Fear and learning in America

Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des Moines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and US democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group... 'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,' Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.