WASHINGTON - The past week has shown why this country of ours, molded into greatness by melding diverse elements, is in danger of becoming a gigantic monolithic megalopolis that ignores the reality of the rest of the world.
Did you get the feeling there were no other athletes at the Winter Games that NBC thought you should watch but Americans?
Did you hear about the federal appeals court decision that all but gives a green light to mega corporations making more mega mergers so that a smaller and smaller number of guys in suits own all the nation's TV stations?
Did you see the Pentagon trying to float the idea of disseminating false information abroad, possibly to foreign news outlets, to put the best spin on American foreign policy, even as the United States is battling for credibility in the Middle East?
Did you watch President Bush sternly admonishing the world about Iraq, Iran and North Korea, yet again, as an "axis of evil" just as he landed in China, smiling and full of praise for a communist country that is still one of the world's most repressive regimes?
And how about his proposal to take a decade longer before cleaning up the air while corporations trade pollution "credits" with each other even as he admits global warming is a serious problem?
We rush pell-mell from one news event to the next, from the sentencing of an ex-priest for sexual deviance to the trial of a mother for killing her children to the Olympics to weird weather to watching corpses pile up in Georgia and multimillionaire executives take the Fifth Amendment on Capitol Hill. It becomes hard to see where we're going.
But once in awhile it all just feels like being smacked in the face. Then it's time to pause and get our bearings.
Every day we become more homogenized. We shop in the same stores in Maine and California, eat the same foods, watch the same TV shows, disdain what is different and, if the Bush administration has its way, are supposed to have the same opinions about everything.
Let's not forget that Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft said in December, in testimony before the Senate, that those who challenge U.S. policy on how to fight the war on terrorism "only aid terrorists" and will "give ammunition to America's enemies." That was not an off-the-cuff remark but a measured reflection of what the nation's chief law enforcement officer really thinks.
In fact, every Cabinet member travels on taxpayer money nearly every week lobbying Americans to believe that Bush policy is the best policy.
NBC decided Americans didn't want to watch hours of live programming of the Winter Games unless American "stars" were performing, being interviewed by NBC's own "stars" in jingoistic settings that all but dismissed every other country's performance and every other country's athletes.
As the Federal Communications Commission struggles ineffectually to figure out what the future shape of communications is going to be, it is looking as if the answer will be less competition, not more.
A cereal company that feeds half the nation's children sugar-coated chocolate globules will own the network that feeds its citizens snippets of indigestible, gory news and the movie company that feeds the world hard-to-swallow advice about how everyone should be narcissistic, uninformed and materialistic like the pretty men and women who are held up as the nation's ideal.
The idea that top government officials would even think of spreading falsehoods to the media to feed to people around the world, spend tax money on such an idea and then try to say that it is not really lying but legitimate "strategic deception" is appalling. Do they really think the rest of the world will settle for being deceived, even by the biggest superpower in the history of the world?
Bush has proven adept at being president (although we need more jobs) but we have to hope he is not so smitten with his own success that he doesn't listen, really listen, to what other leaders in the world are telling him -- because their view of the world often differs greatly from his. Sometimes he's right. Sometimes he's not. But whatever he does affects them all and millions of others.
Power does not equate with wisdom. Bigness is not always best. Uniformity is not always desirable.
And millions of unquestioning Stepford citizens not encouraged to see the forest for the trees are not the way to preserve democracy.
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