New York Post [Page Six] - December 30, 2002
WHILE pompous peaceniks like Sean Penn, Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand babble their inarticulate opposition to a war with Iraq, the federal government is turning to some of America's best writers to tell the rest of world why the U.S. is the greatest.
As part of a worldwide p.r. blitz to drown out the Hollywood nay-sayers, the State Department's International Information Programs is releasing a pamphlet called "Writers on America," in which such literary stars as Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists Richard Ford and Michael Chabon, veteran poet Robert Creeley and National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson discuss the nation's strength, diversity, and compassion.
Federal anti-propaganda law makes it illegal for the government to distribute the pamphlet in the U.S., but it is posted on the State Department Web site.
Ford, author of "Independence Day" and "The Ultimate Good Luck," plays up the nation's diversity, writing, "Whether my experience growing up in Mississippi in the '50s could be said to be any more typically American than the Pakistani immigrant's experience is, of course, a moot point. I am, as he is, an American.
"Our experience is the American experience, or part of it."
Though Penn, Streisand and their ilk shriek at the prospect of Iraqis gaining liberty from the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein, Ford quotes Milan Kundera that in a totalitarian world "the novel is dead." Ford notes that American life is "not at all totalitarian, but contested, complex, ambiguous, diverse . . ."
Dominican-born novelist Julia Alvarez declares, "I would never have become a writer unless my family had emigrated to the United States when I was ten years old. I grew up in the '50s in a dictatorship . . . among people who thought of reading as an anti-social activity that could ruin your life."
The Hollywood elite may regard America as a place of unmitigated stupidity and greed, but Charles Johnson, who won the 1990 National Book Award for his novel "Middle Passage," writes:
"I've always seen my American life as an adventure of learning and growth and service. In this country no individual or group, white or black, could tell me not to dream. Or censor me . . .
"Some tried, of course, but in America I knew that our passions define our possibilities."
The pamphlet is one of several ways the State Department is trying to woo foreign audiences under the direction of public diplomacy honcho Charlotte Beers. She should know how to sell a war. Rather than crawling her way through the D.C. bureaucracy, Beers learned how to capture hearts and minds running a Madison Avenue ad agency.