When Europe tells stories about America, it is principally telling stories about itself, what it fears it will become; what it is already. To read Baudrillard's America, with its evocations of joggers cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of their energy, is to listen to a story about a world where death is banished to the margins - old age people's homes languishing in the suburbs - and our lives become more frenetic the more we try to push death away.