Classroom Battlegrounds: The cruel jokes of US weather

ST. LOUIS - FEB. 8-13 - Here  and in  America in general, there has been some terrible, horrible and even deadly weather for several weeks about which one should not joke [scores killed in tornadoes, fires, floods, ice-storms], but then, again, sometimes you need to joke about the weather because there is little you can do to change it.  

There is a joke in St. Louis which deals with this weather situation and other "weather" [events in our daily lives]:  "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. It'll change."

Here in St. Louis we have had many days this winter where we have seen dramatic change - shifts of fifty and sixty degrees in less than two hours, placid days becoming tornadoes,  and storms turning into idyllic, halcyon tranquility.

When America is really troubled by bad news - tornadoes killing 60 people, a sugar refinery blowing up in Georgia killing several and wounding more than 100, floods that turn into sheets of ice on highways here and in Indiana, causing tremendous car crashes - people go back to joking about their politicians.

The biggest joke is that Hillary Clinton is firing all her campaign organizers because her campaign is going downhill, but she insists that they - the people she fired - really wanted a new job somewhere else and actually begged her to get rid of them. This reminds people that Hillary just told her husband Bill (whom she should have fired a long time ago) to shut up, after his comments about Obama made Obama look good.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are really neck and neck, though Obama's surprising strength in some recent primary elections shows that momentum has shifted to him. The press likes Obama because he is new, and because he draws big crowds.

MSNBC - a major American network - had to discipline one of its broadcasters who said Hillary and Bill were using their daughter Chelsea, 27, to "pimp" for votes. "Pimping" in English means sexual procurement.

Though the network, which is leftist, suspended the  broadcaster, its shows are still strongly pro-Obama, and even the rightist Fox News network has shown a pro-Obama bias (and anti-Clinton bias) in its reporting.

Clinton will try to get "extra" convention delegates by using two stratagems:

Getting the "super delegates" - who had previously been ceremonial - to cast their votes for Clinton. They are 20 percent of the delegates, and they are not tied to primary election results.

Getting the Democratic convention to authorize the previously-overruled elections in Michigan and Florida (which Clinton "won"), thereby getting her a lot more delegates.

Both of these strategies might work for Clinton, but they will stain her and the Democratic Party as undemocratic and corrupt. If she wins this way, many pro-Democratic young voters may stay home, rather than vote, giving McCain an edge.  This worries the Democrats.

Clinton also needs to take the elections in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania in a month. If Obama wins, and he might, she loses anyway.

McCain would love to run against Hillary Clinton, because so many Republicans hate her and will be "energized" to work against her.

Obama also brings in "new voters."

On the other hand, some McCain people believe that Obama can be framed as the most left-liberal of all politicians, and they think that will help McCain.

So far, the national polls show Obama would probably beat McCain by a narrow margin. But so far the press has not really focused on any of Obama’s positions, or really his relative lack of positions, nor his very, very liberal voting record. When that begins to happen, the gap will narrow even more.

But back to the fantasy world. America often seems dysfunctional because much of its television and radio shows seems to revolve around incredible stupidity. Whole shows revolve around the ditty "celebs" such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and the inevitable Britney Spears - the bimbos who keep getting arrested for being drunk and disorderly or worse.

There have been trails of news about Heath Ledger, the Hollywood actor who apparently took an overdose mixture of certain over-the-counter drugs. Other shows on television try to cover the question who fathered or mothered whose child. I kid you not [as the first Tonight Show host Jack Paar once said]. Congress is still consumed by the question of what steroid which baseball player took for how many weeks three or five years ago.

"Reality TV" is really unreal. Life is a  soap opera. We need more fiction and more books.

And the good news here is that the television writers are about to go back to work. The late-night talk show hosts have really been scraping the barrel - even Jay Leno, who gives the best night-time monologue on his Tonight Show. For two nights running, he had been using "Larry the Cable Guy," a raunchy red-neck kind of character in checkered shirt sans beer can who laughs at red necks while scratching himself in front of the camera.

My problem is that here in St. Louis I can never get "the cable guy" when we need him: the cables are lying in the back yard for weeks - endangering our phone, internet and cable tv service - but our local cable carrier, Charter Communication (no hexing, please) has been oblivious to our service calls.

When I want to escape this stuff, I go visit Diamant's Kosher Market, where Irv Diamant and his wife Kay tell me great stories about Irv - Reb Yitzhak to me - and his miraculous escapes from the Holocaust in Poland, Kazakhstan and Siberia. His whole family and town of Kraznogrod migrated eastward in advance of the Nazis. They somehow survived. Once, Reb Yitzhak tells me, he nearly drowned in a pile of human refuse in Siberia, as he fell through some not really hardened piles of ice and dung.

"It was really a question of whether I was worth pulling out from all that crap," the 72-year-old butcher recounts, as he hands me his wife's best marinated beef sandwich. Kay - whose maiden name is Lasky - recounts stories of growing up in St. Louis and in Texas: how her father, the youngest  of many siblings, played baseball with Babe Ruth.

"The family called him 'Lazar' and he played with the St. Louis Browns organization. Babe Ruth used to come by to play for fun with the boys when he came to town, drinking all the game. Then someone in the family would run to the field and yell at my dad in Yiddish - 'kum arine in shtub iz shoyn shabbes' - Lazar, hurry up and come home, it's almost Shabbat.'"

The Diamants - their food and their conversation - always makes us feel better, but it really is very cold around here. So, Sara and I are going for a few days to soak up some sun south of here. We'll let you know how it went.

Professor Michael Widlanski is the Schusterman Visiting Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis for 2007-8. Dr. Widlanski teaches political communication and comparative politics at the Rothberg School of Hebrew University. He is a former reporter, correspondent and editor, respectively, at The New York Times ,The Cox Newspapers-Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, IDF Radio, IBA Television, and The Jerusalem Post. Dr. Widlanski also served as a special advisor to Israeli delegations to peace talks in 1991-1992 and as Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Ministry of Public Security, editing secret PLO Archives captured in Jerusalem.