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U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott gave a well-received speech at Britain's Oxford University a couple of weeks ago in which he cited growing recognition around the world for democracy as the best form of political organization and for free markets as the most successful form of economic organization. Not surprisingly, Talbott, who visited Delhi last April, praised India for its economic reforms and for being an excellent example of the "close linkage between democratic politics and free-market economics." The story of India's economic reforms is by now common knowledge among American businessmen. Every day newspapers carry reports of new deals between American and Indian companies. An organization that facilitates such ventures, the U.S.-India Business Council, held its 17th plenary session in Washington last month. In a letter to council members, President Bill Clinton said: "As you discuss U.S.-India issues such as investment opportunities, trade finance, intellectual property rights, market access, infrastructure, and telecommunications, you can take pride in knowing that the U.S.-India Business Council is helping to ensure that our bilateral relationship remains vibrant and strong. Your work each day on the front lines of international commerce will cement our commitment to developing successful partnerships between government and business, helping both of our countries to enjoy a more prosperous future." An agency charged with promoting such partnerships in the United States is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We profile the organization this month and its young director, Arati Prabhakar, who was born in New Delhi. Prabhakar says the agency's 3,200 employees and 1,200 visiting researchers "all care about the same thing ... delivering value to industry, and it's an attitude that makes you want to rush into work in the morning." Governments around the world eager to approve the Uruguay Round accords of the General Agreement on -r:ariffs and Trade (GATT) are finding that not all of their legislatures are in a rush to ratify it. The U.S. Congress is one example. The issues are complicated and much misunderstood. To air concerns over the subject, particularly in the context of Indo-U.S. relations, the U.S. Information Service and the Confederation of Indian Industry jointly sponsored a seminar in Chandigarh last month in which two American experts on the GATT exchanged information and opinions with some 50 leading manufacturers and businessmen as well as with professors of economics and government officials. Our Focus On section has a short report on the meeting. The U.S. Consulate General in Madras is celebrating its bicentennial this month, and our feature on the event reminds all of the historic ties that bind our two democracies together. The strength of our relationships on so many levels bodes well for the future.
2 5
Patterns of Sensibility Silent Speech
12 13
by Stephen
Westfall
by Richard Wolkomir
Signs of India
by Sadhna Mohan
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
16
Arati Prabhakarby Marilvnne
21 24
by Michele Ingrassia
This Woman Means Business
Rudick
BICENTENNIAL
An Introduction
200 Years of American Consular Relations in Madras by S. Muthiah
28 "...the
compensation was so low... "
29 32 34
Profit Channel
38
Grass-roots
41
Focus On ...
44
On the Lighter Side
45
The Magic of Middlebury
Ashok Amritraj-Double
Impact
Concerns Over Genetic Testing
by Partab Ramchand by DavidL.
Wheeler
by Don L. Boroughs
Pressures on Foreign Policy
by Michael Clough
by Ron Powers
Front cover: Arati Prabhakar, and a researcher at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology using lasers to measure the response speed of optical communications devices. Publisher, Thomas A. Homan; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Assistanl Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Edilor, Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant. Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director. Nand Katyal; Associme Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; PholOgraphic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American
Center Library, New Delhi. Photographs: Front cover--eourtesy National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington, D.C.; inset-Dwight Somers. 2-3--eourtesy Pat Hearn Gallery, New York. 5-II-Lynn Johnson. 12--eourtesy Sadhna Mohan. 14-illustration by Yuri Salzman from The Three Little Pigs Š 1988 Western Publishing Company, Inc. Used by permission. 15--illustration by Mary Grace Eubank from The Three LillIe Pigs Š 1992 Western Publishing Company, Inc. Used by permission. 16-Dwight Somers, USIA. 18-' 19--eourtesy NIST. 21 center-from the book A Brief Hisloryof Ancient and Modern India by Francis William Blagdon 1802-05;courtesy R.S. Books & Prints, A-40, South Extension II, New Delhi. 24, 26-Rajind N. Christy. 29-Don Jones. 3O--eourtesy Live Entertainment. 31 top---Richard Wise, courtesy Columbia Pictures; center & bottom left--eourtesy Ashok Amritraj; bottom right-Partab Ramchand. 34-37-QVC except 34 center, 35 top by Scott Goldsmith. 41 top---S. Anwar; bottom-Kinsey Bros., New Delhi. 43 top--courtesy ClI, New Delhi. 46-47--eourtesy Addison County Chamberof Commerce. Published by Ihe Uniled (phone:
3316841).
Faridabad, Goveroment. the Editor.
States Information
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Center,
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Primed at Thomson
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~~wt!ernsof Sensi hili ty For more than 25 years Mary Heilmann has created brightly hued canvases that playoff the • traditions of abstract painting while resonating with allusions to her own everyday life.
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ary Heilmann accomplishes much in her abstract paintings by not appearing to take herself too seriously. In a time when painting and sculpture have long ceased to anchor visual culture, the lightness and buoyancy of her style have a tonic effect. Her slam-bang, flow-and-erasure painting process is instantly seductive. And though the abstractness of her imagery holds narrative closure in abeyance, her work still resonates with allusions to mass-media sources and the shifting spaces of personal memory. Heilmann's playful spirit crests in her most recent canvases, exhibited last spring at the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York and last summer in "The Broken Mirror," the big painting survey in Vienna, Austria, organized by Kasper Konig and Hans-Ulrich Gbrist. Heilmann's new works recombine the various pictorial motifs that have ordered her canvases over the past several years: Polka dots, checkerboard patterns, multicolored layers of hot-hued horizontal bands that refer to Mexican blankets (and also inevitably recall the striped paintings of Kenneth Noland), and angled hard-edge lines that delineate shapes reminiscent of Jasper Johns's flagstones. All of these elements are executed in an almost shockingly
Too Long (at the Fair); 1993; 142.2 x 177.8 em; oil on canvas.
direct, loosely brushed style that in less accomplished hands would appear merely sloppy. Her taped-off lines, in a grungy color combination of sour bright green and black, are particularly funkY,_with the bleeding of the paint under the tape left to stand. Throughout her career, Heilmann has flirted with the notion of painting-as-object by carrying her image patterns around to the sides of her stretched canvases. This move almost never works for other artists because it trivializes the picture plane, turning it into wrapping paper. But Heilmann reworks her surfaces so often that the sides may refer to a painting two or three stages removed from the present image. The juxtaposition between the sides and the picture's front surface is both visual and temporal, and consequently carries an unexpected phenomenological weight. In the past few years she has occasionally employed a shaped format that can be read either as two interlocking squares or as a larger, single rectangle with square bites taken out of two diagonally opposed corners. [Recently she has been assigning a different pattern and sometimes a different shape to each panel of a diptych.] In some of the most surprising new paintings, she slaps distinct patterns up against one another like overlapping fabric swatches. These exuberant works continue the interplay of fragment and whole that has been a dynamic in Heilmann's art from the beginning. Heilmann grew up in California and came to painting relatively late, after studying literature and pottery at the University of California at Santa Barbara and then ceramics and sculpture with Peter Voulkos in Berkeley. She continues to make ceramics, and the fluidity and translucence of the bright colors in her painting recall not only her own ceramic glazes but also the brightly hued mass-market tableware associated with Southwest suburbia. In college Heilmann moved in a fast intellectual crowd in which there was as much talk about poetry and cinema as about art. It comes as no surprise that Alain Robbe-Grillet was her favorite author. Robbe-Grillet's eye is filmic, moving like a camera. What may exist as an insignificant fragment in one descriptive passage emerges as a crucial feature in another, as the author shifts and adjusts the field
of focus. While painting remains an emphatically different process from writing and subject to different formal laws, Heilmann's paintings nonetheless offer visual corollaries to Robbe-Grillet's style of detached, ironic observation. Almost from the moment she started painting, after she moved to New York in 1968, Heilmann's abstractions were based on drastically simplified fragments of her observable surroundings. With fast, vigorous gestures, she scraped the patterns of window blinds, French doors, and air vents into fluid bodies of glistening, high-keyed primary color. Heilmann called this group of canvases the "Jealousy Paintings"-a play on "jalousie," a colloquial name for window louvers or blinds, and also a nod to RobbeGrillet's novel La Jalousie (Jealousy). In these works, the sensuousness of slick troughs of paint and the edginess of the title conspire in an ominous eroticism that overflows the ostensibly minimalist imagery. As a woman, a West Coast native, and a latecomer to the practice of painting, Heilmann was already apt to view the driving mythologies of New York painting from the perspective of an outsider. The apparent exhaustion of formalist and AbstractExpressionist paradigms by the time she arrived rendered those traditions even more remote. It was the perfect moment, and the perfect vantage point, for reconsidering the collapsed canon of modernist painting. Heilmann's outsider status provided a distance that allowed her to observe mainstream painting itself as a kind of cultural artifact. In an essay in the catalog of the artist's 1990 Boston ICA exhibition, David Joselit describes her work as a postmodern pastiche, "a combination of motifs and conventions of the past largely redefined by the attitudes of the present." Joselit is no doubt on to something here. Heilmann's paint drips and bubble-gum colors can be regarded as two stylistic tropes borrowed from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, which she eventually combined within a framework taken over from a third source, geometric painting. The problem with such an analysis is that it can obscure both the contemplative discipline and the whimsical contingencies of an artist's studio practice. Certainly it is pos-
sible to see Heilmann's work as yet another dance on the moldering bones of modernist painting. Thus the fluidity of her painthandling and her use of the spiral form in a painting such as The Green Spiral (1988) are understood by Joselit as strategies for "dissolving, engulfing, or fracturing the grid." In this view, Heilmann's work becomes an earthy, feminist alternative to a modernist 1ine of spiritual, otherworldly gridmeisters that runs from Mondrian through Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman. Ultimately, though, such theoretical positioning fails to do justice to Heilmann's art. The juicy elegance and economical structure of her work remain in many ways deeply embedded within the refinements of mainstream modernist painting. In addition to those aspects of Noland and Johns already mentioned, one thinks of the printed fabric polka dots and paint splatters of Rauschenberg's Yoicks (1953), the Matissean pinks and blacks of Stella's protractor paintings and, naturally, of Matisse's own alternately joyous and troubled recording of a fragmented domestic sublime. The planar slippages and peekaboos of Matisse's late paintings seem especially important to Heilmann's sense of composition. The formal qualities of Heilmann's paintings seem to me to spring less from ideology than from individual sensibility. Heilmann uses abstraction to move from the specifics of her life to more general concerns. She says, "What I'm looking for in my work is that it have a sense of time and place. Current time and place; past time and place; future time and place-each painting to evoke memory and premonition at once." Taken together, her canvases allow us to measure the way that one person's experience and sensibility have been expressed in visual impulses. Each encounter with a cultural image, everyday object, or personal memory may be reflected in the expansive range, the physical sensuality, and the geometric clarity of Heilmann's art. The viewer is left convinced that painting still renews itself in response to the contemporary world through the shaping consciousness of a single life. 0 About the Author: Stephen Westfall is an artist.
He also writesfrequently on art.
n a darkened laboratory at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, a deaf woman is signing. Tiny lights attached to her sleeves and fingers trace the motions of her hands, while two special video cameras whir. Computers will process her hands' videotaped arabesques and pirouettes into mathematically precise three-dimensional images. Neurologists and linguists will study these stunning patterns for insight into how the human brain produces language. Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have linguists realized that signed languages are unique-a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy-whether language, complete with grammar, is innate in our species, or whether it is learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one renegade teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world's only liberal arts university for deaf people. When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: Among themselves, students signed¡ differently from his classroom teacher. Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American¡ Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English. But Stokoe believed the "hand talk" his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as "slang." Stokoe's idea was academic heresy. It is 39 years later. Stokoe-now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture-is having lunch at a cafe near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought
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his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French, and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. "What I said," Stokoe explains, "is that language is not mouth stuffit's brain stuff." It has been a long road, from the mouth to the brain. Linguists have had to redefine language. Deaf people's self-esteem has been at stake, and so has the ticklish issue of their education. "My own contribution was to turn around the thinking of academics," says Stokoe. "When I came to Gallaudet, the teachers were trained with two books, and the jokers who wrote them gave only a paragraph to sign language, calling it a vague system of gestures that looked like the ideas they were supposed to represent." Deaf education in the 1950s irked him. "I didn't like to see how the hearing teachers treated their deaf pupils-their expectations were low," he says. "I was amazed at how many of my students were brilliant." Meanwhile, he was reading the work of anthropological linguists like George Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr. "They said you couldn't study language without studying the culture, and when I had been at Gallaudet a short time, I realized that deaf people had a culture of their own." When Stokoe analyzed his students' signing, he found it was like spoken languages, which combine bits of soundeach meaningless by'ltself-into meaningful words. Signers, following similar rules, combine individually meaningless hand and body movements into words. They choose from a palette of hand shapes, such as a fist or a pointing index finger. They also choose where to make a sign; for example, on the face or on the chest. They choose how to orient the hand and arm. And each sign has a movement-it might begin at the cheek and finish at the chin. A shaped hand executing a particular motion creates a word. A common underlying structure of both spoken and signed language is thus at
the level of the smallest units that are linked to form words. Stokoe explained his findings on the structure of ASL in a book published in 1960. "The faculty then had a special meeting and I got up and said my piece," he says. "Nobody threw eggs or old vegetables, but I was bombarded by hostility." Later, the university's president told Stokoe his research was "causing too much trouble" because his insistence that ASL was indeed a language threatened the English-based system for teaching the deaf. But Stokoe persisted. Five years later he came out with the first dictionary of American Sign Language based on linguistic principles. And he has been slowly winning converts ever since.
In the Beginning Just as no one can pinpoint the origins of spoken language in prehistory, the roots of sign language remain hidden from view. What linguists do know is that sign languages have sprung up independently in many different places. Signing probably began with simple gestures, but then evolved into a true language with structured grammar. "In every place we've ever found deaf people, there's sign," says anthropological linguist Bob,Johnson. But it's not the same language. "I went to a Mayan village where, out of 400 people, 13 were deaf, and they had their own Mayan Sign-I'd guess it's been maintained for thousands of years." Today at least 50 native sign languages are "spoken" worldwide, all mutually incomprehensible, from British and Israeli Sign to Chinese Sign. Not until the 1700s, in France, did people who could hear pay serious attention to deaf people and their language. Religion had something to do with it. "They believed that without speech you couldn't go to heaven," says Johnson. For the Abbe de I'Epee, a French priest born into a wealthy family in 1712, the issue was his own soul: He feared he would lose it unless he overcame the stigma of his privileged youth by devoting himself to the poor. In his history of the • deaf, When the Mind Hears, psychologist Harlan Lane of Northeastern University
In Boston, Massachusetts, notes that, in his fifties, de I'Epee met two deaf girls on one of his forays into the Paris slums and decided to dedicate himself to their education. The priest's problem was abstraction: He could show the girls a piece of bread and the printed French word for "bread." But how could he show them "God" or "goodness"? He decided to learn their sign language as a teaching medium. However, he attempted to impose French grammar onto the signs. "Methodical signing," as de I'Epee called his invention, was an ugly hybrid. But he did teach his pupils to read French, opening the door to education, and today he is a hero to deaf people. As his pupils and disciples proliferated, satellite schools sprouted throughout Europe. De l'Epee died happily destitute in 1789 surrounded by his students in his Paris school, which became the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes under the new republic.
