But the whole week was bewildering, with the results from election Tuesday (November 3) causing confusion on all sides. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent a Midas sum getting himself re-elected for his controversial third term: more than enough millions to keep, say, Melbourne University’s straitened arts faculty flush for decades. Yet Bloomberg, with 50.6 per cent of the vote, just scraped home. (Don’t even ask what Australian medical researchers, or Sri Lankan refugees, might do with the Yankees’ $206 million payroll.)

The election further north in New York’s 23 Congressional District was pure Lewis Carroll, as though the Red Queen (think Sarah Palin) and friends had gate-crashed the Mad Hatter’s party. Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck et al. didn’t like the GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafava (‘too liberal’), so she stood aside and then endorsed her Democrat rival. The electorate didn’t like the stooge Republican substitute, Doug Hoffman (he looked too March Hare-like once the headlights were on him), so the Democrats won – in a district that has voted Republican since the Civil War. Karl Rove and the gang back at FOX claimed victory before the event, and victory, of a kind, even after the event. Their logic is intriguing. Scary. These are not normal times.

Elsewhere, in New Jersey and Virginia, incumbent Democrat governors lost to Republicans, but without the benefit of barracking from the extreme Republican right.

The weird week – it started just after Halloween – ended late Saturday, November 7, amid unconstrained Democrat jubilation when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought down her gavel to mark the passage of the House affordable healthcare bill (220 votes to 215). Thus began the long-awaited process of overhauling America’s bizarrely inequitable system, which, according to 2009 census figures, leaves forty-seven million people without health cover.

In the pell-mell of congratulation after the vote, Pelosi was surrounded by Democrat worthies (and a few less-than-worthies) eager to share the limelight as they congratulated the Speaker on her successful negotiations with (read ‘making concessions to’) anti-abortion Democrats and slim-majority incumbents worried about losing their seats at the 2010 mid-term elections. Only one Republican, Anh Cao from New Orleans, a former Jesuit seminarian who was worried that the majority of his constituents had no health cover at all, voted for the bill. His fellow House Republicans didn’t congratulate him, or indeed anyone, and none of them tried to spin the loss into a victory. Republican Jack Kingston, from Georgia, labelled it ‘a wrecking ball to the entire economy’.

I turned off CNN at midnight, sick of polarised politics, and thought instead about the keen young doctor who had seen to my stitches the week before in Princeton’s bustling hospital (and yes, after weeks of bureaucratic negotiation, I do have medical insurance, but only because of institutional affiliation). ‘Does Australia have a universal health care?’ he asked me as he prodded and I winced. ‘Yep.’ ‘You’re so lucky.’ I knew that, but it’s not for a foreigner to say, so I just shook my head in friendly bemusement as he added, ‘In this country we are just plain crazy’. The American Medical Association, which not even the crazy crazies can call a socialist collective, endorsed the House reform bill on Thursday.

People keep asking if Obama’s steps are too small (‘baby steps’ as they say here), his administration’s moves too measured to keep plain craziness at bay or to neutralise America’s toxic variety of craziness, the kind that wilfully conflates health reform with Nazism, bank bailouts with Stalinist socialism, or draws cartoon depictions of the president with a bone through his nose, crouching naked, or the First Lady’s family as sprawled gorillas.

I don’t know the answer. Too small? Too constrained? I watched candidate Obama’s measured steps last year, and the year before, and saw him win the presidency. I heard many experienced Democrats bemoan the man’s analytic habit, his disinclination to sink his teeth into the jugular. They were proved wrong. The world values the new American president’s informed civility, the compass and integrity of his ambition.

At home there are certainly legitimate arguments to be had. About the economic stimulus: was it in-adequate or fiscally responsible? Is the ‘too big to fail’ mantra just that – a mantra, not a sound economic principle? Have the banks been afforded privileged treatment, and is the White House too close to Wall Street (‘the revolving door’ charge)? Even in what America disparagingly calls ‘an increasingly parliamentary system’ (i.e. party-dominated and -divided), there has been opportunity for vigorous discussion. But that is not the way the Republican Party has chosen to play the game. Obama’s post-inauguration bipartisan gestures have been roundly rebuffed, and across the country one can hear the whips cracking and the wagons circling – America looking inward rather than outward. (And yes, I realise Rupert Murdoch both promotes and profits from US insularity, and that national stereo-typing has its limitations.)

