I doubt seriously if nations will tremble at my judgement and my time scale of impatience. However, I am happy to appraise America by its mass media. How else are we to judge a nation and its culture in the 21st century? America is a nation saturated in mass media, much of the character of which it created, and it is now part of a machine of global myth making being spread around the world by demand and intense pressure from Jack Valenti and other moguls. My country wrestles daily with the anaconda of American mass media.
Certainly, whenever I go to America I am stunned by the hypnotic effect that the mass media has on everyone: televisions on all the time, every day, everywhere. This is bad enough in many countries I have visited, but it seems to be particularly virulent in America -- I assume it is because it is the only way to hold 300 million people together. I go to dinners among the elite classes, scientists, academics, artists, and virtually all discussions revolve around the previous night's television.

The core of a culture is its memory and its storytelling. America handed over its storytelling to its corporate mass media a long time ago, presumably as part of the shift from a producer culture to a consumer culture. Every other country is struggling now with the same prospect -- it happened first in the land that created breakfast television.
Of course America can be appraised by its mass media. Look at American politics: completely dominated by televison, and the money that makes it work. Your President has never read a book -- where does he get his world view from? Shakespeare? Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Mass media. His only real job ever was running a major league baseball team -- the epitome of corporate mass media. Where do I get my credit card?

yours, Peter T.