Other teachers kept de I'Epee's school alive. And one graduate, Laurent Clerc, brought the French method of teaching in sign to the United States. It was the early 1800s; in Hartford, Connecticut, the Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was watching children at play. He noticed that one girl, Alice Cogswell, did not join in. She was deaf. Her father, a surgeon, persuaded Gallaudet to find a European teacher and create the fir'st permanent school for the deaf in the United States. Gallaudet then traveled to England, where the "oral" method was supreme, the idea being to teach deaf children to speak. The method was almost cruel, since children born deaf-they heard no voices, including their own--eould have no concept of speech. It rarely worked. Besides, the teachers said their method was "secret." And so Gallaudet visited the Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris and persuaded Laurent Clerc to come home with him. During their 52-day voyage across the
Ruth Benedict and her daughter Rachel play out a story using sign. Their entire family is deaf. Rachel started to sign words when she was 11 months old.
Atlantic, Gallaudet helped Clerc improve his English, and Clerc taught him French Sign Language. On April 15, 1817, in Hartford, they established a school that became the American School for the Deaf. Teaching in French Sign Language and a version of de I'Epee's methodical sign, Clerc trained many students who became teachers, too, and helped spread the language across the United States. Clerc's French Sign was to mingle with various "home" signs that had sprung up in other places. On Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for example, a large portion of the population was genetically deaf, and virtually all the islanders used an indigenous sign language, the hearing switching back and forth between speech and sign with bilingual ease, Eventually, pure French Sign would blend with such
local argots and evolve American Sign Language.
into
today's
The Fight Against Intolerance After Clerc died, in 1869, much of the work done since the time of de I'Epee to teach the deaf in their own language crumbled under the weight of Victorian intolerance. Anti-Signers argued that ASL let the deaf "talk" only to the deaf; they must learn to speak and to lip-read. Pro-Signers pointed out that, through sign, the deaf learned to read and write English. The Pros also noted that lipreading is a skill that few master. (Studies estimate that 93 percent of deaf schoolchildren who were either born deaf or lost their hearing in early childhood can lipread only one in ten everyday sentences in English.) And Pros argue correctly that the arduous hours required to teach a deaf child to mimic speech should be spent on real education. "Oralists" like Horace Mann lobbied to stop schools from teaching in ASL, then the method of instruction in all schools for the deaf. None was more fervent than Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and husband of a woman who denied her own deafness. The president of the National Association of the Deaf called Bell the "most to be feared enemy of the American deaf." In 1880, at an international meeting of educators of the deaf in Milan, Italy, where de1;lfteachers were absent, the use of sign lantuage in schools was proscribed. After tha t, as deaf people see it, came the Dark Ages. Retired Gallaudet sociolinguist Barbara Kannapell, who is cofounder of Deafpride, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, is the deaf daughter of deaf parents from Kentucky. Starting at age four, she attended an "oral" school, where signing was outlawed. "Whenever the teacher turned her back to work on the blackboard, we'd sign," signs Kannapell. "If the teacher caught us using sign language, she'd use a ruler on our hands." Kannapell has tried to see oralism from the viewpoint of hearing parents of deaf children. "They'll do anything to make their child like themselves," she signs. "But, from a deaf adult's perspective, I
want them to learn sign, to communicate with their child." In the 1970s, a new U.S. law mandated "mainstreaming." "That law was good for parents, because they could keep children home instead of sending them off to special boarding schools, but many public schools didn't know what to do with deaf kids," signs Kannapell. "Many of these children think they're the only deaf kids in the world." Gallaudet's admissions director, James Tucker, an exuberant 34-year-old, is a product of the 1970s mainstreaming. "I'd sit in the back, doing work the teacher gave me, and minding my own business," he signs. "Did I like it? Hell no! I was lonely-for years I thought I was an introvert." Deaf children have a right to learn ASL and to live in an ASL-speaking community, he asserts. "We learn sign for obvious reasons--our eyes aren't broken," he signs. Tucker adds: "Deaf culture is a group of people sharing similar values, outlook, and frustrations, and the main thing, of course, is sharing the same language." Today, most teachers of deaf pupils are "hearies" who speak as they sign. "Simultaneous Communication," as it is called, is really signed English and not ASL. "It looks grotesque to the eye," signs Tucker, adding that it makes signs too "marked," a linguistic term meaning equally stressed. Hand movements can be exaggerated or poorly executed. As Tucker puts it: "We have zealous educators trying to impose weird hand shapes." Moreover, since the languages have entirely different sentence structures, the effect can be bewildering. It's like having Japanese spoken to English-speaking students with an interpreter shouting occasional English words at them.
Importance of Early Training New scientific findings support the efforts of linguists such as Bob Johnson, who are calling for an education system for deaf students based on ASL, starting in infancy. Research by Helen Neville, at the Salk Institute, shows that children must learn a language-any languageduring their first five years or so, before the brain's neural connections are locked
Players of American-style football at Gallaudet University gather in a huddle to plan their next maneuver. The huddle, designed to hide signs from the other team, originated here in the 1890s and soon became a standard procedure among hearing teams as well.
in place, or risk permanent linguistic impairment. "What suffers is the ability to learn grammar," she says. As children mature, their brain organization becomes increasingly rigid. By puberty, it is largely complete. This spells trouble because most deaf youngsters learn language la te; their parents are hearing and do not know ASL, and the children have little or no contact with deaf people when young. Bob Johnson notes that more than 90
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percent of all deaf children have hearing parents. Unlike deaf children of deaf parents, who get ASL instruction early, they learn a language late and lag educationally. "The average deaf 12th-grader reads at the fourth-grade level," says Johnson. He believes deaf children should start learning ASL in the crib, with schools teaching in ASL. English, he argues, should be a second language, for reading and writing: "All evidence says they'll learn English better." The vast majority of deaf students in America are still in mainstream schools where there are few teachers who are fluent in ASL. Meanwhile, researchers are finding that ASL is a living language, still evolving. Sociolinguist James Woodward from
Memphis, Tennessee, who has a black belt in karate, had planned to study Chinese dialects but switched to sign when he came to Gallaudet in 1969. "I spent every night for two years at the Rathskeller, a student hangout, learning by observing," he says. "I began to see great variation in the way people signed." Over time, signs tend to change. For instance, "home" originally was the sign for "eat" (touching the mouth) combined with the sign for "sleep" (the palm pillowing the cheek). Now it has evolved into two taps on the cheek. Also, signs formerly made at the center of the face migrate toward its perimeter. One reason is that it is easier to see both signs and changes in facial expressions in this way,
since deaf people focus on a signer's face-which provides crucial linguistic information-taking in the hands with peripheral vision. Signers use certain facial expressions as grammatical markers. These linguistic expressions range from pursed lips to the expression that results from enunciating the sound "th." Linguist Scott Liddell, at Gallaudet, has noted that certain hand movements translate as "Bill drove to John's." If the signer tilts his head forward and raises his eyebrows while signing, he makes the sentence a question: "Did Bill drive to John's?" Sociolinguists have investigated why this unique language was for so long virtually a secret. Partly, Woodward
thinks, it was because deaf people wanted it that way. He says that when deaf people sign to the hearing, they switch to English-like signing. "It allows hearing people to be identified as outsiders and to be treated carefully before allowing any interaction that could have a negative effect on the deaf community," he says. By keeping ASL to themselves, deaf people-whom Woodward regards as an ethnic group-maintain "social identity and group solidarity." The "secret" nature of ASL is changing rapidly as it is being examined under the scientific microscope. At the Salk Institute, a futuristic complex of concrete labs poised on a San Diego cliff above the Pacific, pioneer ASL investigator Ursula Bellugi directs the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, where researchers use ASL to probe the brain's capacity for language. It was here that Bellugi and associates found that ASL has a key language ingredient-a grammar to regulate its flow. For example, in a conversation a signer might make the sign for "Joe" at an arbitrary spot in space. Now that spot stands for "Joe." By pointing to it, the signer creates the pronoun "he" or "him," meaning "Joe." A sign moving toward the spot means something done to "him." A sign moving away from the spot means an action by Joe, something "he" did. Tn the 1970s, Bellugi's team concentrated on several key questions that have been of central concern ever since MIT professor Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking work of the 1950s. Is language capability innate, as Chomsky and his followers believe? Or is it acquired from our environment? The question gets to the basics of humanity since our language capacity is part of our unique endowment as a species. And language lets us accumulate lore and pass it on to succeeding generations. Bellugi's team reasoned that if ASL is a true language, unconnected to speech, then our penchant for language must be built in at birth, whether we express it with our tongue or hands. A key issue was "iconicity." Linguistics has long held that one of the properties of
all natural languages is that their words are arbitrary. In English, to illustrate, there is no relation between the sound of the word "cat" and a cat itself, and onomatopoeic words like "slurp" are few and far between. Similarly, if ASL follows the same principles, its words should not be pictures or mime. But ASL does have many words with transparent meanings. In ASL, "tree" is an arm upright from the elbow, representing a trunk, with the fingers spread to show the crown. In Danish Sign, the signer's two hands outline a tree in the air. Sign languages are rife with pantomimes. But Bellugi wondered: Do deaf people perceive such signs as iconic as they communicate in ASL? One day a deaf mother visited the lab with her deaf daughter, not yet two. At that age, hearing children fumble pronouns, which is why parents say, "Mommy is getting Tammy juice." The deaf child, equally confused by pronouns, signed "you" when she meant "I." But the sign for such pronouns is purely iconic: The signer points an index finger at his or her own torso to signify "I" or at the listener to signify "you." The mother corrected the child by turning her hand so that she pointed at herself. Nothing coulp be clearer. Yet, as the child chattered on, she continued to point to her mother when she meant "I." Bellugi's work revealed that deaf toddlers have no trouble pointing. But a pointing finger in ASL is linguistic, not gestural. Deaf toddlers in the "don'tstage do not see a understand-pronouns" pointing finger. They see a confusing, abstract word. AS[1s roots may be mimetic, but-embedded in the flow of language-the signs lose their iconicity. By the 1980s, most linguists had accepted sign languages as natural languages on an equal footing with English, Italian, Hindi, and others of the world. Signed languages like ASL were as powerful, subtle, and intricately structured as spoken ones. The parallels become especially striking in wordplay and poetry. Signers creatively combine hand shapes and movements to create puns and other humorous alterations of words. Clayton Valli at
Gallaudet has made an extensive study of poetry in ASL. He finds that maintenance or repetition of hand shape provides rhyming, while meter occurs in the timing and type of movement. Research with the American Theater of the Deaf reveals a variety of individual techniques and styles. Some performers create designs in space with a freer movement of the arms than in ordinary signing. With others, rhythm and tempo are more important than spatial considerations. The special nature of sign language provides unprecedented opportunities to observe how the brain is organized to generate and understand language. Spoken languages are produced by largely unobservable movements of the vocal apparatus and received through the brain's auditory system. Signed languages, by contrast, are delivered through highly visible movements of the arms, hands, and face, and are received through the brain's visual system. Engagement of these -different brain systems in language use makes it possible to test different ideas about the biological basis of language. The prevailing view of neurologists is that the brain's left hemisphere is the seat of language, while the right controls our perception of visual space. But since signed languages are expressed spatially, it was unclear where they might be centered. To find out, Bellugi and her colleagues studied lifelong deaf signers who had suffered brain damage as adults. When the damage had occurred in their left hemisphere, the signers could shrug, point, shake their heads and make other gestures, but they lost the ability to sign. As happens with hearing people who suffer left-hemisphere damage, some of them lost words while others lost the ability to organize grammatical sentences, depending on precisely where the damage had occurred. Conversely, signers with right-hemisphere damage signed as well as ever, but spatial arrangements confused them. One of Bellugi's right-hemisphere subjects could no longer perceive things to her left. Asked to describe a room, she reported all the • furnishings as being on the right, leaving the room's left side a void. Yet she signed
Gallaudet homecoming queens join other students in a cheer at pep rally the night before a football game.
perfectly, including signs formed on the left side. She had lost her sense of topographic space, a right-hemisphere function, but her control of linguistic space, centered in the left hemisphere, was intact. All of these findings support the conclusion that language, whether visual or spoken, is under the control of the left hemisphere. One of the Salk group's current efforts is to see if learning language in a particular modality changes the brain's ability to perform other kinds of tasks. Researchers showed children a moving light tracing a
pattern in space, and then asked them to draw what they saw. "Deaf kids were way ahead of hearing kids," says Bellugi. Other tests, she adds, back up the finding that learning sign language improves the mind's ability to grasp patterns in space.
Thinking and Dreaming in Signs Salk linguist Karen Emmorey says the lab also has found that deaf people are better at generating and manipulating mental images. "We found a striking difference in ability to generate mental images and to tell if one object is the same as another but rotated in space, or is a mirror image of the first," she says, noting that signers seem to be better at
discriminating between faces, too. As she puts it: "The question is, Does the language you know affect your other cognitive abilities?" Freda Norman, formerly an actress with the National Theater of the Deafand now a Salk research associate, puts it like this: "English is very linear, but ASL lets you see everything at the same time." "The deaf think in signs," says Bellugi. "They dream in signs. And little children sign to themselves." At McGill University in Montreal, Canada, psychologist Laura Ann Petitto recently found that deaf babies of deaf parents babble in sign. Hearing infants create nonsense sounds like "babababa," first attempts at language. So do deaf babies, but with their hands. Petitto watched deaf infants moving their hands and fingers in systematic ways that hearing children not exposed to sign never do. The movements, she says, were their way of exploring the linguistic units that will be the building blocks of language-their language. Deaf children today face a brighter future than the generation of deaf children before them. Instruction in ASL, particularly in residential schools, should accelerate. New technologies, such as the TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) for communicating over telephones, relay services, and video programs for language instruction, and the recent Americans with Disabilities Act all point the way to a more supportive environment. Deaf people are moving into professional jobs, such as law and accounting, and more recently into computer-related work. But it is not surprising tha t outside of their work, they prefer one another's company. Life can be especially rewarding for those within the ASL community. Here they form their own literary clubs, bowling leagues, and gourmet groups. As the Salk laboratory's Freda Norman signs: "I love to read books, but ASL is my first language." She adds, smiling: "Sometimes I forget that the hearing are different." 0 About the Author: Richard Wolkomir is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine.
