Mutating America146;s DNA

In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the US Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. 8216;8216;They have these cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete blocks, and the whole message is: 8216;Go away!8217;8217;8217; said Kate Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. 8216;8216;That is how people think of America now, and it8217;s a really sad thing because that is not your country.8217;8217;

In part it was a conversation with friends in London, one a professor at Oxford, another an investment banker, both of whom spoke about the hassles, fingerprinting, paperwork and costs that they, pro-American professionals, now must go through to get a visa to the US.

In part it was a recent chat with the folks at Intel about the obstacles they met trying to get visas for Muslim youths from Pakistan and South Africa who were finalists for this year8217;s Intel science contest. And in part it was a conversation with MIT scientists about the new restrictions on Pentagon research contracts 8212; in terms of the nationalities of the researchers who could be involved and the secrecy required 8212; that were constricting their ability to do cutting-edge work in some areas and forcing intellectual capital offshore. The advisory committee of the World Wide Web recently shifted its semi-annual meeting from Boston to Montreal so as not to put members through the hassle of getting visas to the US.

The other day I went to see the play, Billy Elliot, in London. During intermission, a man approached me and asked, 8216;8216;Are you Mr Friedman?8217;8217; When I said yes, he introduced himself 8212; Emad Tinawi, a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen. He told me that while he disagreed with some things I wrote, there was one column he still keeps. 8216;8216;It was the one called, 8216;Where Birds Don8217;t Fly8217;,8217;8217; he said.

I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn8217;t remember the column. Then he reminded me: It was about the new post-9/11 US consulate in Istanbul, which looks exactly like a maximum-security prison, so much so that a captured Turkish terrorist said that while his pals considered bombing it, they concluded that the place was so secure that even birds couldn8217;t fly there. Tinawi and I then swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners8217; perceptions of America.

In New Delhi, the Indian writer, Gurcharan Das, remarked to me that with each visit to the US lately, he has been forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to America. They 8216;8216;make you feel so unwanted now,8217;8217; said Das. America was a country 8216;8216;that was always reinventing itself,8217;8217; he added, because it was a country that always welcomed 8216;8216;all kinds of oddballs8217;8217; and had 8216;8216;this wonderful spirit of openness8217;8217;. American openness has always been an inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. 8216;8216;If you go dark, the world goes dark.8217;8217;

Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 8212; from visa policies to research funding, to the way we8217;ve sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war 8212; and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America8217;s cultural and legal essence 8212; our DNA as a nation 8212; has become badly deformed or mutated?

This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I8217;ve argued, where birds don8217;t fly, people don8217;t mix, ideas don8217;t get sparked, friendships don8217;t get forged, stereotypes don8217;t get broken, and freedom doesn8217;t ring.

NYT