Classroom Battlegrounds: The deceptive beauty of the American landscape

ST. LOUIS, OCT 14--  Autumn weather brings remarkable and deceptive color changes to the American landscape. Few things are as beautiful or as misleading as an American university campus bedecked by the  golden, red, pink and yellow Fall leaves.
 
Washington University in St. Louis is sometimes called "The Harvard of the Mid-West." [Frankly, I don't think that Harvard is such hot stuff, but that's another conversation.] WASH-U with its red-stone castle motif is especially beautiful now after baking through a long summer. Leaving the Mid-Western oven, we now put aside polo shirts  and consider putting on sweaters for a few moments for a leisurely stroll to look at the gorgeous foliage, before stepping into snow boots. It looks like a beautiful scene, and that is very dangerous.

One day it was summer (95 F or 32-35 C) and the next day we had a blast of winter with a 40-degree (Fahrenheit) drop in temperatures. Then the next day we climbed back into summer, and there was a return of tornadoes to the Midwest?even as far north as Michigan, where two people were killed when they were sucked out of their house and thrown several hundred yards away.

Across the river in Illinois, two people were killed as their trailer went flying the length of a football field. Meanwhile, a three-month-old baby was thrown hundreds of yards from its parents, but was miraculously unscathed.
 
And they say Israel is a dangerous place to live.

But it is not only the weather that can turn on you in sudden ways here in the heartland of America. The people are generally sweet, cordial and courteous, with a growing tendency for pudginess. A local court convicted a slightly pudgy white man, Michael Devlin, for a truly amazing string of crimes: scores of cases of kidnapping, sodomizing and torturing young boys in the Missouri area. Devlin was sentenced to more than 20 life sentences in jail. And it appears that in real life, the FBI is a little less amazing in solving these kinds of crimes: they had Devlin in their custody and released him before re-arresting him at the urging of local police.

And they say Israel is a dangerous place to live.

A few days after Devlin's conviction, another local court convicted Linda Montgomery, a slightly pudgy bespectacled white woman (who might look like your vision of the local librarian) to death for one of the most brutal crimes: she stalked a pregnant woman, murdered her, and then cut out the baby from the dying woman's belly, washing it, cleaning it, and claiming it as her own.

Montgomery's family described her as a sensitive woman who badly wanted a child.

And they say Israel is a dangerous place to live.

There are two reasons that I mention that Devlin and Montgomery are pudgy white people:

1.The problem of obesity is endemic in the United States now, and most of the shopping centers have special mobile carts that are used not only by the elderly or disabled but even by people who are literally too fat to walk.

2.People in Israel often assume that crime in America  is caused by male Black Americans, but these grisly crimes illustrate that crime exists among all groups.

However, the biggest crime here is still the way people drive, as shown by the 40,000 road deaths each year, that make the war in Iraq and Afghanistan look like child?s play. One would not expect these courteous Americans, who rarely honk their horns at each other the way Israelis do, to be such road killers.

Yet, almost every day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the local paper founded by Joseph Pulitzer, reports on amazing road accidents in our area:

• a man who took a nap and then drove his car the wrong way down Interstate 170, killing two people;
• a tractor-trailer driver who went merrily on his way after he  merely "clipped" a passenger car, sending it across the median divider into on-coming traffic, setting off a five-car collision involving three explosions and two deaths;
• and a car that went off a road into someone's bedroom.

And they say that Israelis are bad drivers and that Israel is a dangerous place to live.

The newspaper founded by Pulitzer (who gave his name to a prize for deserving and often-undeserving journalists) also gave us daily coverage of the corruption of Missouri-Illinois-Kansas politics. Coming from a country with a prime minister who specializes in this kind of thing, I feel right at home.

Finally, I have to show my stuff, giving the annual Schusterman Visiting Scholar Lecture. Originally, I am slated for Holmes Lounge, a handsome reading room that was originally the library. It is a wonderful venue, as the show biz managers would say. It is a room  that would do credit to Oxford, Princeton, Yale or my alma mater Columbia University (well, maybe we should forget Columbia and Ahmadinajad along with Harvard for now). Holmes is where students gather to eat lunch or read their National Edition of The New York Times. It is a room that is used for weekly jazz concerts?the top spot on campus.

Naturally, I get bumped, because the Chancellor needs the room for some of his  big donors, and it is too late to re-schedule the lecture. I get the stadium-like Wilson Lounge, which is a nice science lecture hall seating about 200 people. The University caters the event with kosher food?great pastries, cheeses, and wines: or as Rabbi Elazar Ben Azaryah said, "Without meal, there is no Torah." 
 
As the lecture nears, I still do not know exactly what I will call it. My working title is The Big Mouth Theory: The Development of  Political Communication Power in the Global Strategic  Arena. [This way I can always say that "The Big Mouth" is an auto-biographical sketch.]

My alternative title is The Evolution Of Modern Strategic Power: What?s More Important: Walking The Walk Or Talking The Talk?

They fit me with a portable body microphone, and the lecture goes off without a hitch. Better than that, they let me take home all the great kosher left-overs:  I feel like a Hassidic  rabbi feeding himself at his tish. The only problem is that  I am already rather hefty, and now, I will be a pudgy white man as big  as Michael Devlin and Linda Montgomery combined.

The worst part of the lecture is that my wife Sara has made me write the whole thing out - something  I never do, as my students will attest.

I feel a bit wooden, but nevertheless, I remember to tell a few of my jokes in Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic, and nobody falls asleep. Next time I will play where the clarinets, saxophones and trumpets play in Holmes Hall.