Signs of ~ndia India has an estimated population of two million deaf people of whom some one million adults and 500,000 children communicate with sign language. Indian sign language incorporates all of the simple hand shapes and many of the complex hand shapes found in other researched sign languages, according to An Introduction to Indian Sign Language (Focus on Delhi), a book published several years ago by the New Delhi-based All India Federation of the Deaf (AIFD). The book was the work of Madan Vasishta, James Woodward, and Susan De Santis of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. One of the pioneers in studying, developing, and spreading Indian sign language has been Shashi Pal, a hearing woman who regularly signs the national news bulletin on Sundays on Doordarshan. Pal has been associated since 1962 with the AIFD and has traveled throughout India on behalf of the organization, building bridges of communication among the deaf. She can often be seen sharing the dais with the Indian President or the Prime Minister, signing their speeches. She is also an active member of the International Sign Language Committee, an organization that is striving to establish a world sign language. In 1992 Pal received special recognition for her efforts when the President of India bestowed on her the National Award for Best Service to the Handicapped. Pal says that although social workers ar~:)Und India have taken up the cause of sign language in recent years, and books have come out on the subject, it has not received broadbased support among educators. There are about 300 schools for the deaf in the country, of which 275 are run by voluntary organizations and the rest by the government. With the
exception of three or four of them, all the schools follow the oral method of instruction whereby the deaf are expected to lip-read. Students are often punished or scolded for signing. However, during breaks when the teacher is not around, the children will usually resort to signing, thus demonstrating their preferred mode for communicating effectively and quickly. In addition to all her other activities, Pal runs the School for the Handicapped, Deaf, Mentally Retarded, and Crippled in Delhi. Students who are completely deaf are taught sign language; students with partial hearing are instructed in the traditional oral method. Pal says Bombay and Calcutta each have a school that operates similarly to hers. Pal says much work remains to be done to convince government officials, educators, and parents of deaf children of the merits of sign language. She says signing is an automatic refiex-"Look, you too are gesticulating," she tells me with a smile-and as such is the most normal of communicatigg techniques. "Take the sentence 'Kya turn ghar jaogi?' [Will you go home?]," she says. "A person adept at sign will mouth the first two words and sign 'ghar jaogi' quickly and effectively. Had he mouthed all the words he would have been slower and would run the risk of the other person not following him." Pal's foray into sign language was born out of desperation and compassion soon after she joined the AIFD. She and clerk Kedar Nath were the only two hearing people in the office. "I wanted to know where the toilet was," she said. "Neither Kedar Nath nor I could manage to communicate this to the general secretary, who was deaf. As a last resort, Kedar Nath began to unzip his trousers. The general
Sonia Sharma (left) is one of five persons, in addition to pioneer Shashi Pal, who sign the national news bulletin on Doordarshan; Pal, shown here with Indira Gandhi, has been signing speeches for Indian leaders for many years. secretary banged his fist on the table in anger." Later, Pal said she detected a couple of deaf persons at the organization signing for "toilet," and she taught the sign to everyone else there. "At that time, communication among the deaf at the federation was patchy and difficult," she says. An Introduction to Indian Sign Language includes a dictionary of more than 900 signs gathered in research with II skilled deaf signers (four men and seven women), 16 to 42 years in age. "Probably over 70 percent of closely related variants of these signs-or these signs-will be used in other parts of India also," the authors write. Pal asserts that there is only one Indian sign language, although there are regional variations to it,just as with spoken languages. For instance, to sign "man" the hand is placed on the head in Bombay, rubbed on the upper lip (signifying moustache) in Uttar Pradesh, and rubbed on the cheek (for shaving) in Maharashtra. She says such variations are overcome with ease among signers. She notes that deaf persons trained in the oral method of communication-that is, lipreading-laboriously communicate with each other through writing, not through mimicry of speech. Which is one more reason why all deaf persons should be taught sign language, Pal says. D About the Author: Sadhna Mohan is a former staff reporter of The Statesman, New Delhi, and now a freelance writer.
•
Who's Afraid of the
Big Bad
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Not the Three Little Pigs anymore, thanks to child psychologists who have locked the wolf in a cage and out of people's nightmares. Will fairy tales, or childhood, ever be the same again? The classic version of Little Red Riding Hood is no child's play. The Big Bad Wolf eats Grandma, traps Little Red in Granny's bed, then devours her in an instant. The women are rescued, finally, by a brave woodcutter who kills the wolf, slits open its gut, and releases the duo alive and intact. It's a disturbing image for young children, filled with cannibalism and even a hint of rape. Now Golden Books has come up with a nonviolent twist on tradition. This time, Grandma hides out in a closet, frantically stitching together a ghost costume from linens. When the wolf pounces on Little Red, Granny-as-ghost bursts forth and frightens him away, and they all live.... Well, some things never change. But they're starting to. The revised Little Red comes amid a typhoon of concern over the effects of media violence, particularly on the psyches of the youngest kids. Last fall, in back-to-back salvos from the Clinton Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno warned television executives to curb primetime blood-and-guts or risk having limits imposed; then Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders urged parents to "think twice" before buying a toy gun for a child. Now Golden Books, America's largest children's book line, has scripted tamer endings into three of its most redoubtable tales-Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and Chicken Little. Nearly 20 years after child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim theorized that a little fairy-tale horror is good for kids, child psychologists are questioning how much mayhem should be in their entertainment. "There's no intrinsic value of exposing kids under five or six to death or horror or fright," says child psychologist Jerome Singer of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "They'll find lots of it later on." Golden Books didn't set out to rewrite the classics. But that's what it did after a group of editors and artists tried to add sound effects to several "sight and sound" editions. The sounds-a wolf cackling, a stomach gurgling-were too lighthearted for the ominous images of the original tales. It prompted them to reconsider the plots. "There were a lot of things in here that would scare anyone," says Margaret Snyder, a managing editor of Western Publishing, the MinnesotaAbout the Author: Michele Ingrassia is a general editor for
Newsweek.
The magazine's Chicago bureau correspondent Karen Springen and Washington bureau correspondent Pat Wingert contributed to this article.
based parent company of Golden. (The company will continue to publish original versions of all three tales.) Should children be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Of course. Tales like The Juniper Tree, in which Mom is served her child's head, and Hansel and Gretel, in which kids wind up in the oven, can terrify. But not everyone thinks night fright is bad. In his 1976 analysis of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim argued that all children have rich fantasy lives, filled with fears and anxieties; wicked witches and vicious wolves aren't about violence per se, but about coping. "Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity," he wrote. Unlike violent movies, which leave no doubt about death and destruction, fairy tales play out in a child's imagination. And most child psychologists believe children are strong enough to process the images. When a six-year-old reads about the Big Bad Wolf, for example, he might be conjuring up a picture of the scary neighborhood dog; that, in turn, helps him face his feelings about the animal and his world. Is he afraid of the dog? Did the dog ever bite him? Or did he love the dog and feel sad when it died? Perhaps he is feeling very small in a world in which everyone is so big. Even the grimmest story gives parents and kids a chance to talk about what's going on in the childJs mind. "You have something to focus on-this story-as opposed to going up to a child and saying, 'Tell me something you're afraid of,''' says psychologist James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute in Chicago. Besides, familiarity can breed content. Hearing the same tale over and over helps a child pierce his fears. So does having a grown-up nearby to soothe and to underscore the difference between fantasy and reality. The message: The child's own world is safe and protected. "The child thinks, 'Here Mother is telling me about these stories, and she's so nice, she's so protective. I can see these are things only in my head,' " says psychiatrist David Zinn of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. If unexpurgated fairy tales are so hearty, why feed kids literature lite? "Kids beyond the age of six, seven, eight, nine can read the endings in a different way and [understand) more of the violence," says Singer of Yale. " ...There is no advantage to confronting kids early on
(
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The wolf came down the chimney and fell right into a pot of water boiling over the fire. The little pig quickly popped the cover over the pot-and that was the end of the wicked wolf! CLASSIC: The wolf got mad. "Little pig, little pig, I will to negative things." Singer ing them." (Sendak does his catch you anyhow. I am going to climb up on the roof and believes that security, not part: His new book, We Are come down the chimney and eat you up .... " The wolf came gore, helps children learn to All in lhe Dumps wilh Jack down the chimney andfell right into a pot of boiling water cope with adversity later on. and Guy, is a nursery rhyme But shielding them from reover the fire. The little pig quickly popped the cover over about homelessness.) ality may be worse, say other Besides, fairy tales have the pot-and that was the end of the wicked wolf! psychologists and authors. been evolving for centuries. "Try to imagine how frightreStorytellers traditionally ening it is for a child to comprehend the disheveled world we live in," cited them to adults, not just children, and in the Victorian era, grownsays Maurice Sendak, who has written some of the grittiest tales ups actually "wanted to scare the hell out of kids so they'd do the right literature. "We don't help them by lying in modern children's thing," says Jack Zipes, author of The Trials and Tribulalions of Lillie • and censoring books. We help them by telling the truth and supportRed Riding Hood and other fairy-tale histories. It wasn't until the
REVISED: In the morning, the little pigs awoke and peered out 1900s,when fairy tales moved prose is just more handthe window. There was the wolffast asleep .... They tiptoed out from adult narrative to kids' wringing from parents and the door and gathered bricks, sticks, and straw. Then the three books, that people started leaders at a loss over how to little pigs worked harder than they had ever worked before .... sanitizing them. Even morals protect their children. "It's changed. In the l830s, the "Little pigs! Let me come out!" cried the wolf. "Not by the hair easy to change the ending of lesson of Little Red Ridof our snouty, snout, snouts!" they laughed. a fairy tale or decide not to ing Hood was "Obey your buy toy guns," says Rosalie mother." Now it's "Don't Streett, executive director talk to strangers." More recently, fairy tales have become politically of Parent Action, a national organization of parents based in Balcorrect-feminist, racially sensitive, and culturally correct. timore, Maryland. "It's much harder to deal with the real social issues But even the most carefully constructed fairy tales can't stop a that cause violence." Until grown-ups do, it will be hard for kids to bullet. Or erase bias or bigotry. The real question is whether softer 0 live happily ever after.
W
hen Arati Prabhakar answered the telephone one day in January 1993, and a woman said, "I'm calling . for the President and Vice President. We'd like to talk to you about a job," Prabhakar wondered which of her friends was playing a practical joke. Prabhakar, then 34, had a job directing a prestigious defense research and development office. She had not been lobbying for a position in the administration of the newly elected President Bill Clinton. The call was no joke, and Prabhakar was soon meeting with Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown, hearing his plans for transforming the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into a lead agency, in line with the administration's pledge to harness technology for economic benefits. NIST, which comes under the Commerce Department, was formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards, an old line agency primarily responsible for setting national standards for weights and measures. Prabhakar readily accepted the job, becoming the first woman to head the NIST. "It was the chance of a lifetime," she recalls. But no one, looking at Prabhakar's life so far, doubts there will be many more opportunities "of a lifetime." Hers is a lifetime that spans many miles, from New Delhi where she was born; to Chicago, Illinois, where she moved at the age of three; to Dallas and later to Lubbock, both in Texas; to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where she became the first female student to get a PhD in applied physics; and finally to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Congress's Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), then the Department of Defense.
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Indian-born Arati Prabhakar, 35, holds the distinction of being the youngest director in the history of America's 93-year-old National Institute of Standards and Technology.
my career for the past decade and haven't done anything I've planned," she admits, "because I've always had far more interesting things come up randomly." There was, however, nothing random •• about her family's decision to come to the United States. Prabhakar's mother had
decided to continue her education at the University of Chicago and moved there in 1962 with her husband, Jagdish Prabhakar, an electrical engineer, and Arati. Arati was only three years old then. She recalls that her mother was the big influence in her life. "When I was growing up in Lubbock, there weren't that many Indian families there, so there wasn't that sense ofa community. So it was primarily my mother. She has a very positive outlook about combining cultures. She felt it was important to understand something of our religious and cultural background. But she also felt that there were important things to embrace in America. So it wasn't an isolationist approach." Nevertheless, Prabhakar has slim ties with India now. She hasn't visited the country since she was eight. Her mother's family relocated to the United States and those relatives became her ties rather than distant relatives in India. Despite the distance from her country of birth, Prabhakar feels that her outlook on life,particularly her manner of dealing with stress, is culturally rooted. She remembers her mother's advice to her as a child, on the eve of her first swimming test. "I was really stressed because I didn't think I could do it, and my mother said, 'Look this isjust a test and on the scale of things, not a big deal. You should just pray for guidance to have the strength to get through it....That's what's important, rather than having things always come out right.'" An excellent student, Prabhakar earned her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in three years from Texas Tech University in Lubbock. A fellowship from Bell Laboratories' Graduate Research Program for Women helped to fund her studies at the California Institute of Technology, where she received her PhD in 1984. But while pursuing her PhD, Prabhakar discovered that she disliked pure research. An adviser steered her to the Congressional Fellows Program at OT A-the U.S. Congress's technology think tank-where she could use her science and technology background to develop policy. At OTA she wrote a report calling for the U.S. government to take action to counter the
growing Japanese threat to America's the agency's name and mission: It charged NIST with establishing programs to help semiconductor industry. Her work came to the attention of the industry harness technology. Change came slowly. The Republican Department of Defense and she was tapped for the department's prestigious administration of President George Bush Advanced Research Projects Agency was philosophically opposed to using fed(ARPA), a research and development eral money for private industry and organization. There, she quickly ad- dragged its feet in implementing the vanced, finally creating and directing the agency's new mandate. But this changed Microelectronics Technological Office, a with the election of President Clinton in $300- million program credited with help- November 1992. At the top of his agenda ing to bolster U.S. competitiveness in the was using technology as an economic tool. Despite Prabhakar's obvious qualificasemiconductor industry. Her work with ARPA made her an tions for this post, her appointment raised ideal candidate to be the NIST director. eyebrows. She was young, a woman, and "I was fortunate at a very early age to only the third director not to come up build and run technology programs, and I through the organization's ranks. "I was spent seven years at ARPA ...and got to scared to death," admits Prabhakar, who run an office there that focused on dual took over in May 1993. "And they use technologies-programs that mat- [employees] were thoroughly scared to tered for national security but also death ... .! thought it would be satisfying had some importance for commercial but very difficult. I thought I'd go home applications," explains Prabhakar. "I and pummel my pillow every night." Instead Prabhakar found that it was had a chance to work with industry and figure out how to build programs that are not only satisfying but also fun. She fitted partnerships, rather than the government in well with the agency's 3,200 employees and 1,200 visiting researchers at NIST's instructing industry what to do." That experiencewas applicable to NIST, suburban Washington headquarters in primed to become a focal point for the new Gaithersburg, Maryland, and at its labs administration's policy of using technology in Boulder, Colorado. "A lot of people in to jump-start the economy. Prabhakar not this organization care about what they only brought with her an impressive pro- do. And we all care about the same fessional resume, but valued personal skills thing ...delivering value to industry, and as well.Today she feelsequally comfortable it's an attitude that makes you want to with the agency's scientistsand the industry rush into work in the morning." representatives with whom the agency Prabhakar admits that her transition works. Her energy and enthusiasm im- was eased by the agency's new mission pressed the senators who conducted her and its increased budget. In an era of confirmation hearing. One interviewer severe cuts in federal government spendmarveled: "She can make .topics like the ing, NIST's fiscal year 1994 budget of standard volt sound interesting." more than $600 million represented a healthy increase. And the administration Technology as Economic Tool plans to quadruple the budget in four Arati Prabhakar came to NIST with a years. "My standard joke," says Pratrack record of using government funding bhakar, "is people accept you if you to foster new technologies, something new come bringing money." to the mission of NIST. Created in 1901, Prabhakar believes that the administhe institute's main job was to support tration's commitment to increased fundindustry by developing standards for ing for NIST is indicative of "a reweights and measures. (Among its pro- cognition that with the end of the Cold jects-a chip that measures volts, and War and changes in global competition improving the accuracy of the atomic there are jobs that industry and governclock.) In 1988Congress, controlled by the ment should try to do together-things Democrats, passed legislation changing that are infrastructural in nature or jobs
1. NIST's suburban Washington headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Created in 1901 as the National Bureau of Standards, its focus changed in 1988 to establishing programs to help industry harness technology and to make American industry more competitive in the global market.
