LETTER FROM AMERICA: All the things that used to count in the US as news - or even salacious gossip - don't seem to have much resonance right now. It's interesting and curious to watch the big stories and the small stories lumber across the public landscape with scarcely a footprint left behind.
Here's a short list of what didn't matter much this week: A young business man named William Simon, son a former US Treasury Secretary, a man who had never run for public office before, scored an upset victory in California, winning the Republican nomination for Governor. He will face the incumbent Democrat, Governor Gray Davis, in the fall. President Bush fervently backed another candidate who was expected to win and got trounced.
This, in politics, is extremely bad for Mr Bush and doesn't bode well for his re-election strategy - one in eight Americans lives in California. It's important. The real outcome? Turnout was low and nobody cares.
In Washington DC, Republican senators demanded one more week to try to prevent Charles Pickering from becoming the first judicial nominee to be publicly defeated in a Senate committee in more than a decade.
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, delayed the vote, saying "extreme left" interest groups were "lynching" the Mississippi jurist by opposing him. It used to be big deal if a US Senator threw terms like "lynching" around. Today? Nobody cares.
The nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.5 per cent in February and businesses added 66,000 jobs to their payrolls for the first time since July.
The addition of those jobs during the month followed losses that have averaged 146,000 a month since the recession started in March 2001. The market responded by dipping slightly, unenthusiastic about the good news.
We won't even mention the Enron scandal. It is not on the radar.
You can't even rely on the usual supply of "only in America" type criminal trials normally going on in at any given moment to hold attention. Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children, is on trial this week with defence and prosecutors sparring over whether she is insane or not and whether she knew what she was doing was wrong. But it's only a front page story in Texas.
In Los Angeles, a jury is considering murder charges against the couple whose dog attacked and killed a San Francisco woman in her apartment building's hallway. The infamous dog mauling case riveted the country when it first happened; the couple, it turned out, had adopted the dog's original owner, an Aryan brotherhood neo-Nazi who served time in prison, acting in some strange parental capacity to the man. Very weird case. Now? Nobody cares.
Christopher Darden, the former prosecutor on the OJ Simpson case who lives in Los Angeles, told Fox News: "The case is being covered in the papers, but it's not something people are talking about here."
So what is going on? Anybody in the television news business will tell you this: the only thing that gets ratings right now is war. War coverage, war reports, chat about the war on terror. People want to know what exactly is happening in Afghanistan. They want to consider whether Mr Bush is serious about attacking Iraq. They are looking up Yemen in their desk atlas.
Last week it was reported that federal officials in November had a reliable tip that al-Qaeda was planning to set off a small nuclear bomb in New York City. There was nothing the feds could do to stop it so they decided to tell no one, not even the New York Mayor. You can imagine the outcry here.
Former Reagan speech-writer and author Peggy Noonan has her own explanation of what's going on here. In the Wall Street Journal she writes: "Each day we re-enact normality. We re-enact life before September 11th. That woman hurrying along Fifth Avenue in the coat with the mink collar, rushing with shopping bags from Barneys and Saks into the place where they do your nails. She thinks a nuke may go off in midtown this afternoon. But she also knows she needs a manicure.
"She gets her nails done and muses on what will happen when the big thunderclap comes, and the sky fills with light and the wind begins to whip.
"We're all still hurrying along, walking briskly through the world with our distractions and our plans. And yet every one of us knows it's quite possible - oh, it's quite likely - that we'll be hit again, and worse next time than last. It is odd and interesting that everyone thinks it will be midtown next time, not downtown or uptown. Times Square, or Broadway, or 50th and Fifth."
Ms Noonan has got it right, with one caveat: it's not just New York. Americans - even those Californians - feel they are at war, and in war, little else matters.