BONN, Germany -- As millions of Americans tune in to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, much of the world is tuning in to America.


From the beginning, the Simpson case has been a kind of two-way mirror. While Americans debate its legal and moral content, and reflect on its meaning for American society, the world watches and analyzes America's media, its legal system and its seeming penchant for self-examination.


To many abroad, this is simply the quintessential American story: a gruesome murder in Hollywood; an American hero's flight down a freeway with those all-American accouterments, a gun and a cellular telephone, broadcast live to a country transfixed; then, court television and, possibly, an all-American finale in the gas chamber.


"The fascinated nation is being presented a play that is half Shakespeare, half soap opera: Othello and Richard Kimble, garnished with a bit of Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now,'" wrote the German weekly magazine Stern.


To audiences baffled by a country that prefers a tedious legal proceeding to the World Cup, foreign correspondents based in Washington and Los Angeles this summer have had to explain American psyche and sociology.


"No country in the world builds pedestals for its heroes, especially its sporting heroes, as high and as gilded as this one does," the Independent of London correspondent David Usborne wrote days after Simpson's dramatic arrest June 17.


Europeans in particular seem incredulous at how thoroughly the Simpson case took over -- and will again consume -- American airwaves and brain waves.


"Remember -- and this may be hard for a British reader to imagine," Anne Applebaum wrote in The Spectator magazine, "that the O.J. Simpson story was, at various moments over the past six weeks, running on CNN 24 hours a day while leading all of the news programs and simultaneously appearing on the front pages of every newspaper and the front covers of every news magazine. This is not even to mention the dozens and dozens of ever-multiplying talk shows and television 'magazine' programs, each with its celebrity host and celebrity guests, each with its own angle, tabloid-trashy or upmarket-serious or caring-therapeutic."


For some, tragedy as soap opera is more than they can stomach.


The Montreal Gazette's Jack Todd called Simpson fans on the freeway "the warped and weird thousands." Noting that USA Today had said the case tarnished Simpson's image, Todd wrote, "If there's anything more sickening than the crimes of which Simpson stands accused, it's the reactions of the millions who just don't get it."


The case confirms the beliefs of many about America's worst traits: It is a racist country addicted to violence and sensationalism. The Simpson trial is an extension of the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Los Angeles riots, of the Menendez brothers' trial and the William Kennedy Smith-and-Lorena Bobbitt-and-Tonya Harding-and ... It's all one big media blur.


"This kind of television has elements of a brothel," Michael Schwelien wrote in the German paper Die Ziet. "But a brothel with a separate room for self-righteousness.


The viewer is allowed to moan 'Terrible, terrible,' while the juicy details of sex-and-blood-crimes are put on the table."