One of the most interesting and informative things about leaving the USA for a few months is coming back and seeing with fresh eyes what was there all along. This seems especially true in the post 9-11 world, where everything American is even more so.

After being largely outside the US media ocean for a few months over the winter, I was worried that I had missed some important clue to the way things are. Hoping to be properly re-socialized as an honest-to-goodness American, I spent the first several weeks upon reentry devouring every media source I could find: cable news, newspapers, newsmagazines and AM talk radio.

It was all a bit scary at first. When I left Seattle last November, the US was in a flag waving, post-hypnotic, false patriot sense of denial and seemed to be clamoring for a dictatorship if it promised to make the horrible uncertainty go away.

That seems to have subsided a bit. I still get the impression an American neo-reich wouldn't be strongly opposed, but at least the demands for its imposition have died down somewhat. The War on Terrorism itself seems to have fallen victim to the US media's short attention span. The anchors and pundits still repeat the mantras that remind us what we have lost, but the spirit has gone out of it. There's nothing more to be said on the subject without possibly raising questions about the USA's absolute goodness.

Looking at it all with fresh eyes, it struck me as nothing so much as absurd, as if the news had been given over to deadpan parody of itself. It's not, of course: the talking heads take it all as seriously as ever. I haven't decided yet whether to be encouraged or discouraged by this situation.

One of the first things I saw while catching up on cable was on one of the Christian channels. A hellfire preacher wearing desert-style camouflage fatigues was holding forth from a stage ringed in sand bags. The half-hour program was an excerpt of a taped day long seminar called "Believers' Boot Camp." The program was really an infomercial for the VHS tape series containing the whole seminar, designed to "arm and equip" the Christian believer for a "new level in the battle." Heavy on the Crusader rhetoric, it was a call for holy war as enthusiastic as any Taliban mullah.

For some reason the gospel of the Taliban Christ didn't bother me as much as the waving American flag that ripples continuously behind the anchors on FOXMSNBCNN. I watched hours of cable news, more fascinated by that flag, and what it was saying, than I was by the news that was being reported from beneath it. Eventually I got over the shock and now find it to be a helpful "truth in advertising" reminder.

Once I could actually start listening to the pundits and semi-official spokespeople, I started feeling better. Everything has changed so much since 9-11 that it is almost back to where it was before. Almost. George Bush has gone from being barely competent on Sept. 10 to briefly being recognized as the second coming of Winston Churchill and is now rapidly returning to his former status of ill-informed nitwit. The real change is that the situation is even more cartoonish now that the media has to work harder to pretend GWB is saying important things and has some inherent leadership value.

Immediately after George Bush started calling Palestinian suicide bombers "homicide bombers," the news anchors dutifully followed official instructions and started calling them homicide bombers as well--for about a day and a half. But a lot of pundits and experts on both the left and the right refused to play along on the grounds the new terminology was silly. Some folks still try to make like the clarification that they are "homicide" bombers is an important contribution to our understanding of the Palestine/Israel situation. And that flag ripples behind them as a persistent reminder of why this sort of contortion by our "objective" media is thought to be necessary.

AM talk radio has been the most delightful reintroduction to American values programming. The right-wing hosts, with a couple of exceptions, are a rabidly dishonest lot. They seem to take a particular glee in mischaracterizations and outright lies to make their point. And they still don't seem to be doing a very good job of it. The mildest dissent from the War on Terrorism is called "sedition." And should a caller be in danger of winning the argument the host simply screams at him and hangs up, finishing the argument without the distraction of an opposing viewpoint.

This behavior makes a lot of people I know angry. But somehow, this heavy-handed pounding out of the party line gives me encouragement. The louder they shout, the more desperate the right wing sounds.

The overall impression I get from the mainstream media is that the flag-drenched war mongers are out of ideas. If hysteria, chest pounding, and flag waving is power, then we are in big trouble. But if it's true that information is power, the American Empire is not as sturdy as its propaganda would have us believe. There doesn't appear to be any actual information that is useful to their cause.