ON "AMERICA'S DNA" COLUMN BY THOMAS FRIEDMAN

DEBUNKING THE BUNKER MENTALITY

Back in February, I put up a post titled "On new directions for US embassies", with the sub-title "set them free"...the post reflected on how dramatically closed our embassies are abroad post 9-11 compared to how open and welcoming they have been for much of the past century.  I highlighted in particular our embassy in New Delhi in 1954, designed by Edward Durell, who went on to design the elegant and welcoming Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expands on this theme in his punch-in-the-gut column today titled "America's DNA", coincidentally on a trip to New Delhi.  I'm posting this "must-read" column from my perspective, for reader convenience:

June 1, 2005

America's DNA

    By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

New Delhi

A few years ago my youngest daughter participated in the National History Day program for eighth graders. The question that year was "turning points" in history, and schoolchildren across the land were invited to submit a research project that illuminated any turning point in history. My daughter's project was "How Sputnik Led to the Internet." It traced how we reacted to the Russian launch of Sputnik by better networking our scientific research centers and how those early, crude networks spread and eventually were woven into the Internet. The subtext was how our reaction to one turning point unintentionally triggered another decades later.

I worry that 20 years from now some eighth grader will be doing her National History Day project on how America's reaction to 9/11 unintentionally led to an erosion of core elements of American identity. What sparks such dark thoughts on a trip from London to New Delhi?

In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the U.S. Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. "They have these cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete blocks, and the whole message is: 'Go away!' " said Kate Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. "That is how people think of America now, and it's a really sad thing because that is not your country."

In part it was a conversation with friends in London, one a professor at Oxford, another an investment banker, both of whom spoke about the hassles, fingerprinting, paperwork and costs that they, pro-American professionals, now must go through to get a visa to the U.S.

In part it was a recent chat with the folks at Intel about the obstacles they met trying to get visas for Muslim youths from Pakistan and South Africa who were finalists for this year's Intel science contest. And in part it was a conversation with M.I.T. scientists about the new restrictions on Pentagon research contracts - in terms of the nationalities of the researchers who could be involved and the secrecy required - that were constricting their ability to do cutting-edge work in some areas and forcing intellectual capital offshore. The advisory committee of the World Wide Web recently shifted its semiannual meeting from Boston to Montreal so as not to put members through the hassle of getting visas to the U.S.

The other day I went to see the play "Billy Elliot" in London. During intermission, a man approached me and asked, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I said yes, he introduced himself - Emad Tinawi, a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen. He told me that while he disagreed with some things I wrote, there was one column he still keeps. "It was the one called, 'Where Birds Don't Fly,' " he said.

I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember the column. Then he reminded me: It was about the new post-9/11 U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, which looks exactly like a maximum-security prison, so much so that a captured Turkish terrorist said that while his pals considered bombing it, they concluded that the place was so secure that even birds couldn't fly there. Mr. Tinawi and I then swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners' perceptions of America.

In New Delhi, the Indian writer Gurcharan Das remarked to me that with each visit to the U.S. lately, he has been forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to America. They "make you feel so unwanted now," said Mr. Das. America was a country "that was always reinventing itself," he added, because it was a country that always welcomed "all kinds of oddballs" and had "this wonderful spirit of openness." American openness has always been an inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. "If you go dark, the world goes dark."

Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?

This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.

As an immigrant myself to this wonderfully open land, my first step onto US soil was as a teenager curiously entering an American embassy in the middle east, to learn about US college opportunities.  A friendly and welcoming student counselor then guided me patiently over the next few weeks through the process of putting together a list of schools for me to apply to...those weeks utterly changed the rest of my life.

I wonder if other teenagers are able to access the same embassy resources in an equally friendly and open way...chances are probably not.  We need to think through fresh approaches.  I raised the following question in my earlier post:

What if we applied the distributed internet-network architecture idea to a US Embassy abroad?

Spread out the various functions in smaller offices around a city. Create high-tech information booths in the plazas, malls, and avenues of major cities, where anyone can come in, and speak to US consular offices via IP videophones.  Documents could be passed back and forth via scanners, faxes, and automated fedex facilities.  Indeed, we could "in-source" the consular officers safely in the US in large call centers, manned 24/7 to meet the needs of foreign nationals anywhere.

