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Nothing better exemplifies the disconnect between our nation and the rest of the world than the spectacle of dueling headlines that took place over this past weekend.

On the one hand, stories like this:

Black Friday Turned Green at the Malls Before Dawn

The clock struck midnight. Then the mall struck back.

Early openings, deep discounts and resurgent department stores appeared to give merchants at the mall an edge over discount retailers during the holiday weekend, a reversal of fortune from 2005.

ShopperTrak RCT, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based stores, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving rose 6 percent from last year, to $9 billion. On the same day last year, sales at stores monitored by ShopperTrak dropped 0.9 percent.

Discount chains, with their 5 a.m. openings and $70 portable DVD players, typically dominate the opening day of the holiday shopping season, known as Black Friday, because it was traditionally when retailers started turning a profit, or moved into the black.

But Wal-Mart, by far the nation’s biggest discount chain, threw cold water on that legacy this weekend, estimating that sales in November — including Black Friday — fell 0.1 percent, below its expectations

On the other, stories like this:

Bombings push Iraq closer to abyss

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The bloodiest bombings in Baghdad since the U.S. invasion in 2003, and the reprisals that swiftly followed, show that Iraq's sectarian conflict may be too far gone for leaders to stop, even if they want to.

The killings of some 250 people in just a few days last week marked a "high-water mark", analysts said. It demonstrated with savage clarity how little control Iraq's government exercises, with a security force accused of sectarian bias and a series of peace plans doing little to slow the pace of killing.

"This violence shows that sectarian bitterness between Sunnis and Shi'ites has gone deep down into ordinary people. They are totally polarized," said Mohamed el-Sayed Said of al- Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

And this:

Suicide Bomber Kills 15 People in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 26 — A suicide bomber walked into a packed restaurant in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday morning and set off his explosives, killing 15 other people and wounding 25, Afghan officials said.

Most of those killed were civilians inside the restaurant, which was in the central bazaar of Urgun, a small town in the mountainous Paktika Province, which borders Pakistan. The explosion destroyed the building and damaged adjoining shops, said the provincial chief of police security, Gen. Shah Alam Spand.

He said he suspected that the bomber’s intended targets had been a local official and the chief of a militia that works with American forces in the province, who were having breakfast together. Both men were wounded, but survived, said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Dad Muhammad Rasa. Three bodyguards with the militia chief were also among the wounded, he said.

The attack was the deadliest since 16 people were killed in a suicide car bombing in Kabul on Sept. 8.

[On Monday, a suicide bomber killed two NATO soldiers in an attack on an alliance convoy in the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar, Reuters reported, citing a NATO spokesman.]

And this:

Chilling Echo for Lebanon, Mirror of Regional Tension

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 26 — In April 1975, gunmen fired on a church in East Beirut in what appeared to be an attempt to kill Pierre Gemayel, founder of the main right-wing Lebanese Christian militia. He was not killed, but the shooting set off a cycle of revenge that became a 15-year civil war.

Last week, three gunmen assassinated Mr. Gemayel’s grandson and namesake, a government minister and symbol of Lebanon’s besieged Christian, pro-Western community. Now an unnerving question is emerging here: as the battle between the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah and the Western-backed governing coalition reaches a crescendo, is it in fact the prelude to a civil war?

Lebanon’s seeming slide toward civil conflict is not just a symbol of unfortunate historic symmetry. This country is a barometer for the region, serving as a measure of tensions and rivalries.

It is no coincidence that Lebanon is suffering its worst political crisis in decades at a time when Iraq has descended into sectarian war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the past few months reached new heights and power seems to be shifting away from the Western-allied Sunni Muslim countries of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to the Shiite state of Iran.

“Generally, the regional situation at the time was very much what it is today,” said Kamal Salibi, a historian and author from Beirut, speaking of the start of the 1975-90 civil war.

9/11 changed everything, they said. Nothing will ever be what it once was, they said. Go on with your lives, they said. This is our generation's calling, a clash of civilizations, they said. Go shopping, or the terrorists will have won, they said.

We're still shopping. How that helps is beyond me....

UPDATE: For those of you who are video inclined...

Nothing captures the dichotomy of our news coverage better than this. While John Roberts talks about how "death lurks at every step," and media coverage in the US is "sanitized" to protect families here at home, the border of the screen shows "holiday travel conditions," and the scroll across the bottom details the latest sports and entertainment news.