My first real encounter with the world outside the United States came in 1962, when I spent s€veral mOfiths working for an anti-government newspaper in South
Africa. [...J The battle against aparthei~\vas my first exposure to serious politics, and to a ninetelm-yea '-oldi,as was then, it was ovenvhelming. Part of the experience was
5 realizing that the filiSAwas on the wrong side. Fine speeches at the United Natiol)s were one thing, but the directory board in the iJ.obbyof the American Embassy in
Pretoria, with its long list of military attaches, told a different story. [...J Learning something of the cooperation between th illSA a!ndthe white regime in South Africa
[... J was my first lesson that Americ was not always the noble force for freedom I
10 wanted it to be. A few years afterwards, the !VietnamWat underlined that lesson, for me and for milliGns of other i'\.mericans 0[my generation
Later encounters with the rest of the world have underlined it in different ways.
Despite President BusH's cowboy forayl intoraq~ the way most nations experience
American might these days is not military, but economic. Time abroad is always an
15 education. I had not thought much about globalization until m wife and I lived for six months i Il'ldi in the late 1990s. To read even Inclia'> mainstream2 newspapers was a revelation. Indian were outraged by merican corporate aJttempts to patent3 bas mati rice and a medicinal extract of the neem tree\ products that ndians had been using for centuries. [...J
20 To travel anywhere these days with open eyes is to see a iWorlddominated by an increasingly arrogant superpow€r. When it comes to a different kind of international agreement, those of which the human race has reason to be proud, the United States has refused to sign almost all of them: the treary establishing the International
Criminal Court, the ban on landmines, the Kyoto accords on global warming and
25 many, many others. [.._]
And yet, another type