For those who mean to do us harm, the potential targets would be dramatically minimized, and made less meaningful and less symbolic. What glory is there in blowing up an iMac powered Embassy booth?  We could have it up and running again in a jiffy from the local Apple Store.

We could take it further, making the information booths connected to a website where US citizens here could communicate with potential students, business partners and tourists about the virtues of their parts of America.  This communication could be done through web forums, IM Chats and video conferencing, all powered by Internet technology.

All this may be a bit fanciful, but it may be time to come out of the bunker and let cyberspace be our shield.

It's time for us as a country, a people, and a government, to go from being scared and defensive to being smart and proactive about ALL our interests.  Security is a very important part of that, but so is interacting with the rest of the world as we truly are...I agree with Mr. Friedman...our very DNA is at stake here in the long-term.

 

Comments

[Sunil Chhaya]

It's very clear to me - we won't need to wait 20 years to see the impact of the 'backwardization' and isolation of this once-great country. Just wait a couple of college-cycles: 8-10 years max, and you'll see the conditions of the college campuses, the substantivity of research and ideas as well as the sheer magnitude of research/technology content being developed in this nation reduce drastically. The effect will come from 3 factors, all linked to US 'closed-doors' policy towards immigration: 1: Lack of resources to put the federal / private dollars to effective use through graduate students at the universities + the lack of them driving the university budgets downhill, 2: the relative indifference and incapacitation of the US youth towards Math and Science and technology and 3: the inability of the US corporations to find talented people from home base (IEEE-USA's asinine objections to offshoring notwithstanding)..

In 20 years, at this rate, you may be looking at US as a less-developed country!!

[Ray Tapajna, Editor Tapart News]

1956 was the year that changed the world forever. It is an untold story.

In 1956, the U.S. Government itself funded and started a program that moved factories outside the U.S. It was supposed to be just a temporary measure to help out the Mexican and other Central American economies while supplying the American consumer with cheaper goods. It never ended.
It evolved into what is called Free Trade today. Free Trade is based on moving production from place to place for the sake of the cheapest labor possible. The supply of this labor is endless in the world and there will always be someone who will used the impoverished for their own gain. It is a new kind of wage slave trade in a new kind of colonialism which mixes money and power no matter what system is in place be it Capitalism, Socialism or Communism. It has become a new kind of Global Plantation with elite groupings in government and big business acting out roles of Global Plantation owners.
By the 1970s, only about 200 factories were moved but then with the Maquiladora factory program in Mexico the number quickly went up to 2000 factories by 1992. This was prior to the passing of the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements. These agreements just confirmed what was going on for a long time and rapidly speeded up the process. The number of factories moved to Mexico doubled quickly to 4000. After President Clinton and Democrat controlled Congress passed Nafta, Clinton had to rush billions of dollars to Mexico to save the peso.
Evidently, this so called Free Trade has a long history of failures and continues on to this day while Globalist Free Traders like Thomas Friedman evangelize the process. In his book The World is Flat, Friedman points to times in history according to Friedman as periods that paved the way for Globalization and Free Trade. He leaves out 1956.
For more information, Explore the lost worlds in the Flat World of Friedman Fables that are imploding with terrorism and wars with Ray Tapajna, editor and artist at Tapart News and Art that Talks at http://tapsearch.com/flatworld/ or see http://tapsearch.com/flipflatworld See also http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews/
Following all this was a massive migration of workers from Mexico to the USA although Mexico reports a low unemployment rate just like the USA does. And now the factories are again on the move - moving out of Mexico to places like China while China also contracts workers for even less than than the workers in China.
And now, we also have the Chinese Liberation Army rolling across the USA. The only thing flat in the Flat World of Friedman are flat railroad cars carrying the large shipping containers full of cheap goods. You can see the logo COSCO flash by. It is the logo of the large Chinese shipping company owned in part by the Chinese Liberation Army.
No where in The World is Flat does Friedman report how this vast overhead of long haul shipping and packaging can compete with local value added economies.
He does not talk about destitute workers who can not buy the very things they make and have no money left to buy anything the U.S. may have left to sell.