2. The cone calorimeter developed by NIST provides data critical to predicting the fire hazard of a product. It replaces time-consuming and expensive tests by using only a small sample of the material to be tested. It is being considered as the basis of a standard test method by the International Organization for Standardization.
3. Engineers at NIST are developing an automated system that produces precision chamfers or beveled edges on aircraft engine components made from titanium or inconel. The system, called Advanced Deburring and Chamfering System (ADACS), consists of a six-axis electric robot fitted with an actuated chamfering tool.
4. Diamond-tool turning and grinding machines are the acme of precision manufacturing tools, capable of machining high optical finishes without additional polishing (such as on this copper mirror for a laser system). NIST and industrial researchers are working on improved methods of monitoring and controlling diamond turning machines to improve the precision and production of highly efficient optics such as mirrors for laser welders.
What's happening is a recognition that with the end of the Cold War and changes in global competition there are jobs that industry and government should try to do together-things that are infrastructural in nature or jobs that involve longer-term and riskier investments in technology. --ARATIPRABHAKAR
that involve longer-term and riskier investments in technology. And for the first time, in a deliberate and visible way, the administration is trying to build programs that tackle that part of the technology. The exciting part of the story to me is not about the total number of dollars but the fact that it's a deliberate attempt to do a different job."
Incentives for Excellence While the government's involvement in funding industrial technology is relatively new to the United States, Prabhakar points out that "every other industrialized nation has some kind of program that focuses on technology for economic goals. For us it's new and I think it's important that we do this in a way that's tailored to the American economy, to the American culture." NIST's'mission, she says, is to see "if there is a uniquely American way to structure civilian technology programs that will affect the economy." To accomplish this, explains Prabhakar, NIST offers a portfolio of different tools for working with American industry. These include the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the grant-giving Advanced Technology Program (ATP), and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) educational assistance program. The Baldrige Award (named after a former Secretar~ of Commerce) was established in 1988to showcase outstanding achievements in manufacturing, service, and small business. This year, the recipients of the award were AT&T Consumer Communications Services,
GTE Directories Corp., and Wainwright Industries, Inc. "These three winners demonstrate that aggressive quality management-including a clear customer focus and partnerships with employees and suppliers-equips American companies to compete and excel in the global marketplace," President Clinton said, in announcing the winners last month. Added Secretary Brown: "U.S. business competitiveness depends on American firms that understand the importance of being fast moving, cutting-edge, and more flexible than their competitors." While the Baldrige Award showcases past efforts, the ATP, launched in 1990, is an investment in the future. It is a grants program that shares with private industry the cost of developing long-term technological advances that are too risky and too costly for a company to finance itself. The objective, says Prabhakar, "is to use the catalyst of government dollars to create economic opportunities." NIST looks for innovative, cutting-edge technologies with strong commercial potential that, if successful, will have wide applicability. ATP has so far invested in about nine projects. They include a small New England area start-up company, which is developing a new method of delivering and regulating insulin to diabetics, and industrial giants Ford Motor Company and General Electric, which are developing technologies to recycle lightweight plastics used in car manufacturing. While ATP invests in tomorrow's technology, the MEP strives to make today's industry more productive. Modeled on the Department of Agriculture's successful grass-roots extension program for farmers, the MEP provides informational services to small and medium-sized companies that may lack the resources to keep abreast of new technologies. "There are 350,000 firms around the country that employ 500 or fewer people and that's about half of our manufacturing base," says Prabhakar. "Many of these companies have zero to one engineer, and they don't have an engineer to send out and hunt up information about new industrial engineering practices ....So we're trying to get them the information they
need to do their jobs." Prabhakar says that some of these resources are informational and delivered via computer, but "human beings end up being the bottom line." The extension has established 30 regional centers and plans to have 100 when the network is fully operational in 1997. The centers are staffed by manufacturing engineers who have worked in large, sophisticated firms. "They go out to small manufacturers ...and walk through the facilityand help identify inefficienciesin the manufacturing process," then identify resources and find solutions to the company's problems, explains Prabhakar. Peter Heydemann, acting director of MEP, says that 2,000 companies have already sought assistance from MEP and the number is increasing by about a hundred a week. MEP is the "only organization in the world with field agents knocking on doors of small and mid-sized companies and offering assistance," he explains. Heydemann, well known to scientists in India, took up his post earlier this year after serving five years as science counselor in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi (see SPAN, March 1992). While NIST's new mission focuses on making American industry more competitive in the global market, Prabhakar thinks that there are international implications for NIST's work. "We spend taxpayers' dollars to make our industry more competitive, but none of this happens in a box with the boundaries ending at national borders. Virtually all companies that we work with are engaged in the global marketplace, and are often engaged in global operations as well. "I don't think that as a society, or throughout the world, we've thought through these questions of what global economic development looks like. It's reaily a much bigger question, that I don't have the answer for." But no one who has met Prabhakar doubts that, given the assignment to think it through, she would come up with the answer. 0 About the Author: Marilynne Rudick is a. freelance writer and novelist based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
S
oon after the U.S. Congress created the consular service on
Pondicherry,
April 14, 1792, President George Washington appointed
programs. The celebrations
Benjamin Joy, who had extensive trade ties with India, to be
nar-"The
is commemorating Bicentennial
this month with a series of
will begin with a one-day semiof the U.S. Consulate
in Ma-
'J
consul at Calcutta "and other ports and places on the coast of
dras"-at
the Madras Club, to be led by Ainslie T. Embree,
India and Asia." However, when Joy arrived in Calcutta, the
professor
emeritus
British authorities refused to recognize him as a "consul entitled
University,
to privileges," but they said he could "reside here as a commer-
Delhi, serving as a special adviser to Ambassador
cial agent, subject to the civil and criminal jurisdiction of this
Wisner. Other panelists will include S. Muthiah, author and
country." Undaunted, Joy carried on his duties of a "consul,"
an authority
which in those days consisted primarily of assisting stranded
columnist and writer and a former cultural adviser for USIS
American sailors and overseeing U.S. maritime commerce.
Madras; and M.N. Vedantham,
On November 24, 1794, Joy appointed William Abbott, an American trader resident in Madras, to be the first U.S. consular It is this event that the U.S. Consulate General in Madras, Pradesh,
for the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra
Kera1a, Karnataka,
New York.
Embree
currently
lives in New Frank G.
on the history of Madras; S. Krishnan,
noted
professor of history at Presi-
dency College who has done pioneering diplomatic
at Columbia
work on the U.S.
presence in Madras.
On November 8, Ambassador Wisner and Tamil Nadu Gov- •
agent in the Madras presidency. which is responsible
of South Asian history
and the Union Territory
of
ernor M. Channa Reddy will inaugurate a photo exhibit, "From Ice to IBM: 200 Years of Indo-American Cooperation,"
in the
Consulate General. The exhibit provides a glimpse of some of
the well-known
and little-known
facts that have formed and
nent than they are today; and, most notably, C. Subramaniam,
informed the relationship between our two countries over the
former governor of Maharashtra, will speak on the "Making of
past two centuries: How from a modest beginning in trade-a
the Green Revolution" in the mid-1960s, when he was union
major American export to India in the 1830s was ice !-bilateral
minister of food.
cooperation now encompasses a wide range of areas in the arts, culture, education,
science, technology,
and commerce.
An
The month-long celebrations will also include an American play, Choices, a one-woman show to be performed by New
interesting fact that emerges from this exhibit is that from the
York-based
earliest days of the relationship, India nearly always has enjoyed
artists led by Frank Dubier, and the release by the Indian postal
a trade surplus with the United States. Out of a total trade figure
service of a first -day cover commemorating 200 years of Indo-
of $7,300 million in 1993, a 28 percent increase over the
U.S. relations.
previous year, India had a trade surplus of $1 ,200 million. Bicentennial expanding
lectures will highlight various aspects of the
bilateral relationship.
Embree will speak on the
variety and importance of bilateral cultural and scholarly exchanges; Laura Livingston,
chief of the consular section in
actress Joanne Hamlin; a jazz concert by local
In the following article, S. Muthiah looks back on the early history of consulÂŁ!r relations between the United States and South India. 0 The U. S. Consulate (above) for South India, located at Gemini Circle, Madras,
Madras, will discuss consular work in the next century, when
is curremly headed by Consul General
immigration issues are expected to become even more promi-
Timothy P. Hauser.