A lot happened between February’s bright inauguration and August’s dog days. Discontent, some of it racial, festered and was given a rhetoric, a sheen of legitimacy and support, tacit and vocal, most ominously from some Republican leaders. Disaffected or cynical conservatives began organising in ways that won’t lead to election but will subvert even the idea of government (‘a little bit of revolution’) – even more ominous. Democrat mistakes (see the Acorn affair) and state corruption scandals have disillusioned supporters and critics alike. And the sheer size of the Obama administration’s task is so daunting: fix the shambolic economy, address increasing unemployment, shift international opinion of America while negotiating withdrawal from or escalation of two foreign wars, legislate for reform in health and energy policy before election politics render reform impossible.

I do know that when I arrived back here in September, everyone was glum, very Hanrahanish. In the late summer doldrums, the new administration seemed bogged down, the energy dissipated, the mood sour. Town hall meetings, and the attempts to explain health reform, had gone haywire; the ‘Tea Party’ protests looked like the only game in town. Plus they seemed spontaneous, a popular uprising, with the annexing of the Boston tea party tag not just an historically ignorant or cynical joke. That they were strategic, lavishly funded and meticulously organised I have since learned (Google Tea Party Patriots or Dick Armey and FreedomWorks, and you’ll see what I mean). Nonetheless, there remains a grass-roots passion about the protests, and an accompanying irrationality and paranoia in the movement that is disturbing. Take this posting, from the Tea Party Patriots website (I quote it exactly as written):

Near midnight on Saturday November 7^th, when most Americans were either sleeping or otherwise destracted, democratic members of the House of Representatives ignored the clear will of a very vocal American majority and implanted the tenticals of a growing tyrannical government into the spine of the republic that was built on the back of hard working Americans.

Vocal they certainly are, and metaphorical with it. But an American majority they are not. This year’s polls have consistently demonstrated that a majority of Americans support health insurance reform and want the inclusion of a public option in that reform. But damned lies, like damned Yankees, are bankable here. If the currency is debased, as it was in Representative Joe Wilson’s ‘You lie!’ outburst during Obama’s health re-form speech in the House in early September, it is also an insidious form of derision that traduces American politics more than it tarnishes the man at whom it is consistently directed.

When Obama made a midnight trip to Dover Air Force base in Delaware to salute the return of the bodies of fifteen soldiers and three Drug Enforcement agents killed in Afghanistan, his public action marked a departure from the Bush administration’s policy of withholding the numbers of combat deaths and bringing soldiers’ bodies home in secret. You might think that Americans would appreciate their president’s gesture. Many did. But others labelled it a publicity stunt (‘President Bush paid his respects privately’, they argued). Some nitpicked about protocol; columns were devoted to the propriety of the presidential salute. But presidents, who are also commanders-in-chief, have saluted since Reagan sought advice about the practice from a Marines commandant in 1981. So what’s special about Barack Obama?

Many things. Obama makes Americans alternately proud and acutely uncomfortable. In a distinctive but oddly unrepresentative way (remember ‘not black enough’?), he both embodies America’s past and points to its future. The mixed reality of that past some Americans want to deny; the future – multiracial, governed, globalised – they fear. They want ‘their America’ back. And in the cynical vein that fits the times, you could argue that they also want back their financial dominance.

Certainly, it is instructive to trace the money trails: they tell you a lot about where power resides in America, about the influence of lobbies (six health insurance lobbyists for every congressperson in Washington, for example). Calculate the money even rich American politicians need to elicit from donors big and small in order to afford election campaigns and you begin to understand what influences the shape of legislation and the way elected representatives vote.

