(UNDATED) Is our population — as obsessed as it is with the trivial — capable of recognizing a crisis, much less mustering the disciplined response necessary to aggressively and intelligently resolve it?

If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, how significant would it be for an entire nation of Americans to take up fiddling while our nation faces an economic, global and societal meltdown?

There is reason to believe that’s exactly what’s happening.

Two words to make my case: Susan Boyle.

As you’ve probably seen, the dowdy Scottish singer wowed an entire nation, and later the world, when she appeared on “Britain’s Got Talent.” Her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables” won over not only skeptical judges, but also a crowd that initially scorned her appearance.

It has now been viewed more than 100 million times, making it one of the most popular YouTube videos ever posted. (Her YouTube audition has been watched five times more than President Obama’s inauguration ceremony, which has had 18.5 million views to date.)

One meaning of the word entertainment is “to divert,” to draw our attention from one thing to another. Diversion is not necessarily a pejorative term; a person can be diverted by the frivolous to the serious through entertainment.

Filmmaker Sydney Pollack tells the story of two Oxford dons and playwrights who were sitting at a tavern, grousing because neither one of them could get produced or performed. One turned to the other and said, “Oh, the hell with it. Let’s just do what Shakespeare did — give them entertainment.”

Yet unlike Shakespeare, what passes for entertainment in our age occupies a disproportionate amount of our time and consistently diverts our attention away from issues that matter and toward the inconsequential.

As real life increasingly gets morphed into entertainment and vice versa, entertainment is becoming our central reality, and real life is becoming subsumed in our entertainments. In his book, “Life, the Movie,” Neil Gabler writes that “It is not any `ism’ but entertainment that is arguably the most pervasive, powerful, and ineluctable force of our time — a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.”

The reality TV fad exemplifies this merging of entertainment and real life. News organizations once provided citizens with information and thoughtful commentary so they could make informed choices. But today, real-life tragedies and the mundane failures and heartaches of ordinary people are hyped like new movie releases.

The normal human response to a person in need is to help, but in our entertainment culture, even actor George Clooney has observed that “people’s misery becoming entertainment, that’s what’s dangerous. And that seems to be the place we’re going.”

We sit in front of television sets, passively watching human misery unfold, while just outside their door, down the street, or in an apartment next door, a real person faces the same problem, and there is no human to help them. Everyone is too absorbed with their favorite character on reality TV.

When diversion becomes a way of life, we avoid the very issues to which we should be most attentive.

The swine flu story has bumped Susan Boyle off of the top daily downloads on YouTube. The threat of a pandemic is serious and deserves attention, but if past experience is any indication, it will pass from the scene quickly and most of the population will return to the fad du jour.

We Americans have been fed a steady daily media diet of the new, novel and different for so long that the possibility of returning to a meat-and-potatoes diet of real news, serious commentary and informed debate is remote.

What Jonathan Franzen said of his work as a novelist is literally the biggest challenge concerned Americans face today: “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging the culture?”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)