Tuesday, June 27, 2006 | Cartoon News ONE OF the first things I noticed, arriving in North America, is that the news seems to disappear, or fade into the background. On one level, it seems ridiculous; on another, it seems not to affect people and their lives. Everyone is too busy coming and going from work, taking care of kids, fixing the car, or whatever. What's on television seems like a television show. I noticed this phenomenon right away. It is true that television news has a distinctly less serious tone in North America. In Europe, if you're an expat, you get a lot of your news from BBC World, which is not part of the same mind control machine as the American cable networks; BBC has its problems, as anyone who works there will tell you straight-up, but they are for the most part serious journalists. And more of reality gets through the filters. There is a focus on problems in the developing world, you can still see follow-ups on the tsunami, and the politics of the Iraq situation are taken a lot more seriously; it's not just a body count. Get to North America, particularly the United States, and everything we call news is reduced to injectable carbohydrates for the mind. It seems no more real than cotton candy. I remember one night just after arriving when the Mexican immigration issue started to heat up, and all of a sudden the TV news programs were loaded with nonstop coverage of how Mexico is invading the United States. The programming seemed to run 24 hours a day, like it was THE most important story EVER. And to my eyes, it seemed so trivial as to be an obvious ruse. Particularly given that Mexicans have been immigrating to the United States for, well, quite a while, and then all of a sudden one day in 2006 it's like this thing we have to stop right now. This kind of enormous distraction messes with our sense of what is real and what is not. But this is not exactly what I'm talking about. I get most of my news from the Internet, not TV, and I read the same news sites wherever I am: Political Waves, truthout.org, NYTimes.com and CNN.com. I don't quite understand why, but the sense of scale and meaning is magnified by distance. There seems to be a perspective created; like the United States' role in the world can be seen better outside the United States. Having spent most of my time in Canada the past six weeks, I can tell you that's a place where people are tuned in to the U.S. role in the world, and from what I've heard directly from people, they are not happy about it. So even from Canada, which most Americans think of as being an extension of upstate New York, there is a vastly different perspective on what the United States does than from inside the country. And when I got to the United States, the issues seemed -- in my own mind and perception -- to fade to being nearly irrelevant or invisible. It was a real not seeing the forest because all the trees are in the way kind of thing. I'm not the first person to notice this kind of thing. Lots of writers have to get away from their home country in order to see it clearly, to write about it. But the literary aspects are not as meaningful as the political ones; the question I have is, what will it take for Americans to accurately see their role in the world? How can we see ourselves in perspective? In short, people see the behavior of the government as psychotic, and are completely at a loss at the way the public allows its political leaders to get away with it. And "it" seems a lot more urgent from outside. Inside our borders, the feeling seems to be, "Well what can we do about it?" Outside our borders, people are really wondering what's gone wrong.