200
YEARS
AMERICAN CONSULAR
nited States interest in India is as old as the dras archival records provide fascinating glimpses into the American republic itself. A year after the country life and times of William Abbott, a rather controversial declared independence in 1776, a member of the figure. In fact, from the time of his arrival in Madras as a American Continental Congress said: "It is reported that young man in the early I780s, about which there is no the East Indians have risen upon their oppressors [Great record, the British establishment does not appear to have Britain], and taken Madras. This is all good news." been enamored by his associations and activities. The first mention of Abbott is in 1788, when he is However, America's first contact with India came a described as Paul Benfield's agent. Benfield, who came to decade later in 1786 when the Chesapeake sailed up the "Hoogly" River into the port of Calcutta. After that, U.S. Madras to work as an engineer with the East India Company, had started his own construction company. His vessels made routine trade trips to Calcutta, Bombay, commissions included building many of the walls and Surat, and Madras. (So brisk became the trade in the ensuing years that an East India Company official in defense emplacements of Fort St. George, which stand to this day, and the town's north wall. It also seems likely, Calcutta ruefully remarked in 1806 that the power and resources of the United States had been "hitherto nurthough the records are scanty, that he designed and built the tured in the Indian seas.") Chepauk Palace of the Nawab Muhammad Ali Wallajah In view of all this commercial activity, President George of Arcot-and also of the Carnatic. If, indeed, Benfield Washington appointed in 1792 Benjamin Joy, a businessbuilt the Nawab's first home in Madras, he would be the man from Massachusetts, as the first American consul to progenitor of the Indo-Saracenic architectural style. Even if India. He was to be stationed at Calcutta, then the nerve he didn't, Benfield, by virtue of the fact that he had lent large center of British activity. The British rulers refused to sums of money to the Nawab for building the magnificent recognize his commission, but he was allowed to stay in palace, became in a way the progenitor of the British empire Calcutta and serve as the U.S. government's commercial in India. As the Nawab was in no position to repay the huge agent. The denial of consular status to Joy could possibly be loan, the East India Company took upon itself to pay off his explained by the fact that the Governor General in Calcutta debt. In return, the Nawab assigned the Carnatic's revenues at the time was Lord Charles Cornwallis, who, as comto the company. Later his principality (a little more than mander of the British forces, had been forced to surrender to present-day Tamil Nadu) became the first major territorial Americans at Yorktown, Virginia, at the end of their War of acquisition of the British in India. Independence more than a decade earlier. Meanwhile, a shrewd Abbott used his employment with Operating from his Calcutta base, Joy found it difficult Benfield to promote his personal interests, and in 1792 he to devote enough time and attention to U.S. maritime became the Nawab's agent and confidant. This association J interests with "other could not have pleased the ports ... of India," es- A portion of the old town wall in Madras built by Paul Benfield. British authorities, as their pecially with Madras, the This area has now been convertedinto a park. relations with Nawab older though less saluMuhammad Ali were anybrious settlement "where thing but cordial. In retromany American ships spect, it seems likely that go." So on November 24, Joy's choice of Abbott as 1794, he appointed Wilconsul agent in Madras liam Abbott, an Ameriwas dictated by the latter's can merchant living in anti-establishment posture Madras, as the first U.S. and activities. If Cornwallis consular agent of the Mawas not going to be helpful dras presidency. to American interests, Joy The well-preserved Mamust have reasoned, he
U
RELATIONS IN MADRAS should look for help from among those who were opposed to the establishment. (Joy described Abbott as "Secretary to the Nabob of Arcot" in a letter to the State Department.) In between representing Benfield and the Nawab, Abbott had a stint with the Madras Courier, one of the city's first newspapers. The weekly, founded in 1785, appointed Abbott as an agent and, in that role, he found himself in trouble with the government in December 1791. The editor, James Hall, had published the previous September an allegorical story titled "Chinese Anecdote." It told of how a Tatar Sta te was tyrannically ruled by the mandarin in charge. The collector of South Arcot district saw himself as the mandarin and complained to the government. Abbott was summoned; he pleaded innocence and blamed Hall. The editor, who said he didn't know the identity of the author and was unaware the story contained any personal allusions, was ordered to apologize through his paper and he did so. Soon after, the weekly terminated Abbott's services. Ironically, only a few months earlier Abbott had offered in a letter to the authorities, on behalf of the Courier, to carry government advertisements "gratis" in the newspaper, provided no postage was charged for despatch of the publication. By "circulating commercial intelligence," Abbott said in his letter, the paper was of "Publick use & answered the ends Government proposed by giving it their support." From 1792, Abbott also seems to have been a partner in the firm of Benjamin Roebuck and William Abbott. His American connection is first mentioned in the records of 1794, when he is in correspondence with Benjamin Joy in Calcutta. In addition to his consular duties, Joy carried on with his outside business activities, which was the rule rather than the exception in the early days of the American republic. U.S. consuls of the 18th and 19th centuries were not paid regular salaries but rather received commissions, which were often meager, out of the fees they charged for the services they performed. As records testify, the reason for Abbott's first contact with Joy was business, and he seemed to have been more Joy's agent in Madras than
byS.MUTHIAH
America's: Roebuck and Abbott inform Mis. James Drummond and George Sparkes and Mis. Hamilton and Reid of Canton about the intended arrival there of the ship John, of Boston, and "introduce" its owner, Benjamin Joy, to them adding that "should Mr. Joy propose any plans that may appear mutually advantageous we think he will prove worthy of any confidence you may place in him." Abbott's firm then writes to Joy that it has received bills drawn by him on his brother Michael of No. 56 Hatton Street, London, and assures him that all "endeavours" will be made to collect the proceeds. Roebuck and Abbott next arrange for insurance on the John for the voyage to China, and later assure Michael Joy that the insurance has gone into effect. Again, a letter from Roebuck and Abbott to Benjamin Joy in January 1795 informs him of "a box of treasure" comprising "3000 Star Pagodas" being sent to him in Calcutta by an "American bottom," the Canton. Piecing the letters together and noting Joy's short tenure in Calcutta-he left the city for the United States in 1795 because of ill health-it would appear that the JoyAbbott, America-Madras connection lasted just 'the length of the John's voyage-Boston-London-MadrasCalcutta-Canton! Nevertheless, it was a beginning and a connection that grew into a major partnership. Abbott was active in local politics as well, and that he was a man of some prominence is apparent from the fact that he was one of the "committee of (24) gentlemen" who, in December 1793, took over the lease of "a house on (43 acres of) grounds," where they "regulated the
amusements which were pursued in the settlement." These included balls, suppers, dramatic performances, and receptions. An example is the "public entertainment" given in 1805 to Sir Arthur Wellesley (later to become the Duke of Wellington). These "public rooms" were known 'J as The Pantheon. Abbott was also nominated to be one of nine aldermen of Madraspatnam between 1793 and 1798 and a member of the Mayor's Court. Nothing appears to have stopped Abbott from accomplishing his goals. For example, in 1797, the government refused to name him as mayor~though his was one of the two names nominated by the Mayor's Court~ unless he apologized to it in suitable form for his transgressions. Abbott not only sought "the form of such an apology," but promptly made it public. Soon he was His Worship the Mayor of Madraspatnam. During his one-year term as mayor an event significant in Madras history took place. The Mayor's Court was reconsti-
tuted as the Court of the Recorder. For the first time, a court in Madras was required to be headed by a man with a legal background. Thus on November I, 1798, Mayor William Abbott swore in Sir Thomas Strange as the first Knight Recorder of Madras. When the Court of the Recorder was reconstituted as the Supreme Court in 180I, Sir Thomas became the first Chief Justice of the Madras presidency. Abbott was nothing if not diligent in promoting his business. For example, it seems he used his influence with the Master Attendant, Edward Adderley, to become Deputy Master Attendant, one of whose jobs was to supply ships calling at Madras port. However, he again ran into trouble with the British authorities when his appointment was challenged by Hugh Jones, the Beachmaster. Jones felt he had been "cruelly" treated, being bypassed and superseded by an outsider. Abbott, it appears, had contracted to pay Adderley 1,000 pounds a quarter for the appointment, recovering it from the sale of
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An excerpt from a letter relating to Abbott's complaint over dismissal as deputy master attendant.
supplies, including water, to the ships. The two declared on oath that there was no agreement between them other than the contract they had formally entered into. The council agreed that Abbott had not "purchased the office" and turned down Jones's appeal. However, after Abbott had been in office for 15 months, he fell out with Adderley and was dismissed. After several appeals against his dismissal to the council in Madras, Abbott wrote directly to the Court of Directors of the East India Company through the "Supreme Government of India" in Calcutta, complaining that the council in Madras was paying no attention to his pleas regarding "the cause of my Dismission." Calcutta sent the letter to the Madras council for action. Abbott was reprimanded for approaching Calcutta without following proper channels, and the Madras government ordered him in 1796 to leave the country "together with your family." He tendered an apology, and the .order was withdrawn.
In 1799, Abbott resigned as an alderman and decided to concentrate on family and business. His first wife, Ann Rogers, had died and on July 26, 1800, he married Miss Elizabeth Lee in St. Mary's in the Fort. He set up a partnership company under the name Abbott and Maitland, dealing in cotton, textiles, pepper, copra, salt, rice, "Birds Nests," "Elephant Teeth," arrack, and rum. The firm also undertook building contracts. It was a prosperous Abbott who appears to have departed Madras sometime in 1812-13 for England, bringing to a close nearly 30 years of his residency in Madras. Except for one brief decade during that period, he had been very much in the public eye and can be credited with getting the Madras-American relationship under way. 0 About the Author: S. M uthiah has \lTillen several books on Madras and the British commercial activit)' in South India. He is a consultal11 editor oj'The Indian Review of Books.
T
he early "official" consular relationship between agency wasreestablished with the appointment of Joseph the United States and Madras appears to have L. Thompson of Maine as consular agent. Thompson was on lasted until 1802. That was the year American succeeded by Charles P. Pierce of Massachusetts representation in Calcutta, under which the Madras October 18, 1872. But he remained in Madras for less representative functioned, faded from the scene for a few than a year and was succeeded by A.F. Pater. decades. One of the reasons for this was the precipitative The post continued as a consular agency under the - decline in Indo-American maritime trade-primarily be- Consulate General at Calcutta until 1908. On June 10 of cause of Great Britai.n's difficulties with its China tradethat year Nathaniel B. Stewart of Georgia was commisand consuls found it difficult. to carry out their official sioned consul at Madras, and the post was raised to the duties on the meager commission they received. rank ofa consulate. It continued as a consulate, under a Joy and Abbott had thriving businesses on the side, but succession of principal officers, until India's indepennot all who followed them did. With declining trade, some dence on August IS, 1947, when it was elevated to the consuls found it difficult to make ends meet. For example, rank of Consulate General, which it remains today. The Philemon S. Parker, who was appointed consul for Bomcurrent Consul General is Timothy P. Hauser. bay in 1838, wrote to the State Department in 1839 that Vastly changed from its beginnings as a one-man, "without any business whatever to detain me," he was diplomatically unrecognized commercial agency attendleaving his post. Still another consul in Bombay, claiming ing to the needs of the occasional Yankee trader, today's it was impossible to live on the $200 in fees he collected U.S. Consulate General plays a vital role in promoting each year as a commercial agent, went to work for the relations between India and the United States. Four East India Company at $5,800 per year. consular offices in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and New A study made of the consular service by Secretary of Delhi now perform such varied duties as issuance of State Martin Van Buren in 1830 concluded that "the immigrant visas to Indian citizens; issuance of nonimmicompensation was so low as to make it impossible for grant visas to tourists, businesspeople, students, and officers to maintain the social standing and influence professionals; and a variety of communications, docuwhich their positions demanded." Thus, in 1856, the U.S. mentary, legal, and personal services to American citizens Congress passed a bill traveling or residing in that provided salaries to Consul General Timothy P. Hauser shakes hands with Tamil Nadu India. consular officials. In Finance Minister V.R. Nedunchezhian as USIS director for Last year the American 1924, the old practice of South India Miriam E. Guichard (second from right) and former Consulate General In appointing consuls on the chief of the consular section Hugh F. Williams look on. Madras, which has four basis of business, politiAmerican consular offical, collegial, or familial cers and 12 Indian emties ended with the esployees, processed 45,000 tablishment of the career nonimmigrant visa appliAmerican Foreign Service. cations and more than Thenceforth, consular du7,000 immigrant vIsa ties were entrusted on the applications-an inbasis of merit to full-time crease of 17 and eight perprofessional foreign sercent, respectively, over vice officers. the previous year. The The consular rela tionMadras office has the ship between the United distinction of being one States and Madras was of the largest issuers of put on a firm footing in orphan immigrant visas 0 1867 when a consular in the world.
ASHOK
Ashok Amritraj, the youngest of the three tennis-playing brothers from Madras, had it in him, according to no less a person than Rod Laver, to become "the best of the trio." Eldest brother Anand had a decent singles record on the professional circuit and had also struck up a formidable combination with younger brother Vijay. The two were among the leading doubles pairs in the world, good enough to reach the semifinals at Wimbledon in 1976. Vijay himself reached the singles quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 1973 and 1981, and took India to the Davis Cup finals in 1974 and 1987. When Ashok reached the finals of the junior Wimbledon in 1974, something that his two brothers had been unable to achieve, great things were predicted for him. But somehow he failed to live up to this early promise, and in 1979 he quit playing competitive tennis. But he had found something equally, if not more, glamorous to fill the void. "You have two sons who have brought you fame and fortune through tennis," Ashok told his parents, Robert and Margaret Amritraj. "I will bring you fame and fortune through another field." Rather a confident remark for a man in his early twenties who had de-
AMRITRAJ
lion. It had a very successful run in India last year. Other films made under the Amritraj banner that have done well include Night Eyes, Illicit Behavior, Betrayal of the Dove, Invasion of Privacy, Red Sun Rising, and Nine Deaths of the Ninja.
cided he wanted to be a filmmaker. "My parents thought I was crazy," he recalls. Toda y, as the Los Angelesbased Amritraj Entertainment, Inc., completes a decade in show business, one
can say for certain that the switch was in fact a great idea. Amritraj Entertainment's Double Impact, the action-thriller starring Jean Claude van Damme, has grossed more than $100 mil-
Ashok keeps tabs on what the public wants. Familiar with every aspect of filmmaking, he is in full control of a company that meets the highest professional standards of Hollywood. Barry Collier, a well-known executive producer and film distributor in the United States, who has been associated with Amritraj Entertainment for more than six years, says, "A lot of care and thought goes into the making of Ashok's films. He has the knack of selecting the right cast and technicians. He is a very creative filmmaker and a shrewd businessman." Ashok has succeeded despite the fact that it is very difficult for independent producers to do well in Hollywood without some kind of tie-up with the major studios. The company's forte up to this point has been slickly made action thrillers. However, Ashok has begun to tackle new themes. A start was made about three years ago with Lambarene. Also known as The Light in the
Jungle, the film is based on the life of Albert Schweitzer. It won numerous international awards, including Best Picture at the South African Film Festival. Ashok, who became a father recently, also has plans to make a film for children, based on Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The shooting, which will take place in South India, is scheduled to commence soon. Ashok plans to make one movie every year in India. He wants to show that "India is not just slums, poor people, and dirty streets as some filmmakers have portrayed. There is another aspect of India-so many delightful dimensions to Indian culture [as well as] the high-rise buildings and palaces and big hotels." The average budget for an Amritraj production used to be $2 million to $3 million. But now Ashok has more ambitious projects in mind. "We budgeted about 50 million dollars for eight films in 1994," he said. That comes to more than $6 million per film. Some of those who have worked in Amritraj productions have gone on to bigger things. The best example is Jean Claude van Damme, who, on the strength of his performance in Double Impact, now commands a fee of about $5 million per picture. In India, Night Eyes and Illicit Behavior have done well at the box office. Other Amritraj films expected to be released soon are Red Sun Rising and Tropical Heat. The latter was shot in India during 1992-93. Says Ashok: "I am sure that A scene from the award-winning The Light in the Jungle, based on the life of Albert Schweitzer.
Left: Double Impact, an action thriller that grossed more than $100 million, starred Jean Claude van Damme (right). Center: A scene from Tropical Heat, shot near Mysore in 1992. Bottom: Amritraj with associate Barry Collier, the well-known Hollywood producer; and with (left to right) Mrs. Collier, wife Chitranjali, and parents Margaret and Robert infront of the Amritraj home in Madras.
filmmakers like Mani Ratnam and Subhash Ghai who have been so successful here could make films internationally. There is an incredible market out there in the entertainment industry. If any Indian filmmaker wants to take the step to make movies in the United States, I am prepared to be the bridge between India and Hollywood." In 1991, Ashok was presented the Platinum Award for filmmaking excellence by the Indian community in southern California. Later that year he was given the Nataraj Award by the Indian community in the United States. And in 1992, Ashok had the honor of being inducted into the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, under the sponsorship of Sherry Lansing, president of Paramount Pictures, and Arnold Kopelson, Academy Award-winning producer of Platoon. Earlier this year in Madras, Ashok showed this writer a IS-minute video on Amritraj Entertainment's eventful first decade. There were felicitations from Charlton Heston and Sidney Poitier-"my tennis buddies," as Ashok put it-among a host of other stars who have worked under the Amritraj banner. From all appearances Amritraj Entertainment's second decade will be even more successful than the first. And who knows? A Wimbledon title eluded Ashok but perhaps an Oscar is in the offing! D About the Author: Par tab Ramchand, a Madras-based journalist with the Ananda Bazar group of publications in Calcutta, specializes in sports and films.
A 33-year-old woman, from a family that had frequently been stricken by breast. cancer, walked into Dr. Barbara Weber's office at the University of Michigan and made a dramatic announcement. The woman--cal1 her Ms. X-told the physician that three days later she was scheduled for drastic surgery-"a bilateral radical mastectomy." "Is there anything you want to tel1 me?" she asked Weber who, along with several other scientists, was seeking a genetic basis for the high incidence of breast cancer in Ms. X's family. Ms. X knew there was a chance that the researchers might have discovered if she was at risk for the disease. But if the scientists didn't know whether she carried a breast-cancer gene, she wanted to go ahead with the surgery to avoid the suffering that had plagued other women in her family.
