roller coaster - it usually takes me a week to recover my cynicism before Monday rolls around again, and Sebastian and I start crying and I find myself thinking, wouldn't I like to move back home? Or at the very least stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance? It's pure schmaltz, but it's intellectual schmaltz - the range of contributors include a formidable cast of well-known writers and broadcasters - and thus for an hour a week I'm just not ashamed to put aside all of this political grappling, and instead indulge in the fantasy that America really is a land of hope, opportunity, and unparalleled charm.
