My fellow international writers and I, gathered here at the University of Iowa, are to take part in a public panel, each making a brief presentation and then all of us discussing the "Images of America" we will take away from our stay in the United States. Tricky business for me. I've been coming here fairly regularly for 30 years and right now the US seems to me to be more deeply in trouble as a society than at any time since the McCarthyism days of the 1950s. Even during the Vietnam War, a sense that young people would redeem...