Checking the "Pedigree" Weber, an assistant professor of internal medicine and director of breast oncology at the university's hospital, knew that an analysis of the family had just been completed. Scientists had found a marker so close to the flawed gene that they knew, with 98 percent certainty, who had the gene and who did not. A genetic family tree, known to scientists as a "pedigree," flashed in Weber's mind. She was almost certain that Ms. X did not carry the genetic flaw and, after double-checking, told her she was not at risk for the inherited form of the disease. Ms. X, who was visiting Weber's office with a sister who was there for chemotherapy, was elated and canceled her surgery. Later, however, she felt guilty that she had escaped the disease that had stricken her two sisters and mother. The rapid pace of discoveries of the genetic defects that cause disease has raised fears among scientists that the health-care system is not ready to handle the knowledge it is about to receive. "I am real1y concerned about how we are going to handle this on a large scale," says Dr. Francis S. Col1ins, a member of the team studying breast cancer and director of the National Center for Human Genome Research in Bethesda, Maryland. Tests already exist for a few disease genes, including the mutations that cause cystic fibrosis, a genetic flaw that one out of25 Americans is believed to carry. But in 1993 the rate of gene identifications picked up, particularly for diseases that strike after adolescence. In that year alone, scientists identified genes for Huntington's disease, a relatively rare but devastating neurological disorder, and an inherited form of "Lou Gehrig's disease," or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Scientists have also found markers close to the genes for inherited forms of colon cancer and breast cancer. When the actual gene is identified, a test for its presence is immediately available.
Although the implications of genetic tests have been discussed for years among smal1 circles of medical ethicists,
the prospect of millions of patients demanding to find out if they are at risk for common forms of cancer now concerns a larger group of scholars and scientists. No one knows how the public, physicians, hospitals, health-insurance companies, and researchers studying families with genetic disorders will react to the widespread availability of genetic tests. Scientists caution that administering the tests they will find for many afflictions will be appropriate only for those likely to have the inherited forms of the diseases. Those who don't have relatives stricken by a disease probably shouldn't bother to take a test, scientists say. But they fear that even people without a family history of disease might also demand to be tested. Collins is urging researchers who work with families that have inherited disease to begin studying how to deliver counseling, testing, and medical care. He and others considering the implications of genetic tests see a few key problems. One of them is keeping test results confidential in an age when medical records have come close to becoming public. Another is the chance that genetic tests will turn the healthinsurance industry upside down: Instead of insuring people against unexpected illness, health insurance could gradually turn into a prepayment plan for medical problems that are on their way. A third difficulty presented by genetic tests, a problem already on the horizon, is a shortage of trained counselors who can talk to patients about the pros and cons of genetic tests and who can explain to them what the results mean. That job isn't always easy. The test for cystic fibrosis, for example, can only detect about 85 percent of the genetic flaws that cause the disease. Parents who test negative could still have a child with the disease. The United States now has about 1,100 genetic counselors, who study for two years and work for one more before they can be certified. But the counselors acknowledge that they wouldn't be able to meet the demand if large numbers of people sought genetic tests. "It would be tough," says Bea Leopold, executive di~ector of the National Society of Genetic Counselors based in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Collins says ways must be found to supplement one-on-one genetic counseling. Health-care professionals may sometimes have to explain genetic tests to groups, he says, and some counselors may have to develop expertise in just one disease. Interactive videodiscs, which would allow patients to seek out information pertinent to them, could be used in some situations, he says. Whatever form the counseling takes, patients will have to be told that it wil1 be difficult to keep their test results completely confidential. That lack of privacy will affect families as well as individuals. "Genetic tests don't just tell something about you but about your brothers and sisters and children and parents," says Ray Moseley, director of the medi-
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by DAVID L WHEELER
cal humanities program at the University of Florida and the leader of a study on the effectsof genetic testing on health, disability, and life insurance. Genetic tests, for instance, may accidentally prove that a man children call "daddy" isn't really their father.
The Need for Confidentiality Moseley says another study showed that about 250 employees in a medium-sized hospital had access to medical records-a number that makes inadvertent disclosure of private information seem likely. He also notes that to be reimbursed for their health care, most Americans routinely sign forms giving healthinsurance companies access to all of their medical records, which can include the results of genetic tests. Under the current system, Moseley and others who have studied the problem say it is impossible to keep the results of genetic tests out of the hands of insurance companies. The companies may well use that information to drop coverage for those who are at risk for disease. Many physicians believe legislation will be required to make genetic tests confidential and to prevent health-insurance companies from excluding families with inherited disease. Researchers also must guard against breaches of confidentiality. A team of scientists that found a marker for an inherited form of colon cancer, for example, chose, in a paper they published in Science, to omit information about which family members carried it. One family in the study was from a rural area in New Zealand and the other was from Newfoundland. Gloria M. Petersen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on the research, says the two families come from small, tight-knit towns where others know they were participating in research. A busybody from those towns could deduce who was who on the published family trees. Paul Billings,an assistant clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied genetic-testingissues for five years, believes scientists should be concerned about how the information they have gathered might be used. Billings has used advertisements in medical journals to gather case studies of what he calls "genetic discrimination." He is also writing up the results of a survey of 30,000 people contacted largely through organizations set up to help those with inherited disease. Billings says his studies show that many people do not want to take genetic tests, because they either don't want to know the results or believe such tests might make them vulnerable to discrimination by insurance companies, the military, or private employers. The fears of discrimination are well-founded, Billings says. "We're not sure how common genetic discrimination is, but the fact that we can detect it with the crude instruments we have been using indicates it is fairly common." Billings and his colleagues found that health-
insurance companies frequently tell people who have relatives with inherited disease that they must take a genetic test to prove they are not at risk, or they will not be covered under a healthcare plan. "This is economic coercion," he says. Moseley of the University of Florida says that the U.S. government's effort to reform the nation's health-care system to guarantee health insurance for everyone may not reduce the problem of forced testing. The reforms, he says, will emphasize preventive health care, and taxpayers and federal officials may not look kindly on those who refuse to take genetic tests that could keep costs down by catching disease in its early stages. The history of public health, adds Moseley, is littered with examples of recommended treatments, such as vaccinations, that quickly turn into requirements.
Concern Over Preventive Care Genetic tests also may exacerbate controversies over the best preventive care for particular diseases. Collins says in one family studied at the University of Michigan, every adult woman found to be at risk for breast cancer opted for a mastectomy. "Before I got into this field I never thought this step would be so popular," he says. "We did nothing to encourage it." Physicians disagree over how much tissue needs to be removed to prevent breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and reports have emerged of cancer occurring in remaining tissue even after the breasts or ovaries have been removed. "There are no epidemiological data on risk of breast cancer among women who have had prophylactic mastectomy," writes Mary-Claire King, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley. A double mastectomy, reconstructive surgery, and removing a woman's ovaries to eliminate the risk of ovarian cancer can cost up to $40,000, a sum that many insurance companies may notwant to pay. Despite all the controversies ov~r genetic tests and their potentially negative societal effects, scientists say that the identification of genes should eventually lead to better medical treatments. The Michigan research team had to tell one woman who had already had a bilateral mastectomy years earlier to avoid breast cancer, that she probably wasn't carrying the cancer gene. She ultimately came to terms with the decision she had made, considering the information she had at the time. But when the team told another woman in the same family that she probably did have the gene for breast cancer, she agreed to have a mammogram on the same day. A tiny lump was identified, and she had surgery to remove it three days later. If the tumor hadn't been removed, the cancer would have progressed. "We probably saved her life," says Collins. 0 About the Author: David L. Wheeler writes for The Chronicle of
Higher Education.
ave
works hard to win the trust and hold the attention of its
customers through such devices as fashion shows (left and far left) in its television studios (far left, bottom); monitoring its merchandise sales (far left, center), which are electronically
updated
every five seconds; housing a massive inventory (left) in four huge distribution centers that approximate
the size
of 24 football fields; and executing an order in less than a day. 1be result: Six out of ten new customers return to their TV screens for another QVC purchase.
A
t half past midnight on an icy Saturday night, the shopping malls surrounding West Chester, Pennsylvania, have been dark for hours. But here in a former pharmaceutical warehouse, Randy Dixon's phone sales are just starting to heat up. In the past 30 minutes he has sold a garnet and pearl ring to a doctor's wife in Scottsdale, Arizona; a gold necklace to a woman in Temperance, Michigan; and eight other pieces of jewelry worth a total of$446.56. And that is just the beginning. Half an hour later and 25 meters away, Dan Wheeler hops off the set ofQVC's "Heart Jewelry Collection" show and rushes to a computer screen, which tells him that the ring he was pushing in front of the camera brought in more than 3,000 orders to operators like Dixon in just an hour. "Three thousand at $38 a ring, that's more than $110,000," Wheeler calculates out loud, as his boyish face lights up. This is QVC's profitable new world of television home shopping, in which success can be counted in dollars per minute, 24 hours a day. By the time the retailer's fiscal year ends soon, it is expected to have sold some $1,200 million worth of goods to cable TV watchers for the year. L.L. Bean, America's venerable catalog giant, has taken 81 years to approach the $1,000 million mark, but QVC blasted through it in less than eight years. Says retail consultant Alan Millstein: "The concept is only. eight years old and [QVC's] compound growth rate has exceeded any retailer I can think of since World War II." With customers sending instant feedback over QVC's toll-free line, the TV retailer can adjust its merchandising strategy minute by minute, not just season by season. The company's IBM ThinkPad notebook computer tracks QVC sales product by product, updated every five seconds. "It's how I learned the business," QVC Chief Executive Officer Barry Diller explains. And since QVC deals directly with manufacturers and sells in such vast quantities, its cost of goods is lower than that of many traditional retailers. Designer Diane Yon Furstenberg, who now sells her clothes exclusively through QVC, estimates she
can price her blouses, skirts, and blazers on television at less than half what a department store would have to charge. "Being on QVC allows me to pass up the middleman, the double shipping, the double warehousing, the showroom costs," says Yon Furstenberg. With fewer layers nibbling away at profits, QVC enjoys a larger gross profit margin-42 percent recently-than a typical department store. "And they don't pay rent, sales help, or advertising," adds consultant Millstein, listing three of the largest costs for traditional store owners.
Touching the Goods These virtues were already apparent to direct mail marketer Joseph Segel in 1986 as he watched the early successes of the Home Shopping Network (HSN), based in St. Petersburg, Florida. But Segel also recognized that the weakness of television shopping lay in the fact that customers have no direct contact with the merchandise or the merchandiser. Doug Briggs, QVC's executive vice president for electronic retailing, laments that the problem hasn't faded away. "With a store, you know it's going to be there tomorrow," says Briggs. "On TV, who are you dealing with? You can't touch anything. There's no absolute certainty." That explains why the average QVC customer watches 50 hours of the shopping channel's programs before picking up the phone to make the first order. "It's all about trust," adds Briggs. "People have got to trust before they'll change habits." Every executive at QVC is charged with developing that trust, ~tarting with program producers and merchandise buyers. Segel believed that HSN, with its then tacky sets and high-pressure sales tactics, undermined credibility. QVC would use low-key product "explainers" and no sale deadlines. Since then, QVC has passed the industry pioneer in profitability and sales. The credibility of QVC merchandise is bolstered by alliances with famous-name designers such as Yon Furstenberg and Bill Blass, trusted retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue and name-brand manufacturers like Pentax and Panasonic. In a recent coup, QVC obtained exclusive re-
tail rights for the three-month introduction of Kodak's newest camera, the Cameo Zoom Plus.
Gem Margins But despite the importance of big names in turning skeptical viewers into new customers, QVC still finds greater profits in the humbler world of Diamonique imitation gem jewelry. Electronic goods typically carry margins ofless than 30 percent, for example, while jewelry margins run closer to 50 percent. Jewelry, though declining in importance, still accounts for more than 40 percent of QVC sales. Luring established names to an industry with a reputation for trinkets and T-shirts has become much easier since 1992, when QVC attracted Diller, fresh from his success at turning Fox Television into the nation's fourth network. Nothing about QVC's West Chester headquarters-a brown brick cube abutting a cornfield and horse farm-suggests Hollywood glamour. But the two limousines idling outside one recent night do indicate that selling on QVC is no longer anathema to the stars. One limo waits for Yon Furstenberg to finish her Silk Assets show. The other will spirit away John Tesh, the telegenic host of Entertainment Tonight. Relaxing in QVC's green room after selling 45,000 CDs and cassettes of his piano recordings, Tesh admits that his friends consider selling on TV "weird,"
Left: With as many as 925 operators,
and a computer
that can handle 1,825 orders at a time, QVC can process more than 35,000 purchases an hour. Far left: Packers work day and night to get orders out the door. About 85 percent of the packages are shipped to customers within 24 hours.
but Diller's presence makes a big difference. Without the former Fox executive, says Tesh, "I would have had to think about it harder." In their effort to build trust, QVC executives have pledged that no customer will order an item only to find that it is out of stock and back-ordered. Keeping this commitment requires the utmost coordination between programmers, operators, and inventory keepers. At his producer's table facing the set, Tom Armstrong has video screens showing different camera angles, but the screen that gets his greatest attention is the computer screen showing sales and inventory. By monitoring supply and demand, Armstrong can prevent hosts from promoting unavailable products. The data are updated every five seconds by a computer that links the hundreds of QVC operators taking orders in West Chester; San Antonio, Texas; and Chesapeake, Virginia. The second an item sells out, operators' terminals refuse to take any more orders for that merchandise. All of this is useless, of course, if no one knows exactly how many baubles and baby toys are in the warehouse. But at QVC's West Chester jewelry distribution center, a recent physical inventory count revealed that out of $500 million worth of gold and Diamonique, a scant $30,000 was unaccounted for. Even the shipping departments at QVC's three distribution centers are deter-
mined to inspire customer confidence. QVC's most recent annual report, bragging that the average order is out of the door within 48 hours, already looks out of date. Several months ago, Diller demanded that all packages must be on the road in half that time. To help meet that mandate, management at the West Chester distribution center doubled the size of its flexible part-time workforce-mostly retirees, college students, and mothers-to 500. Today, 85 percent of all packages meet Diller's 24-hour goal. Diller says hitting that mark is just the first step toward what he calls "ground zero": Order it by 4 p.m. and you'll get it the next day. By raising the industry standard, the approach may be as useful in scaring away competitors as it is in attracting customers. "This business is hard to do," says DiIler. "That's good, because for others it's very hard to do." Success does breed imitation, however, and this year a new era of television shopping has begun. A Time Warner/ Spiegel joint venture announced that it has signed up a mailbox full of catalog companies-including Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Neiman-Marcus, and the Nature Co.-to participate in its Catalog 1shopping channel. Most painful of all to QVC, the Sharper Image, whose products were featured on two QVC specials last year, has jumped ship to Catalog 1. The new shopping channel debuted in four J
markets earlier this year. This autumn was also to herald the arrival of TV Macy's, putting the chain's products within reach of cable watchers from Maine to Missouri. And HSN itself plans to crowd in another channel, Television Shopping Mall, featuring the wares of established specialty stores. Both Catalog 1 and TV Macy's are aiming for a more upscale customer than the average QVC buyer, who has a household income near $40,000. But QVC, too, is trying to move uptown. Q2, pitched as an electronic specialty store, is on a separate channel from the regular QVC programs. Q2 aims to capture a younger and more active audience that formerly may have shied away from television home shopping. Busy consumers with more disposable income are no doubt attractive; they have played a large role in catapulting the $50,000 million catalog industry. But one former QVC executive questions whether any of the new upscale channels can attract the busiest big spenders. "You can go through a 48-page catalog every month in a few minutes," he explains, but to see everything a television shopping channel has to offer, "you have to watch for several days." The solution lies in the future of interactive television, when shoppers will tell their TV sets what kind of products they are looking for. QVC will begin to dabble in that world late this year, offering an online shopping service for personal computer users. Diller warns that interactivity "won't mean anything of significance in people's lives for at least three to five years," but he adds that he would not have come to QVC had it not been for the opportunity to be on the front lines of this technological revolution. "I was interested in QVC because I really did believe that it was at the junction point of interactivity," Diller says, adding, "but in a primitive way." And if the primitives make money like this, just what might the civilized be able to do? D
About the Author: Don L. Boroughs is an associate editor with U.S. News & World Report.
