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All About Walls
New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman’s new book,
Longitudes
& Attitudes, contains about three hundred pages of his columns in
that paper from shortly before and a half-year after 9/11/01, followed by
eighty pages of diary. While Friedman’s previous books showed depth and
thought development, here we see snapshots, re-runs of his 750 words per
column. Personally, I find his columns easier to read in regular doses in the
newspaper rather than in the format of Longitudes
& Attitudes. In this book, there’s a drumbeat of repetition and an ongoing
image of Tom’s wagging finger pointing at one or the other of us.
Whether you agree or disagree with the
ideas or opinions Friedman expresses, his writing remains constantly superior
to most of what we read in any newspaper. An advantage of this book is that a
reader can see the development of Friedman’s ideas, anger and opinions as
events unfolded. Here’s an excerpt from toward the end of the diary section:
“Looking back
over the period covered in these columns and this diary, it seems to me I owe
the reader the answer to one last question: What is the real meaning of
September 11 – what did it tell us?
Some historic events turn out to be smaller than they first seem. September
11 is just the opposite. It is, I am convinced, one of those rare major
historic events that will turn out to be even larger, even more important,
than it first seemed. And we are not at the beginning of the end of
understanding it or its implications. We are not even at the end of the
beginning. We are still at the beginning of the beginning.
As I write these words I am sitting in the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem
looking out at the lit walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is late on the
evening of April 25, 2002, and I’m back in the country where I accidentally
started this journey on September 11. The Old City walls are exactly the
right backdrop for what I am about to say, because for me September 11 was
all about walls.
What do I mean? I mean that what made 9/11 so profoundly shocking to most
Americans and civilized people around the world was the fact that it breached
such a fundamental wall of civilization. If it is possible to recruit
nineteen educated young men to hijack four planes and commit suicide by
flying them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and thereby kill
close to three thousand totally innocent people who kissed their spouses
good-bye that morning and a few hours later were phoning home to their loved
ones (if they were lucky) and telling them they were about to die, then
anything is possible. Whatever civilizational restraints on human behavior
you thought existed before are no longer there. An important wall has been
blown away.
Not only has the wall of civilized behavior been breached, but it happened at
a time when, thanks to globalization, the walls between countries and people
were increasingly being lowered or erased by rapid advances in
telecommunications. So the whole world got to watch live as the Twin Towers
went down. And they got to tell each other exactly what they felt and thought
as they went down. What I’m saying is that 9/11 released some very intense
feelings, but it did so in a world in which – thanks to independent satellite
TV stations, fiber optics, the Internet, cell phones, beepers, and Palm
Pilots – those feelings could be multiplied, amplified, and circulated around
the globe faster than ever. It is as if your crazy aunt did something
absolutely outrageous and the whole family was now gathered around the dinner
table arguing about it, shouting about it, occasionally exchanging blows over
it – and no matter where you went in the house, you couldn’t get away from
the conversation. …
And this leads to the deeper point that 9/11 is trying to tell us: that while
the world is being globalized, shrunk, and tied together ever more closely in
technological terms, this has not been accompanied by a better mutual
understanding between cultures, countries and civilizations. There is a
mismatch. We are technologically closer – and culturally and politically as
far apart as ever, at least among certain communities. Maybe the Internet,
fiber optics, and satellites really are, together, like a high-tech Tower of
Babel. It’s as though God suddenly gave us all the tools to communicate and
none of the tools to understand. …
When Americans, or others, hear all the hate and anger boiling out there
against them, even if they don’t experience it firsthand, the natural
instinct is to want to build walls against it. But walls just aren’t what
they used to be. In the short term, maybe they can help, but technology is
erasing them too quickly.
In the long term, the only answer is to figure out ways to change the
attitudes and intentions of the people on the other side of the wall, or at
least narrow the gap between differing cultures and political traditions so
we can share this shrinking planet. …
And no wall will ever be high enough or thick enough in this age of technology
to spare us this challenge.”
Reading Friedman always leaves a reader
thinking, and often with some strong emotion about what he’s said and how he’s
said it. Longitudes
& Attitudes presents Friedman’s thoughts and reflections in a way that
leaves a reader feeling challenged and engaged.
Steve Hopkins, September 25, 2002
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