I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

America is not just 'a nation with the soul of a church,' as G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1992: it is a nation with the mind of a crusade

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.