The day after the alleged U.S. election, I caught a French
journalist on television recalling that he and his colleagues had mocked
the way the final result in the recent presidential race in the
Ivory Coast had taken twenty-four hours to come through, but that, with
hindsight, they were a model of efficiency.

I doubt whether any of the blowhards infesting CNN and the other
cable channels could have drawn such a contrast. The Ivory Coast
election did not receive a lot of attention in the United States,
and not just when measured against the attention the U.S. election
received in the Ivory Coast. In all other G7 countries, it is
perfectly normal to switch on the evening news and see stories
from around the globe, often from quite unimportant places—the
recent coup in Fiji, say—whereas, by comparison, ABC’s “world
news headquarters” in New York is a world headquarters with no
branch offices. It can be argued that as citizens of the
preeminent economic, military, and cultural force on the planet
Americans have no pressing need to follow affairs in Fiji, the
Ivory Coast, or even France or Britain. But the accelerating
insularity of the United States is like a virus, multiplying
wildly and destroying what should be the support systems of a
healthy culture. You see it most clearly in the popular arts.
Before “multiculturalism” was invented, Americans were genuinely
multicultural: they devoured Heidi and The Three Musketeers
and Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves