America is like a 21st century Krakatoa now, set to erupt and consume' itself

Pulsating hope of Obama era well and truly lost as Trump wreaks havoc all around him

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WITH our world convulsing, a jet stream of ominous news propelling the Doomsday Clock's minute hand perilously close to apocalyptic midnight, I thought of Mary Black.

Specifically, I remembered her voice, its hypnotic, nightingale beauty - the notes quivering up from inside her, a red carpet of velvet optimism rolled out to greet a momentous night - on a Dublin eve in 2011 when Barack Obama filled the skies with hope.

As The Beast, the custom-built presidential Cadillac, rolled into the city centre, Mary stood on a raised College Green dais, uncorked her champagne vocal cords, let flow A Song For Ireland's fizzing notes, potent heavenliness pouring into the night.

Black was not so much singing Phil Coulter's masterwork as exhaling it, living each lyric, a tiny figure creating something monumental, bigger than herself, bigger than life, a river of spine-tingling sound rushing from its source in her heart.

"Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no-one had to fight." There was a brotherhood in being among the delirious thousands squeezed into the thronged acreage between Trinity's Corinthianty's Corinthian columns and the granite magnificence of Parliament House.

For sure it was idealistic, a surrender to innocence, a naïve investment of conviction in the notion of Obama as an unshakable ray of calm light, but for a few May hours 14 yeas ago a rare confederacy seemed within humanity's reach.

Black announced her imminent retirement this week, Obama's old seat is occupied by a creature whose bunker-busting ego exists in inverse proportion to the empty shelf of his wisdom, and that night feels like a thousand lifetimes ago.

Gaza, Ukraine, the sundering of American values as a superpower tears itself asunder, Russian drones raining menace on Poland - it feels like we are inhabiting a world awaiting its own ruin.

Day after mean day, we slide toward the abyss.