ressures on Many pundits blame President Bill Clinton's inexperience or indecision for the current crisis in American foreign policy. But the roots of the dilemma lie far deeper. They run to the collapse of America's postwar policy-making system-a collapse that not even the most sage and resolute leadership or the discovery of some new strategic formula could have averted. The problem, and the answer, is that the American people are in the process of reclaiming foreign policy from the "Wise Men" who have so assiduously guarded it fOF the past 50 years. Over the last half-century America has undergone a technological and demographic transformation. Increased mobility has forged new centers of culture, fashion, wealth, and power. A communications revolution has rewired the nation's nerve system with computers, faxes, and fiber-optic cables. Immigration approaches levels not seen since the turn of the century, and Americans travel and live abroad in numbers scarcely imaginable years ago. Such changes integrate Americans in new ways with each other as well as with the rest of the world. But they also diversify and divide us as they slowly erode the lingering vestiges of our Mayflower roots. This globalization of American society has made the idea of national interest more elusive. While America's politics has always intruded on its foreign policy, today a fresh constellation of domestic forces creates its own global policy. Making sense of American foreign policy requires a fuller understanding of the new domestic politics that now shapes America's relations abroad. Foremost among these pressures are the regionalization of global policy making, the impact of ethnicity on American foreign policy, and the rise of powerful global issue groups.
The Establishment Declines For nearly five decades the complexion and outlook of American foreign policy makers remained constant. In the view of the small, cohesive club of academics, diplomats, financiers, lawyers, and politicians that ascended to power during World War II-men such as Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, George Kennan, John McCloy, and Paul Nitze-this was as it should be. National security and the national interest, they argued, must transcend the special interests and passions of the people who make up America. They believed that domestic politics should stop at the water's edge and that foreign policy should be guided by bipartisan consensus. This separation of policy into foreign and domestic spheres rationalized and legitimized the emergence of the close community of experts that shepherded American foreign policy throughout the Cold War years. After 1941, the Northeast played a dominant role in shaping
foreign policy. But this was not always the case. For most of America's history the influence of the more industrial and Anglophile Northeast was counterbalanced by other regions. In the controversy surrounding the French Revolution, for example, opposition to the antirevolutionary views of Eastern opinion leaders such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris came from Thomas Jefferson and the South's other agrarian populists. Likewise, in the great debates over war and neutrality in the first half of this century, opposition to Eastern internationalist calls issued mostly from isolationists and populists from the Midwest and West. How was this small band of Atlantic-minded internationalists able to triumph? What enabled them in the postwar period to subdue the isolationist impulses of the hinterland and turn the nation of "no entangling alliances" into both the world's policeman and its banker? For the most part, the answer is twofold: Fear and prosperity. The dangers of the postwar world-the threat of Soviet expansion and the haunting memory of global depression-<:onvinced the public that it was necessary for the United States to assume the mantle of world leadership, and the rapid growth and productivity of America's postwar economy convinced them that they could. It also helped that Eastern internationalists had gained great authority once it was clear that they were right about AmeI1ca's need to enter World War II. In contrast, many of the most prominent Midwestern opinion leaders on international affairs-such as Senators William Borah of Idaho and Ge,rald Nye of North Dakota-were discredited. By taking the lead both in mobilizing the nation for war and in preparing it for the peace that followed, the Eastern internationalists were able to shape and staff the qurgeoning foreign policy institutions created in the late I940s. Most important, this newly ascendant coterie fashioned the overarching consensus on containment and free trade that emerged as America's guiding international outlook. The preeminence of the East was reinforced by other postwar developments. The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, Time magazine emerged as the leading national sources of news and commentary on international affairs. The original big three national television networks all chose New York as the site of their headquarters, and hence their evening news shows. A small number of well-endowed foundations and influential foreign policy institutes were also based in New York and Washington, D.C. And a handful of Eastern seaboard universities played a critical role in training and employing America's new foreign policy cadres. Together, these developments meant that the most reliable,
the fastest, and often the only way to become a player in the national foreign policy debate was to locate oneself along the Harvard-Manhattan-Foggy Bottom corridor. This reality greatly contributed to the homogeneity of discourse on international issues that characterized the Cold War years. As long as the Cold War endured and nuclear Armageddon seemed only a missile away, the public was willing to tolerate such an undemocratic foreign policy-making system. But in the eyes of most Americans, the world is no longer so menacingmessy, bloody, and sometimes shockingly brutal, yes, but a threat to our security and peace, no. With the Soviet Union residing in the dustbin of history and the United States reigning as the world's largest debtor, the twin logic of national security and the national interest is neither clear nor compelling. Without a clear and present danger, the American public is no longer willing to trust the experts to make the right decisions when it comes to the lives of their sons and daughters, especially when the experts themselves are so deeply divided. The result is that the wall separating foreign affairs from domestic influences has come crumbling down. The old foreign policy establishment, already weakened and divided by its defeat in Vietnam, is losing both its bearings and its sway. And the old foreign policy-making system, no longer insulated by fear and prosperity, is more susceptible than ever to societal pressures. As the muddled debate over intervention in Bosnia and Somalia attests, this rupture has left the ship of state dangerously adrift in a sea of geopolitical confusion. The idea of a separation between domestic and foreign affairs has become untenable.
Global Policy Is Local The globalization of American society has greatly increased the incentives for individuals in all parts of the country as well as local, state, and regional institutions to become more involved in world affairs. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, developments abroad matter more for local communities. War in Central America causes greater burdens on southern California's social services; drug feuds in Colombia lead to assassinations in New York; unrest in Russia affects port traffic in Seattle; and economic development in Mexico throws Americans out of work in Detroit. At the same time, opportunities for local, state, and regional actors to influence global policy have also grown. Many state and local institutions are establishing direct links with counterparts around the world through technical assistance and exchange programs. Foundations and entrepreneurs are creating new regionally based foreign policy communities to provide the kind of leadership in world affairs that the Eastern establishment once monopolized. Almost every major university in the United States now has some kind of international affairs degree program. The news media are also more diverse; CNN (Cable News Network) is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and plans for new cable channels are being hatched across the country. The East's privileged place in foreign affairs has eroded. New York no longer dominates the nation's economic relationships with
the rest of the world, and the share of trade that flows through Eastern seaboard ports has shrunk dramatically. From southern California to the Great Lakes, and from the Pacific Northwest to the Texas border and southern Florida, regions are developing their own economic interests and orientations, and creating the trade offices and other institutions necessary to pursue them. In short, regionalization has not only lessened Eastern influence over foreign policy making but also helped spawn a new process of global policy making with sources of power far beyond Washington.
New Voices, New Accents As America becomes more diverse, the economic, social, and political incentives for individuals to emphasize their ethnic identities are increasing. In the 1980s, for example, AfricanAmericans, motivated in part by the model of Jewish-American support for Israel, largely succeeded in laying claim to U.S. policy toward Africa, especially toward South Africa. More recently, Mexican-American groups played a critical part in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) debate (see SPAN, April 1993) and in the formulation of U.S. policy toward Mexico generally. Similarly, a growing Chinese-American community has played an increasingly significant role in policy toward China, and the American cousins of embattled East European nationalities have begun to mobilize as well. This trend is reinforced by the economic advantages that can accrue to ethnic groups who serve as a bridgehead for potentially prosperous countries such as China and Mexico. More and more foreign countries are beginning to see their ethnic brethren in the United States as natural allies in campaigns to develop more favorable bilateral relationships. This web of societal ties linking American ethnic communities with their homelands is certain to thicken as the information revolution increases the ease and affordability of reaching out and touching previously distant kith and kin. Concentration of ethnic groups in particular geographic areas heightens the impact of the regionalization of foreign affairs. For example, Asian Americans constitute roughly three percent of the U.S. population but nearly ten percent of the population of southern California and 15 percent of the San Francisco Bay area. Similarly, Hispanics account for roughly nine percent of the national population, but they comprise onethird of southern Californians, one-third of south Floridians, and one-quarter of Texans. The more localized foreign policy becomes, the more likely that ethnic ties will influence the debate, especially as more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are elected to local and state political offices. The results are likely to vary. In some foreign policy areas, such as Africa, ethnic and racial considerations are likely to play a dominant role as long as high costs or risks are not involved. In most other areas, they will be increasingly important factors in a complex and changing equation, one in which ethnic organizations may not only attempt to influence U.S. foreign policy but also to develop their own global policies. If the United States today had a set of broadly recognized "national" interests and a
clear global strategy, the impact of ethnicity on foreign policy would be less significant. At present, however, there is little prospect of either anytime soon.
The Grass Roots Grow The final factor contributing to the breakdown of the old foreign policy consensus is the emergence of powerful, activist groups organized around individual issues such as human rights, the environment, humanitarian relief, and women's rights. These global issue groups differ from traditional national interest groups in that their principal goal is to change policies and living conditions beyond our borders rather than promote and protect the economic interests or welfare of their American members. In most other respects, including origins, scope, size, resources, effectiveness, and commitment, they vary widely. Once again, this phenomenon is not entirely new. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the peace movement, and the international women's movement date back to the turn of the century. Beyond the peace movement, however, the number and influence of foreign-policy issue groups in America had been limited. The turning point occurred in the 1970s with the creation in Washington of a number of wellstaffed offices focused on particular issues. Today, these groups are increasingly attracting the best and brightest of the young college graduates interested in world affairs. During the Cold War, most of these issue groups were, by necessity, oppositional. Since there was little chance that the foreign policy establishment would give their objectives equal weight with the rief:d to contain communism, they focused on exposing the effects of Washington's policies and, wherever possible, limiting governmental prerogatives. But government has begun to embrace many of the goals these groups have long sought to promote, thus presenting their leaders with a dramatically different set of strategic choices. Their most important new challenge is to find ways to merge myriad single issue pressures into a coherent whole and to do so in an environment of shrinking resources. The trade-offs involved no longer pit geopolitics against human rights or development. Instead, they pit environment vs. development vs. humanitarian relief vs. democratization vs. economic reform, etc. Many participants in this emerging debate have sought to mute these conflicts by embracing concepts, such as sustainable development, that suggest that everything good can go together-and it may, but only in the long run. But for now, easy compromises and easy money are scarce. Moreover, it is very difficult, both intellectually and politically, for single-issue groups to adjust their rhetoric in the ways necessary for a grand synthesis to emerge. One of the greatest strengths of the leadership of these groups has been their ability to persuade both funders and constituents that their particular issue deserves priority. Softening such claims could mean losing support. The issue-group picture is also growing more complex. At first it was dominated by a few national organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In the 1980s, however,
grass-roots organizations sprang up across the country. Today, groups of varying size and character literally number in the hundreds. In addition, more and more groups are de-emphasizing foreign policy advocacy and concentrating on their own global policy initiatives. This shift is most evident in areas such as South Africa, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, where the reasons to lobby Washington are rapidly declining and the opportunities for direct action abroad are rapidly increasing. The result is a whole new set of cleavages and complications.
Synth,esis or Struggle? The breakdown of the old foreign-policy system extends beyond the security realm to economics. Protectionism is nothing new. What is new is that environmentalists, human rights activists, labor, and regional political leaders seem to be merging in a popular coalition that rejects free trade as the organizing principle of the global economy. This development was demonstrated by the long debates over the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and NAFTA. When the U.S. economy was growing and good jobs at rising wages were plentiful, such criticism fell on deaf ears. But what is true in good times is often false in bad, and for many Americans the good times seem over. A new and highly uncertain era has begun. It is possible that the heirs of the Wise Men will succeed in diversifying the foreign policy establishment and in enlisting these new forces under the banner of a new grand strategy such as "enlargement." But that is unlikely. The latest generation of Wise Men does not have enough public authority or institutional clout to forge a new consensus from the top down without a threat as clear and compelling as the Red Menace. Nor are its leaders sufficiently nimble or creative to put out the prairie fire of independent global policy making that is raging across the country. These new domestic forces could well lead to the balkanization of the foreign policy-making process in the United States, with different communities and groups seeking to control different issues and policies. At best, such a development would create a system of separate policy-making domains organized around an implicit set of rules for resource allocation and conflict resolution between them. More likely, balkanization would cause a bitter and pr910nged domestic struggle over America's role in the world, undermining its ability to lead in the era now dawning. Only a radically redesigned foreign policy-making system, one fashioned to meet the global challenges of the 21st century in the same way that the national security apparatus was created to face the Cold War, would make a synthesis of these competing interests possible. Only an open, decentralized, and collaborative system, which encouraged the initiatives of regional actors, ethnic groups, and global-issue groups, would restore public confidence that Americans' involvement in world affairs is still consistent with their own values and would improve the security and welfare of all. 0 About the Author: Michael Clough is a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and cochairman of the Stanley Foundation's New American Global Dialogue.
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"See, the problem with doing things to prolong your life is that all the extra years come at the end, when you're old." Drawing
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by Mankoff:
HEART Of
AMERICA
•
BYPASS
•
1994 The New Yorker
Magazine.
