(wrote this a while ago, forgot to post it)

The Omaha shootings have been all over (government-controlled) Russian TV. The frequency and the tone of the coverage seem...off. The story played over and over, I strained to make out the Midwestern accents under the dubbed Russian, and whatever newsworthiness and emotional impact it had was quickly overshadowed by the subtext that somebody at the Kremlin thinks this is a political windfall.

Blueberry pointed out that things like that always get lots of coverage, and that America has way more than its share of them, and she's right. Plus, I wouldn't put it past Fox to have a similar field day if someone shot up ГУМ, the huge Soviet-general-store-turned-designer-mall on Red Square. Still, it was eye-opening and depressing to see what from America (which is more a part of me than I ever could have imagined before I left) gets plucked out and portrayed as representative.

Relatively mindless anti-Americanism has also hit the jackpot with Creepo Ed (who, turns out, is married with a 9-year-old daughter). He has a column called "An American in Moscow" where he wheels out all the old platitudes against Bush, which, regardless of whether I agree with them or not, sound parroted to the point of meaninglessness. The America he describes is boring, hypocritical, obese, psychotic, etc. What doesn't come through in the articles, of course, is that in Moscow he gets to live it up as Mr. big-shot Editor in Chief (though I strongly suspect that one of his main qualifications for the job was his ability to speak English), whereas in America he's just some dude from Pittsburgh whose parents take him shopping at Wal-Mart on the weekends (excruciatingly telling moment that night at his friend's house...he says something about driving to Wal-Mart, then says well actually my parents take me there because I can't drive, realizes how that sounds, steals a reaction-gauging glance at my poker-face).

He's basically struck a bargain where he gets to keep his self-image, and the forces here that want to tar all of America with the same paranoid, unstable, moronic brush capitalize on his insecurity about not being able to hack it it back home. Government ownership of the Weekly also probably means he's shot himself in the foot for any sort of journalism career in the States.