Blog

First, an explanation for my silence for most of the month. One week I was in Cambridge, MA for the end of the week (when I normally post), and I have also been busy preparing and grading exams, doing my annual reports for the university, writing a grant application, and revising a paper for resubmission. My desk is a bit cleaner now, and I will be back to posting more regularly now, including some posts about the final exams in my courses.

But today’s post is about something completely different. On this trip to Cambridge I stayed into the weekend and my wife joined me, and we had a chance to visit the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Realizing that we will be in Boston again with the children later in the year and also realizing that an annual membership is less expensive than two visits, we took out a membership.

Beyond all the things we saw on the visit – particularly a superb special Egyptian history exhibit “The Secrets of Tomb 10A” – getting the membership gave me the feeling of joining a cultural community in a city that is not my home, but one I frequently visit.

And this takes me to the deeper question of why we travel. For me, the key reason is to understand the history and culture of other places. My main attractions are museums, art galleries, and religious shrines. In the Eighties and Nineties, when I travelled frequently, especially in Asia, I wrote quite a few travel pieces for the Globe and Mail, about things like Kabuki theatre, Chinese and Japanese gardens, and religious shrines.

To my profound regret, the travel pages have increasingly become dominated by foodie travelers, who travel primarily to visit a handful of upscale restaurants. And while local cuisine is a part of local culture, and for that reason deserves some attention, many foodie travel articles display little locavore interest, and simply go for the places with the Michelin stars.

I read an egregious example of this in the New York Times on Sunday April 25. In the “36 hours” feature, correspondent Jaime Gross was in Kyoto, a place so significant to Japanese culture that, during World War II, it was the only major city the Americans did not bomb.

She began by noting that Kyoto has 2000 ancient temples and shrines, and then suggested twelve activities. Four were in some sense cultural (the Geisha district, a well-known park, a museum devoted to the tea ceremony, and a comic book (manga) museum. Five were restaurants, two bars or clubs, and the twelfth was shopping. Clearly, none of the 2000 temples or shrines nor the famous Nijo Castle appealed to her.

On two visits to Kyoto, each a weekend, I rented a bike, and cycled from shrines to gardens to castles, treating the meals as refueling stops. I couldn’t imagine a more fascinating way to spend a day – anywhere.

There are two terms, both of biblical origin, I would apply to Ms. Gross’s notion of travel, at least as displayed in this article: philistine and Am Ha-aretz. The latter is a Hebrew phrase from rabbinic Judaism, literally “people of the land,” connoting people who are rustic, uncivilized, and ignorant.

The challenge of the “36 hours” concept is to accept the time constraint and make choices. That article displayed unwise and uncivilized choices. In its essence, foodie travel is about indulging the senses and ignoring the mind. A bad choice, and not my choice.

In my graduate narratives course, our narrative-of-the-week feature has frequently looked at how journalists incorporate narratives at the start of their articles to capture the reader’s attention. This is an alternative to the standard inverted pyramid model that involves summarizing the entire story in the first paragraph. My guess is that roughly 80 percent of articles use the inverted pyramid model but 20 percent employ the narrative approach.

This week’s narrative of the week – an article in the New York Times about Barack Obama’s arms control negotiations with the Russians – dovetailed perfectly with the theme of the class – the Cuban Missile Crisis as portrayed in the movie Thirteen Days.

Peter Baker’s article, entitled “Twists and Turns on Way to Arms Pact with Russia” appeared in the New York Times on Saturday, March 27. A narrative about the four month long process of negotiation began with its most dramatic episode, an impasse that so angered President Obama that he was willing to walk away without a deal.

In its second paragraph, the article directly quoted Obama’s words, “Dmitri, we agreed. We can’t do this. If it means we’re going to walk away from this treaty and not get it done, so be it. But we’re not going down this path.” It’s rare to see a President’s exact words in a confidential negotiation quoted, and I think it’s a certainty that the unnamed advisers who provided his words were those at the highest level: Rahm Emanuel and/or David Axelrod. What was the point they were trying to make?

Even though the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union was dissolved two decades ago, Russia maintains its nuclear arsenal and many Americans still remember living under the specter of nuclear war.

Thus, one of the criteria by which Americans measure the mettle of a president is whether he has the strength to stand up to the Russians. Baker’s article draws on that expectation, contrasting President Obama’s resolve to “forge a new relationship with Russia, starting with a treaty to slash nuclear arsenals” with the observation that “for a year Russia had been testing him, suspecting he was weak and certain it could roll over him.”

Obama’s advisers wanted to tell the inside story of the negotiation process to demonstrate that he wasn’t weak and that the Russians didn’t roll over him. The phone call quoted at the start of the article was one instance. The article also mentioned that, despite his focus on health care reform, Obama found the time to closely supervise these negotiations. As proof, it added that he had 14 telephone calls or meetings with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

This demonstration of presidential engagement was likely intended to forestall the political right’s long-standing criticism of Democratic presidents as being soft on communism. But perhaps the world has changed somewhat. The Times ran the story on page 4 in the news section, rather than beginning it on the front page. And the right seems to have ignored this arms control agreement, continuing to focus its attacks on health insurance.

Finally, the article had one historical echo that some readers may have caught. In the classic satire Doctor Strangelove, the Russian Premier with whom the American President Merkin Muffley has a telephone conversation was named Dmitri. In that case, the fictional President was trying to coax his inebriated Russian counterpart to respond to the threat of American bombers carrying nuclear weapons turned loose by a rogue air base commander. When reading the article, I couldn’t help but hear comedian Peter Sellers voice, who played the American president, intoning “Dmitri, we have a little problem.”

Indeed the world has greatly changed since the mid-Sixties, but the presidential narrative of firmness towards the Russians still remains deeply embedded in the American psyche. And President Obama, and his advisers, were trying to demonstrate that his actions were consistent with that narrative