Biggest economy wouldn't default over politics, would it?
Returning from a trip to the UK in 1964 my father, a man of the cloth, visited in-laws in Maryland, not far from Washington DC.
At the local church, the priest introduced him to the congregation, explaining he was on his way back to New Zealand "where he's doing missionary
work among the natives".
Twenty years later, I happened to be in Chicago when the election which brought down the curtain on the Muldoon era took place.
I rang the Chicago Tribune, which used to style itself as the world's greatest newspaper, in the hope of finding out the result.
The guy manning the international desk rummaged through the wire stories: "Let's see now, there's been an election in Zaire - is that any good to you?"
(I declined a briefing on the cliffhanger in the country formerly known as the Congo. As it turned out, Mobutu Sese Seko had scraped back into power with 99.16 per cent of the vote, a chastening drop from the 99.99 per cent he achieved at the height of his popularity.)
And, just last month, American satirist Jon Stewart had fun at our expense after a New Zealander in the Daily Show audience sought his views on our upcoming election.
Off-air Stewart admitted he knew more about what's going on in Iceland than here; on air he fell into a feigned coma upon uttering the words "New Zealand politics".
Stewart's right of course: our politics are boring, sometimes painfully so, compared with the United States. Then again the saying "May you live in interesting times" isn't a blessing; it's a curse.
The big political story in the US right now is the stand-off between the Obama Administration and Congressional Republicans over raising the country's debt ceiling.
If they can't agree by August 2, the US Government will be unable to repay its borrowings. Technically, it will be in default.
If the prospect of the world's largest economy defaulting on its debts makes you queasy, you're in good company: economists are bandying around terms like "Armageddon".
Thus far, however, the markets seem far less spooked by the Washington impasse than the eurozone meltdown. This is attributed to the widespread assumption that, political posturing notwithstanding, a deal will be done because it would be insanely reckless to do otherwise.
This assumption is probably valid, although I find the older I get, the less inclined I am to assume that people in positions of responsibility will act responsibly.
Take the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. It was easy to assume that the IMF boss was guilty as charged because it defied belief that the authorities would act as they did, calculatedly and publicly humiliating a figure of international standing, unless they had an iron-clad case.
Rape cases usually boil down to he said/she said, but in this instance the victim's credibility was particularly crucial since it was obvious the defence would subject her character and history to minute scrutiny.
From very early on, the authorities had information that should have caused them to adopt a far less gung-ho approach.
They didn't; now they face humiliation and quite possibly the mother of all wrongful arrest suits.
Likewise, it was reasonable to assume that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction since it defied belief that the American and British governments would make the momentous decision to invade Iraq on the basis of the spy community's equivalent of pub talk, or that they would present this pub talk to the world as impeccable intelligence.
The big story might be the debt ceiling, but the big picture is the 2012 presidential election and the continuing metamorphosis of the Republican Party.
As New York Times columnist David Brooks, a conservative, noted this week: "The Republicans may no longer be a normal political party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative."
While this faction has never accepted Barack Obama's legitimacy - as evidenced by its increasing willingness to canvass impeaching him for the crime of representing the people who voted for him in 2008 - its overarching cause is the culture war which elsewhere ended some time ago with a live and let live ceasefire.
Thus the Republican presidential field includes the likes of Rick Santorum who equates homosexuality with bestiality and Michele Bachmann who objects to children being exposed to The Lion King because the music was composed by a gay.
America is indeed going through interesting times.
That suits Stewart down to the ground: as a satirist of the liberal persuasion, he's operating in a target-rich environment.
Viewed from this boring little backwater, however, the US more than ever appeals as a nice place to visit, but not somewhere we'd want to live.