But the American public attitude to money and the way it is disbursed also tells a tale, and it’s not quite the same one. Money speaks, yes, but voters with their feet still planted in an austere Calvinist tradition often don’t approve its style: this is a country of supple and often conflicting attitudes. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg, for all the $90 million invested in his re-election, couldn’t buy himself popularity. His vote was down one hundred thousand from last time. In New Jersey, the incumbent Democrat and former Goldman Sachs chief executive, Jon Corzine, fell to a combination of resentment about property taxes (at a $7000 average, the highest in the country), his own aloof and lean persona, which was not helped by the Goldman Sachs connection, and anger at blatant corruption in the state. His Republican opponent, the unrepentantly plump and personable Chris Christie, had the advantage of his former role in prosecuting corruption, plus a common touch. Three days after the election, New York public radio featured two musical improvisers singing ‘Jon Corzine, we hardly knew you’. The ever equable, ‘sane alternative’ broadcaster and host of the show, Brian Lehrer, laughed, as I did. Very Hobbesian, very unforgiving, very consuming, politics in America. And no time for losers, as Obama learned in Copenhagen when Chicago lost its Olympic bid, and the Philadelphia Phillies must have understood as they walked, unacknowledged and unsung, off the field at Yankee stadium after putting up a good fight, and taking two games off the eventual winners.

But if Americans are angry about the greed and unabated hypocrisy of their bankers (the coinage ‘banksters’ appeals), and ground down by housing fore-closures and the unemployment rate (that ten per cent doesn’t include the further seven per cent who are underemployed or who need work but have given up in despair), they are also, many of them, ill-equipped to handle the complexity and difficulty of life at the moment.

A flawed education system doesn’t help enough of them. American television, the nation’s prime communication source, is mind-numbing. No wonder the national attention span has shrunk. I watch to learn, and yes, I enjoy (briefly, like wasabi up one’s nose) the sparring spectacle of FOXNews one minute and MSNBC the next. But after some hours of high-voltage exchange interspersed with erectile dysfunction cures and inane counter-indications (‘contact your doctor if an erection lasts longer than four hours’), I want to kick in the flat screen. How could America have let such a potent medium go so awry? Edward R. Murrow come back, even with your cigarette. Restore some dignity. Give us honest, direct speech. Some Shaker simplicity. Remind us again that ‘‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free / ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.’ This is American wisdom. And if you watched Obama’s White House lawn speech the morning after the House vote, you could hear its echo in his resonant plain speech. But there are plenty who do not want to hear, and many who would distort the message, would turn the simple into the simplistic, freedom into a slogan, and ‘where we ought to be’ into a place of exclusion.

It was almost a relief when I read a recent account in the New York press of Australia’s latest asylum-seeker brouhaha. The Times correspondent, properly dispassionate and scrupulous in detailing the case, still couldn’t disguise a degree of astonishment that Australia should be in such a lather over what looked, by international comparisons, to be such a small problem. Irrational fears of people who arrive in boats? Surely not! From common-sense Australia? Don’t they play cricket with them? And the government spending a profligate sum processing people on a tiny island a thousand or so miles offshore? Didn’t they learn anything from Guantanamo? And what about the defensive actions of Kevin Rudd, that Obama-smart politician who made such a hit at the Pittsburgh G20 with his lucid, rational, statesmanlike analysis of global economic priorities and principles? Hard to fathom.

Better than a lecture, it was a dose of Burns medicine: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad fra mony a blunder free us …’ And if my giftie was not simple exactly, it was salutary. Liberating, you could say. Set me free to enjoy for a while what America does so wonderfully well. Like the new ‘Bauhaus, Workshops for Modernity’ show just opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall, and amid bracing concessions that perhaps America didn’t win the Cold War all on its own, that Ronald Reagan wasn’t the Prime Mover, that Europe had something to do with it after all, MoMA staged a perfectly curated, fresh, excitingly open-minded exhibition of works that came out of a socialist utopian movement that lasted only from 1919 to 1933. And nothing dour or worthy in the works or in the way they were presented. The exhibition was a frank and graphic salute to an early twentieth-century European cultural movement that profoundly influenced America and the world, and still does. There were hundreds of people at the Wednesday preview. Some of them will have stayed on in New York that evening for the final game of World Series. Some will have had friends in the military, and their Thursday will have been dark. And many Americans of course will never set foot in MoMA, and will go on being persuaded that nothing good could ever come out of a country or a political system that didn’t value individual freedom with the fervour of the National Rifle Association.

Politics here is so complex, so mired, so compromised, that at times Edward Gibbon feels like one’s natural guide. But Americans themselves, and the squirrel that scampers along my window sill and plays trapeze in the bare dogwood, give me warrant to believe that Fall in America is the prelude not to decline but to Winter, the quiet season, the season for gathering, for celebration, and then, the long wait for the rebirth of Spring.