Postcards From Tomorrow Square by James Fallows

Author:James Fallows [Fallows, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General, History, Asia, China
ISBN: 0307456242
Google: WXb-zjtgg-YC
Amazon: B001NLL13U
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

THE VIEW FROM THERE

NOVEMBER 2007

For 150 years, The Atlantic has been trying to figure out the American idea. For a quarter of that time, I’ve been on the job myself. The process began in earnest the first time I set foot outside the country, in the summer of 1970, when I left for graduate school in England. The real work of debating and defining a country’s prospects, of course, happens inside its borders. But I’ve found it very useful to think about America from afar. I know it’s annoying and superior-sounding to say that you see a country most clearly from the outside. (Those poor homebound hicks! They don’t get the big picture the way we cosmopolites can.) But at least in one way, it’s certainly true. Inside America, we discuss what the country could and should become. Outside, we see what it is—which of its traits and habits really make it unusual, the effects of what it claims to stand for, what it actually does to the rest of the world.

I am living in China now mainly to learn about China, which is similar to the reasons my wife and I have previously lived or spent extensive stretches in Ghana, Malaysia, Japan, and other places. But inevitably, we are thinking and learning about what America is. And—surprise!—we are feeling good. I am more hopeful about America and its idea than I was even 18 months ago, before coming to China.

The details of this outlook are shaped by my previous cycles of judging America from overseas, so let me explain three of the stages that led to my current, largely optimistic view. In England, I discovered that I was an American; in Japan, how essential America’s ideas are to its strength; and now in China, that America’s ideas are still the key to its vitality, if we don’t abuse them or carelessly let them wither away.

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