Currently I am in the US trying to finish a novel. This involves hours of shouting at people I made up earlier, while occupying a wooden house surrounded by woodpeckers. (I didn't order the woodpeckers, they're just here. And eating the house. No really, they are – come outside and I can show you. Or listen – you'll hear them. Knocking…) Sorry. Stir-crazy. My company mainly consists of fictional constructs and small, destructive birds. All work and no play… all work and no play…

Anyway, my location means I am obliged to tell you how things are in what I like to call the Land of Fog News, Fear and Large Trousers.

To begin with trousers, you'll be aware that America is a puritan country. We in the UK may still think of it occasionally as the source of exceptionally groovy music, film stars with improbable teeth and all manner of hip trends that we and our wise leaders have loved to follow: casual tattooing, stock-market pyramid scams, utility sell-offs and opportunistic invasions – the kind of cool stuff it's hard to resist.

But beneath the surface glamour and exciting TV shows about death, America still yearns for savage modesty and the right to burn uppity women. This means – and I have noted this during visits over many years – that American trousers and, particularly, American gentlemen's trousers are generously concealing, if not actually capable of accommodating entire families of migrant workers – and possibly infants who may be groomed for later use as "bomb mules".

In post-9/11 US, threat levels are announced on a colour-coded basis ranging from green = "Go About Your Business and Buy Another Flag for Your Front Yard. What? You Don't Want a Flag, What Kind of Monster Are You?" to red = "Shoot Everyone! It's the Rapture and You Know Jesus Will Shoot First – or at the Very Least There Are Socialist, Atheist, Muslim, BP Executives Outside Eating Your Mother and Raping Your Dog."

As I write, the airline sector threat level is orange = "What? Get on a Plane Without My Gun?" Although it's kind of the authorities to calibrate my fear, much cheaper indicators of ambient fear levels bestride America's sidewalks – gentlemen's trousers. When a man is truly scared, he conceals those things he loves the most. Many American men are now wandering about inside trousers we might mistake for a pair of modest wedding marquees. Urination, intimate exercise or simple rearrangement are becoming increasingly unwieldy. Although seeing a pair of bright trousers catch the breeze and billow like a spinnaker is slightly moving – especially for the owner.

Why the bull market in fear? That would be down – in part – to Fog News. By which I don't mean Fox News – the channel that has plumbed so many depths it has actually bored through the Earth and now broadcasts as an impossible satellite, its atmosphere maintained purely by wilful ignorance of all physical laws.

Fog News begins on the internet, in campaign offices and lazy newsrooms. This article will, for example, end up online in a variety of forms and fragments. Those who wish to will then be able to state that "an informed source" believes illegal immigrants are being concealed in super-sized chinos, that Karl Rove wants to burn uppity Republican women and that "groomed bomb mules" are operating in kindergartens near you. None of this is true, but beliefs don't have to be and quoting and misquoting beliefs in scary, politically useful and profitable ways is what Fog News is all about.

And if you live in a country where journalists don't get paid enough to fact-check, or who have never been taught how to fact-check, or who have been replaced by maddened bloggers like me, then there simply is no limit to the unfacts that can be generated, manipulated and used to scream at one's opponents and the unsympathetic world. Which makes for more fear and even scarier beliefs…

So doll-eyed, far-right, uppity sex kitten Sarah Palin could happily accuse Obama's tiny reforms of America's unmerciful healthcare system of creating government "death panels" (you know nationalised healthcare – it always has "death panels"). They sounded bloody terrifying and so were believable.

Uppity anti-masturbation campaigner, ex-witch and TV pundit Christine O'Donnell is both an embarrassing threat to established Republican interests and a woman with the stunned eyes and tighttighttight smile of a stranger to self-love. (She also presents an apparently intoxicating, Palinesque persona: part 80s hooker, part moron, part woman who may wake boys with garden shears for impure thinking.)

But beyond the fact that she dreads the day any man discovers he can come without her, she remains ill-defined. Her campaign mentions her commitment to "the core values of the great American tradition" – which could involve witch-burning, cross-burning, Big Bill Broonzy, the Summer of Love or having guns on planes. (Actually, she's in favour of guns on planes.) O'Donnell has a dubious financial and educational background and yet she is now the Republican senatorial candidate for Delaware. In a fact-free media environment anything goes. Questions don't have to be asked, answers don't have to be given and the more incendiary your beliefs, the better. Which explains why Fox heads up every other item with: "Sooo… is Obama killing your child tonite?"

Except that last bit isn't true – I made it up. I feel threatened by forces I don't understand and, in the absence of real information, I become fearful and aggressive. Like most human beings.

I am writing in a country full of people like most human beings, a country much like my own where leaders lack the will to be honest or active, where the poor are punished for their poverty, where returning veterans are routinely betrayed as their sacrifices are invoked to excuse obscenities, where food is sold as love, where fear is sold as patriotism. It's the same country where – a couple of hours from here – a UN summit met last week to discuss its millennium development goals – international targets that, if they were already operational, would mean human beings alive today simply wouldn't die tomorrow of hunger, or curable illnesses – of poverty. The fact is, they probably will die. We're too busy being scared to help them.