3. Public school authorities in Frisco, Texas, suspend a popular and much-honored art teacher after a pupil reported seeing nudity at the Dallas Museum of Art while on a field trip approved by the principal who collaborated in the teacher's suspension. Yep! That'll learn them artists not to bring their so-called art around here, all them human body parts hanging out like the Wednesday washing. The New York Times gets wind of it and runs the story on page A-9, with a four-column photo. Readers' minds go into overdrive: Dumb Texans! Just what we'd be saying about the religious right and how they'd like to shut down free discussion and similar public blessings! All this amid ongoing crises over public schools' failure to impress upon students what the American Revolution was, and how to employ the times tables when no calculator is handy.

Unexamined implication: The sheer dumbness, nuttiness, whatever, of seeing this museum trip as a trek to Sodom and Gomorrah obscures rightful grievances over the debasement of real culture in almost every department of life. How do you talk seriously about -- say -- much-lauded photos of a crucifix suspended in urine when some of your natural allies go bananas over nudity in an art museum?

4. Mass media sink their teeth into every detail of the foregoing: to the entirely constitutional, but nevertheless unwholesome impoverishment of public conversation about the things that matter most in a land of the free. Unless the bashing of the wartime commander-in-chief, a pedophilic sex scandal and philistinism in publicly financed schools all count as just more evidence of our political and moral enlightenment.

Right about now, shouldn't Middle Easterners be overflowing with rapture concerning the blessings of the ballot box and unfettered speech and universal public education, as practiced in the United States of America? Should be, yes. Just not right now.