Inc.
The Ma9ic of
The American town is a mythical place, the old crucible of our innocence, its Main Streets and wood-frame houses a prim chastisement to our troubled, urbanizing century. "Main Street," as Sinclair Lewis prophetically declared, "is the climax of civilization."
What is it that makes a place work as a home? When the author moved to Middlebury in Vermont, he found the answer.
But Lewis's words were also tinged with irony: In his great novel of 1920, he unpeeled Main Street to find a dead end, a prairie gopher hole of prim pieties and jingo politics. Three generations later, America's towns look much worse than that. Most visibly degraded are the city-sapped towns. By the year 2000, the 12 largest population centers in America will contain 70 percent of the population. No less troubled are the towns that have swelled-the "weekend" towns, overrun by city dwellers buying second homes. The newcomers' purchasing power inflates real estate and property taxes. Their tastes require boutiques where general stores had stood, gourmet ice-cream parlors in the abandoned railroad station, Szechuan takeout in the former coffee shop. The local, native-born population thins out; the legacy of stewardship falls away. And a different kind of blight sets in. Towns that work do stand, here and there, but they are hard to find. To enter one is to experience a cleansing shock, the recognition of a place that gets by on its own, that pays homage to its history yet reinvents itself with each new generation, a place remote but spiritually and intellectually sustaining. Such a town is Middlebury, Vermont. Four years ago, I freed myself from urban obligations and brought my family to this charmed hamlet in the Champlain Valley, crowned by the spire of a 185-year-old Congregational church, bisected by a meandering stream that forms a waterfall in the epicenter of town, framed by two of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. Sinclair Lewis was still right, I found, but it was possible to savor in his proposition a deeper irony than he had intended-that he himself bought a farm in Vermont during his final years. Middlebury is a fairly young town, as New England reckons these things; its land wasn't cleared until 1766. This article was originally Copyright
'-s
published
1993 Ron Powers.
in Com/(; Nas! TRA VELER.
Today its oldest buildings date to the early 19th century, but its central business district is more up-to-date-square red brick and stone buildings from the 1880s through about 1910. The Green, which enfolds the 1827 gray stone St. Stephen's' Episcopal Church, is equally avant-garde; its stocks and whipping posts have been gone longer than anybody around here can remember. Today the old milling and marble-quarrying
town is a center of agricultural, academic, recreational, and entrepreneurial life. It boasts about 8,000 souls. It also harbors a strong aesthetic link with its 18thcentury origins; a vital relationship with the surrounding farms and wilderness and the changing seasons; a relatively steadfast source of economic stability (Middlebury College, which also provides access to culture and learning); a robust mingling among its various economic and social echelons; and an abiding sense of regeneration. Place is the first great reason a town survives as Middlebury has. Place can mean physical terrain, or regional identity, or the accumulated quirks and lovely eccentricities of architecture, alleyway, raspberry patch, railroad track. In Middlebury, place means all of these. THe town is situated in a rolling valley, brilliant with maple trees, between the Adirondack and Green mountain ranges, in the bosom of some of America's richest and least-spoiled countryside. Safely beyond the sticky tendrils of Albany (two-and-a-half hours of hard noninterstate driving away), Boston (three and a half). and New York City (five), the town is virtually immune to urban commuters and weekenders. And yet not fatally isolated. Route 7, a vintage two-lane highway that meanders from Canada to NEW HAMPSHIRE MASSACHUSETTS
the Connecticut
shore,
passes
through
town, connecting it to, among other places, Burlington, a graceful and cosmopolitan small city 58 kilometers to the north on the shores of Lake Champlain. An international airporl in Burlington
provides access into and out of the region for winter skiers, college students and professors, businesspeople, and a seasonal flow of tourists and wilderness sportsmen. Place alone cannot ensure a town's good fortune. An economic motor is needed-a farming nexus, a manufacturing plant, an institution of higher learning. Of these, the first two have steadily retreated from America's towns. The third, while not exactly disappearing, has in many instances proved unreliable as a steward of its host town's fortunes. Not so in Middlebury. On a broad swell ofland on the leafy western rim of town spreads the sloping 200-hectare campus of Middlebury College, an elite liberal arts academy founded in 1800. Middlebury College has acted as a safeguard, insulating the town from the extremes of either decay or hypergrowth. Of its $70 million annual budget, about half flows either directly or indirectly into the area's economy: In land and building taxes, in salaries (the school employs some 800 local people either full-time or part-time), and in occasional gifts and bequests, such as a new fire engine. The school enriches the town in other ways as well. Its 2,000 mostly affluent students (tuition is $22,900 a year) crowd into the local shops, restaurants, intown movie house, keg-beer retailers, and hairdressing salons. Every year a few graduates find they cannot bear to leave the town and take their $91,600 education back to the world of gridlock and corporate suburbs. "We have the besteducated carpenters in the world here," a townsman dryly remarks. The college has nourished the town spiritually as well. Its summer language program and its position as a center of Russian studies have brought an international flow of ideas. Two years ago the college acquired the Salzburg Seminar, a series of world-policy discussions among American and European intellectuals, which had been based at Harvard University. Its Old Stone Row, a line of early-19th-century gray stone buildings, announces the institution's link with its past. Its powerful dance, theater, concert, and lecture series have given the town access to cultural crosscurrents normally unimaginable in a small northern New England village. At the same time, the college has with tweedy subtlety arranged things to ensure that prosperity will not get, well, out of hand. Over the decades, its board of trustees has quietly purchased nearly 2,400 hectares of farmland around the town's perimeter and in adjoining townships. The result is a kind of rural preserve within eyeshot of its students (who are, after all, tomorrow's benefactors and leaf-peeping tourists). Middlebury is one of the few towns left in America whose borders have not been choked and uglified by arterial strip development. The time has long since vanished when most Americans could claim experience with a working dairy farm-the fine geometrics of its red barns against a green landscape, the bare light bulbs above its milking stalls spilling their timeless glow out into the predawn chill of a winter
A town that works: One of Middlebury's many backroads used by cyclists (above); a music concert on the town green on a summer evening (right); downtown on Main Street (opposite page).
'morning, the weight and cluster of its tail-switching Holsteins or Herefords. But in the hillsides and valleys around Middlebury, the dairy farm remains an authentic way oflife. The town is surrounded by them. True, their numbers are declining, and the brute economics of agribusiness are threatening the survivors. But corporatized farming has not gained a foothold in Vermont, and the 300 or so working dairy farms in the county keep the rich, fertile soil open to agricultural use and free from residential development. Dairy farmers lend more than a decorative trim to this community. Within an America of coarse politicking, brutal movies, self-regarding best-sellers, corrosive street violence, and corporate cheating, farmers lend character. Theirs is character annealed by unceasing cycles of hard physical work. It is tempered further by the hard fatalism that work must continue even as an unsympathetic government refuses to legislate
price supports that equal the cost of production. Clear-eyed, businesslike, and steeped in the blunt wisdom of tools, terrain, feed, pestilence, and ledgers, the dairy farmers and their families remind the town that its roots are in the land and not in the electronic systems of distant consumerism and make-believe. They are consistently represented on the board of selectmen. They support the town's economy, buying feed and equipment from retailers here and their sturdy clothing from a nononsense dry goods store in town, a denim-fragrant place called Lazarus. Even their bumper stickers are bracingly circumspect in an age of preemptive savagery. DON'T ABOUT FARMERS, a sticker suggests, WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL. Farmers and students, professional merchants, and the odd freelance writer or graphic designer make a true community together, a socioeconomic mix just about as varied and interactive as it is possible to imagine in America. There are, however, two conspicuous exceptions to that mix. One is an elite class. There is no country club. There is no invisible ruling cabal of old boys. The college football coach is on the school board, shoulder to shoulder with local housewives and merchants. A COMPLAIN
professor of art history is a guiding light on the town design advisory committee. Most local board meetings are videotaped and shown on the cable-access channel; people watch, and pay attention. The other, more disturbing, is race. Aside from college faculty and students, and the migrant apple pickers who appear for a few weeks in ,the fall, one will rarely encounter a Third World or an AfricanAmerican face in Middlebury. Active exclusion is not the issue here, and racial relations are generally cordial, although students of color have suffered occasional slurs and challenges from village toughs. The fact is that Vermont's racial and ethnic tolerance has never been truly tested. The Industrial Revolution mostly bypassed the state, and with it the migration of a southern black labor force. This absence of a test poses an unavoidable question: Would the town be as cohesive as it is if a critical mass of its population were black or Asian? The question has not yet been answered, but Middlebury has
proved tolerant on a related issue: It has, in general, opened itself to newcomers. This is not as self-evident a virtue as it might seem. Most towns do not take kindly to newcomers. Even here,flatlanders, a generic term that describes anyone not born in Vermont, has not completely lost its chilling edge. Flatlanders all too often have been despoilers who turn pristine villages into glitzy ski resorts and then wax sanctimonious about "preservation," with environmental agendas that usually come at the expense of property-owners' rights. Vermont has not escaped hyperdevelopment, either; down near the Massachusetts border are crowded, overbuilt ski areas. Happily, the test of authenticity in Middlebury is no longer, How long have your people lived here? but, rather, What do you do to help make the town work? Farmers make the town work, and small-business owners, and
college professors, and barbers, and clergy. But so does a slowly gathering new addition to the socioeconomic mix: People who have come to town because they've decided they want to live here. In the past decade these have included recently retired professionals (who have added greatly to the lists of social service volunteers); modestly ambitious young entrepreneurs from the cities (guesthouse owners, shopkeepers, even a few fledgling farmers); and a coterie of painters, writers, musicians, photographers, and craftspeople. These artists and artisans have discovered that they can free themselves from the megalopolis and still earn urban wages. They take advantage of the fax, the modem, and Federal Express to send their output back to publishers and clients in the major cities.
community. In larger towns and cities where they must be kept behind locked doors, taught paramilitary survival skills, transported great distances for their schooling and their fun, the bonds of community fall away. In Middlebury, children rule. They can be, in Dylan Thomas's phrase, young and easy under the apple boughs. Children surge through the streets and fields here. They are individuals: My ten-yearold son, Dean, stole the last act of the Community Players' Mame in a cameo as Peter, Mame's grandnephew, last spring. My eight-year-old, Kevin, has been befriended by an entire New England folk band, the Wood's Tea Company. This has led him into guitar lessons from a gentle musician in the area who specializes in teaching children. The children bring us all together.
This artistic immigration is not exactly new. The counterculture discovered Vermont in the mid-1960s, sending shock waves through the state as mountainside communes took root. Those who remained are now in their mid-forties, and they greatly enrich the state's cultural life with their traditional crafts, poetry, theater, puppetry, and music. Among the most famously successful is Middlebury's own Woody Jackson, who has parlayed the whimsical notion of painting Holstein cows on T-shirts into a company, Holy Cow Inc., that grossed $ 1.5 million in 1992. The trade you bring is one way you're judged; the time you give as a volunteer is the other. My mother-in-Iaw's life was saved by the volunteer am bulance crew not long after we moved herethey rushed her to the hospital in time to forestall a burst aneurysm. Last summer I, who have trouble administering my study, found myself serving as the chairman of St.
The seasons pivot around the children here. The town has its Halloween parade-an army of Draculas and ballerinas, townies, professors' kids-following the town fire engine around the Green. At Christmas the Mary Johnson Children's Center, a sublime day-care facility, organizes caroling. (The shop windows then are filled with tiny handcrafted dolls and trains, and from nearly every window in the town shines an electric candle.) On New Year's Eve there's ice-skating and fireworks at a pond on the edge of town, and a giant bonfire. A year ago I stood at the edge of that pond on a frigid night and looked up the bank to where the New Year's bonfire blazed. I could see the people of Middlebury silhouetted against its orange wall; see the shapes of their hunter's caps and the glint of spectacles, their flitting kids, the thick shape of the town fire engine standing guard. And it hit me that if I had been standing here half a century ago, or 75 years, and looked up to that same spot, I would have seen exactly the same tableau. Subtract the fire engine and I could have gone back a century. I thought of where I and my family had come from, in that moment, and to where we had come, and why we had come here, and what it was, irreducibly, that made things work in this town we had adopted, the thing that is so terribly absent from this anxious and distracted society. And I thought of a few lines from Wendell Berry, who is perhaps America's most compelling voice for local, native ground:
The test of authenticity in Middlebury is not, How long have you lived here? but, rather, What do you do to help make the town work?
Stephen's Church's annual Peasant Market, a daylong bazaar of clothing, books, toys, and other goods; the proceeds benefit the parish and the area's poor. (Some of the worst poverty in America is concealed in Vermont's pretty hills and hollows.) My wife has served, in addition to her roles as college professor and mother of our two small boys, on the boards of a day-care center and more recently of the town's grade school. Volunteering is an avocation in this town; it is what people tend to do when they are not pursuing their livelihoods. The local Baptist minister coached my elder son's baseball team-this in between his long rounds of court appearances on behalf of troubled poor kids from those pretty hills and hollows. (I was the assistant coach and umpired a game or two.) The United Way is big here. So is the Counseling Service of Addison County, a community health center funded by federal grants, insurance fees, and donations that encourages business partnerships to hire the county's mentally retarded and its depressed, abused, and beaten down, and to retain recovering alcoholics and drug abusers on the job. In Middlebury, these victims of life's darker forces are not swept out of sight, nor are they left to fend for themselves on the streets and in the abysses. They are working members of the community-supervised, visible, known. They have names and personal histories. They are part of the mix. In Middlebury-in any town that works--ehildren playa crucial role. Children are creatures of the locale; they are conduits to
';What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love." But Berry is no more sentimental than Sinclair Lewis was. The love he prescribes cannot be reduced to a greeting card sentiment or the slogan on a souvenir pewter mug. "I do not mean abstract love," he goes on, "but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects." That's as good a precis as any I know of what it requires to live in Middlebury. Or to begin restoring all of America's lost Arcadias. 0 About the Author: Ron Powers, a television journalist and critic, has written extensively on the disappearing character of America's small towns. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for television criticism.
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Company
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photocopying
or
photocopier. the
or a business. for any
Xerox
is
world-famous
registered Xerox
trade-mark
Corporation
of and
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is the
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the
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Today
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leading
since. is
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Document
Because
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and services are marketed
across the world ... Xerox copiers,
scanners,
facsimile
Xerox is a trademark and not the mark ofa trade.
products,
Xerox The
and
office
XeroxÂŽ
symbolises
even
supplies. trademark a
multi-
million
dollar
corporation's
commit-
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