It's partly the media's fault.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

Americans last week, in spite of a veritable flood of important issues demanding national attention, instead were generally obsessed with pieces of trivia -- the story of besotted astronaut Lisa Nowak and her 900-mile diapers, and the life and passing of Anna Nicole Smith.

My own theory is that not only was it understandable that our people would rather focus on these two human-interest stories, it probably was good for us to do so. Unmitigated attention to what are truly ghastly matters had burnt us out. We needed to think about something we could do virtually nothing about and didn't really matter. Besides, who wouldn't rather look at pictures of Ms. Smith, or even the bedraggled U.S. Navy captain, than look at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or former vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, flanked by a "suit" lawyer, contemplating his trial for perjury and obstruction of justice.

It is no accident that the state of the environment gets short shrift, or that people rapidly reach their saturation point on the subject of stem-cell research, unless they have one of the diseases that might be cured by it. If the human interest in a subject is general, it is likely to be low.

What was important last week that took second place to the sagas of Ms. Smith and Capt. Nowak?

There was the alarming U.N. report on climate change. The general conclusion of the carefully prepared analysis was that if we humans do not act quickly and effectively we are going to have to deal with drastic changes in the basic physical features of the world we live in -- such as temperatures and the division between land and water.

From Iraq there was the news that the insurgents and militias opposed to our continued presence there have figured out how to knock American military helicopters out of the sky. Given that the roads in Iraq are too dangerous to travel on for the most part and that both our military forces and civilian officials have come to depend on helicopters to get around, that is a very serious development. Last week we also were introduced to the complement to improvised explosive devices: the equally dangerous explosively formed projectiles. Plus the daily reports of murderous explosions in markets and other public places that claimed the lives of hundreds of Iraqis.

Alongside those reports we also were subjected to the bold fiction that new Bush administration appointees to various posts in the U.S. Iraq bureaucracy were going to make all the difference to our prospects for "success" in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus could be a military genius, but there is no reason to believe that he or anyone else can make a silk purse out of the sow's ear that is America's continuing role in Iraq.

We have also had another wave of '08 presidential candidates launch their campaigns. We now have been asked to believe that it matters that a particular formulation of pre-war attitude to the Iraq war will make a stupendous difference in a candidate's likelihood to get a nomination and win the elections 21 months from now. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the start to the presidential sweepstakes is the reminder that this may be a $1 billion campaign, and that it will take at least $100 million for a candidate even to be taken seriously. The main question there is, which special interests are going to put up that kind of money, just on the off-chance that they are buying the winning candidate?

But I guess the beginnings of the campaign for president are important. Look what we did in 2000 and 2004 and what a mess President Bush has put us into, at home and abroad.

Another appalling subject that got less coverage than Ms. Smith and Capt. Nowak last week was Mr. Bush's proposed budget. It would give another disproportionate slice of America's money to the military, cutting into help for the poor, and dishing even more ice cream into the mouths of the rich by preserving his iniquitous tax cuts.

In the meantime, the national debt will continue to soar, running up our future obligations to the point that we will never get out of the hole. Thc Chinese hold 10 percent of America's federal debt. I am absolutely certain that they will want to go down with America's economic ship when the time comes. Sure I am. Back to the pictures of Ms. Smith and baby Dannielynn.

In Pittsburgh there was plenty to escape from also. There was the collapse at the new convention center, constituting, in effect, the collapse of the hopes of the city, first, to attract lots of conventions to fill our hotels and restaurants, and, second, to ever get paid back the money the public shelled out for the center.

Gov. Ed Rendell's new Pennsylvania budget was also a bundle of joy. We will all enjoy paying a higher sales tax. On the other hand, maybe our truly greedy, corrupt Legislature will block passage of the tax increase. Then we can rejoice in the approximate level of government gridlock that we saw in the U.S. Senate last week when it wasn't able even to debate a non-binding Iraq resolution through a combination of egoism, presidential candidate preening and carnival-level parliamentary sleight of hand.

Let's try Kodak's cutting another 3,000 jobs as the final piece of information that addicts us to nonstop coverage of the diapered astronaut and the sad Ms. Smith.

Whichever one of these gems we were avoiding last week, we had a right to do so. America's news -- and its situation in the world and at home at this point -- is enough to send a groundhog back into his hole for a year. Steady, recurring doses of trivia help us endure.