Crossposted at HuffingtonPost.com. Comments not included here.
I am reading Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-55. She is a luminary to some, including me, for the "Letter From Paris" column she wrote (under the name Genêt) for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until 1975. I aspire to be a variation on her writer-journalist theme in today's media-morphing environment. I would like to give Americans a sense of the larger world--a Parisian world, a European world, a global world--that has exploded from the culture of the last 10 or so years and is zooming forward in time and space through modern conveniences that only grow faster every day.
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I want my fellow Americans to get another point of view--from one of their own--who, in some ways, has a clearer vision because she lives abroad and gets wider media coverage. And whether you want to believe this is true or not, it is. I want Americans to get a sense of how the rest of the world feels about us. Don't tell me this doesn't matter. It does. I want to show Americans how other people in the world live and what they think and why. I want to help grow American consciousness into the scope it once had but now has lost.
The irony is that during this decade of globalization, American culture has grown backwards into a much more insular milieu of fear and prejudice that George W. Bush's reign of terror--not 9/11--created. There is no question that Barack Obama is changing and repairing the perception and reputation of the United States throughout the world, and that he is making the world more friendly to Americans again, but the stark reality is this: He is up against those who still want to make us smaller than we ever were throughout history.