OCT19--  A few days later, I give a larger lecture to the St. Louis Rabbinical Association at the beautiful Temple Israel. There are more than 150 people in the crowd at Temple Israel when I talk about "What's So Special About Israel - and Why We Can't Deal With It."

It's raining and dark as Sara and I try to find the building. We get there a few minutes late, and there's no time to pull out a computer copy of my notes. I do what I do best - ad lib stand-up dressed up as informed academics. The crowd is happy, and Sara and I get home early enough to watch Jay Leno and Dave Letterman. They're not bad for amateurs.

A good stand-up comedian, night-time TV host or political science professor has to keep up with the newspapers and television shows. And here I am at a disadvantage. Normally, my material comes from the Israeli press and Israeli broadcasting or from Hamas, the PLO or Hizbullah.

The latter three are really important to my specialization of Middle East communication, but it is difficult or impossible to get real-time broadcasts here of Hamas  or Hizballah (apparently due to the PATRIOT ACT) without bringing the FBI into my bedroom.

Instead of  monitoring Hamas Palestinian TV or Hizbullah, increasingly, I fall back on my other alma mater, The New York Times, which, come to think of it, is not always that different from the other aforementioned sources. None of them refer to suicide bombers or Arab rocketeeers  as "terrorists." The three Arab sources call them mustash-hideen (heroic martyrs) or (fedayeen) men of sacrifice etc., while the Times, like Reuters, calls people who blow up buses or shoot rockets at schools "militants."

The Times, where I worked as a reporter for three years, is still probably the best newspaper in the world, but in many respects, it is a far worse newspaper than it was 30, 40 and 50 years ago. This is seen in the basic writing on the news pages and in the slanted playing of items.

This is particularly sad because the NYT, as Howard Kurtz, the media columnist of The Washington Post, has said, basically sets the agenda for news programming in American television. The Times, whatever its faults, is America's national newspaper for people who still read newspapers rather than looking at pictures of celebrities in supermarket check-out lines.
 
Yes, objectivity was never a complete reality at the Times  or any other paper, but it was always a goal, especially at the Times, something to be sought. In today's Times, reporters, editors and headline writers often make little or no effort to separate fact from their opinion.

It is even more evident in the work of Times columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins whose discourse, as the presidential campaigns begin, is increasingly partisan and puerile.

Whole columns written about Republican candidates are little more than juvenile jokes or extensive insults, while much of the coverage and columns about the Democrats are actually attempts to boost their candidacies.
 
The Times editorials are little better. Even the columns from more seasoned columnists such as Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich are often written in a juvenile style and tone that one would never have associated with great Times columnists of the past, such as James Reston, C.L. Sulzberger, Flora Lewis.

Yes, Fred Thompson the former southern senator and actor, is as miscast as a president as he has been as a New York prosecutor (with a southern drawl) in the television series Law and Order,  and yes, Rudy Giuliani has personal "skeletons in the closet" and is "surrounded by neo-cons" (as both the Times and NBC tell us simultaneously).

But what do we really know about the qualifications, policies and goals of  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Senator Clinton has struck a middle-of-the-road position on the war on terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular. She is regularly attacked by the pacifist wing of her own party. As  for the young and largely inexperienced Senator Obama, he has struck a strong "anti-war" approach that seems more of a pose than a position. 

Obama, like Jimmy Carter, would "talk to everyone," including the Iranian ayatollahs. But his talk is cheap, like Carter's, especially in the short run. Later, when the hostages are taken and the buildings fall, the talk is expensive. And Obama's talk is more expensively orchestrated than Carter's, which is often factually and embarrassingly absurd to the point that one suspects that some interviewers have to control themselves not to laugh in Carter's face. [In a recent appearance Carter spoke about how he "handled" Iran, for example.] Carter and Obama both have a bit of the Baptist preacher in their speaking style, but Obama knows how to modulate it and to dress it up with a kind Illinois-Lincoln patois. In other words, he knows how to talk the talk, but only time and the opinion of the voters will determine if he gets the chance to show us if he can walk the walk.

As I follow Obama's  speeche -including a recent one at Washington University here in St. Louis - there is only one thing about which I am sure about Obama. The very junior senator from Illinois is the opposite of the pudgy white man. Yes, he is a thin man of color, and he is somewhat thin on ideology and ideas, but he is also someone Shakespeare might have described as having  "a lean and hungry look."

As I espy the various candidates for president from both the Republican and Democratic parties, one wonders whether any one of them can fulfill the psalmist's requirement (Psalm 24) that a leader be "clean of hand and pure of heart."

Indeed, that same question can be asked of Americans themselves who appear to be dying at ever greater numbers because of dirty hands.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, or MRSA, has gained more attention since a government report this month found more than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly staph infections each year. This is what Israelis have come to call haydak alim?the violent germ.

In Britain, where they like to criticize Israel for having dirty hands, more than 1,500 people a year die of dirty hands and other forms sloppy-hygiene-borne infections. Indeed, one medical journal there reported this week that MRSA rates in the UK are among the highest in Europe. Each year, healthcare associated infections contribute to 5000 deaths and cost the British NHS billions. In the United States, several reports stated this week, a patient has a survival rate that is lower than an American soldier in Iraq.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 19,000 people died in the United States in 2005 from MRSA. A total of 94,000 became infected with the lethal germ.

And, as I mentioned earlier, some people say that Israel is a dangerous place to live.

Michael Widlanski is the Schusterman Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at Washington University for 2007-8. An expert in Middle Eastern politics and communications,  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.

Professor Widlanski 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, and he teaches political communication and comparative politics  at the Rothberg School of Hebrew University.