From afar, I've used my six hour head start on New York to gobble up a big supply of American media. That is, I've watched mainstream media fall on its pancaked face for most of the month we've been away — a period that started with the last gasps of Michael Jackson, rolled through Thomas Friedman's columns, Oprah Winfrey's dust-up at Hermes, the yo-yo that is the Yankees and ended with Ed Klein. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. But I did. And I am here to tell you; from a distance, American media looks grotesque, loud and overwrought — a lot of noise about very little.

Late on the evening of the full moon, my wife and I were pushing the kid in her stroller past the Eiffel Tower as — unknown to us — Tom and Katie were being whisked up to the Jules Verne restaurant. Their love vibration never reached us, but then, neither did the next day's news conference. Or all the madness that followed. Paris just didn't give a damn. (Just as the Cruise-Holmes match was starting to bore American editors, if not audiences, we finally read one smart piece on Cruise, by Edward Jay Epstein, in Slate. Epstein stepped back from the gossip and did the math — and figured out that while Cruise may, in the tabloid world, be totally deranged, he was together enough as a producer to get a deal that earned him $92 million from the last "Mission: Impossible." Even with the much-publicized renegotiation of terms for the next MI, he might do just as well. So how crazy is Cruise, really?)

It's amazing how quickly you can learn not to care about the mass culture of the homeland at a distance of 3,000 miles. Maybe it's a function of any travel that has you disconnected from your mother country for weeks at a time, but from this dot on the planet, it just doesn't seem that the United States really is the red-hot center of the world.

This is a conclusion that's especially easy to reach in France. Its first manifestation came early in our visit, on a crystalline Sunday in the country. Our hostess was an old college friend, married forever to a Frenchman. Married well, too. Monsieur is not only smart and a charmer, his family has owned an 18th century hunting lodge forever. So there we were, a picture out of a French movie: seven Americans — five of them longtime expatriates — and one Frenchman.at a long table under the trees as our daughter chased the dogs.

You would expect that the new arrivals would be grilled about the Old Country. But the President never came up. There was no discussion of the war. The decline in American newspaper circulation and Hollywood box office elicited no interest. The topics were medieval cathedrals, the South Korean metric for serious wealth (your own art museum) and — because these people weren't abject Francophiles — the million things wrong with French culture and government.

On the way back to town an idea started to form. These people hadn't turned their backs on America; America had turned its back on the rest of the world. Not in so many words — the message was more like: "You can't get anywhere without Uncle Sam." And the rest of the world had noted this, absorbed it, and decided to muddle on without us.

Or maybe it's something else: American culture has stalled. "They" make movies we don't want to see, publish books we don't care to read, release music we can't bear to hear. The answer to every American cultural question is "nothing applies," because there is a schism between the government and the people. The government is crazy and — belatedly — most adult Americans seem to know it; the people have no power and the government knows it. Somewhere ahead we sense there's a reckoning, which makes us uneasy if not outright terrified.

But that's not a conversation we can have with one another, even though we think about hitting the wall about as much as we think about sex — the disconnect between the loons who make news and the rest of us is too great. If only we could have a do-over of the election! For that matter, if only the ball had bounced differently in 2000! How is it possible that a few misplaced votes here, an electronic glitch there, have us suddenly worried about...well, everything? So we do what we can: work and play. And those too aren't as satisfying as they might be — our work is a desperate effort to store up nuts before the winter and our nights are evasive actions. Media that spoke honestly of this condition — media which grasped that the context of our lives is the most powerful content we've got — would be a sensation. But that would be, as it were, too French. That is, too much about feeling and perception and truths you can't prove.

And yet I have witnessed that conversation — this very month, in Paris, when Bruce Springsteen brought his one-man show to a sports arena jammed with 10,000 acolytes. I mean "acolytes" literally; beer was sold, but no one was crying "Bruuuce," and when the faithful moved to the stage at the end, they were so quiet Springsteen had to laugh. But the show was no laughing matter. Its subject was difficulty, how hard life is, and how great people are for confronting disappointment head-on, and how, though we are damaged and broken, our dreams are all we have. The loudest sound for most of this concert was sobbing — theirs, mine, my wife's — but these were good, cleansing tears, and if we left the two-plus hour encounter group exhausted, we were also exhilarated. Context and content had merged; someone had spoken our common language.

Not that a steady diet of media this intense is in order — my wife is of the view that she never needs to see Bruce again. And on the flip side, we've done our share of wallowing in French TV, which is as lousy as ever. Happily, the commercials are bunched together in a "publicite" section, so you can enjoy a sheaf of them without any interruption from the universally dreadful programming. One commercial was even a series of water colors — cool and pretty and damned if I can remember the product. At midnight, on regular old TV, they show soft-core porn of the "Emanuelle" school, with just a small notice that this stuff isn't appropriate for viewers under 16. (Sixteen! Is this a great country, or what?)

And then there are the bookstores. It seems like there are a million of them, many so tiny and specialized you don't see how they make enough to feed the cat. And the cafes, where the French spend outrageous time just talking to one another. And the sidewalks dotted with beautiful women who don't seem afraid of men, and with men who don't seem afraid of women. And the child's amusement park in the Bois, where we watched kids in bumper cars do something no American would think of — try to avoid collisions. Lots of sweet moments to fill the time that the Parisians don't spend consuming media.

All trips end with resolutions. Mine is to spend a little less time reading about people I don't care about and a bit more time being with people I do. And then to be fearless about advancing what strikes me as the real topic media needs to explore, which is nothing less than balancing coverage of scams and frauds and stunts with a sustained and sincere search for the light.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based writer and the founder and editor of HeadButler.com.