The role of cultural diplomacy is winning back friends for the U.S., Iowa City, Iowa, May 11, 2005

- [George Bedell] Today's program was made possible through the cooperation of international programs at the University of Iowa with additional support of Iowa State Bank and Trust and an anonymous donor and The New Pioneer Club, we at Pioneer provided the meal. Dee Norton, chair of the program committee will introduce today's speaker. - [Dee Norton] Christopher Merrill has been director of the UI International Writing Program since 2000, coming to Iowa from a position as William Jinx chair and contemporary letters at the College of the Holy Cross. Throughout his time here, Professor Merrill has been a strong supporter of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, each fall he has helped us recruit one or two of the visiting writers to present programs for the audience. They have given us many memorable observations about their respective home countries. Professor Merrill has a distinguished record as a writer, he has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter Lavonne Award from The Academy of American Poets. He has published translations of two books, Ales Debeljak's Anxious Moments and The City and the Child and has edited several volumes including The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe as Icon. In addition, he has produced four books of non-fiction, The Grass of Another Country: The Journey Through The World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age Of the Refugee. A highly regarded, Only The Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and most recently, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. It is indeed a pleasure to introduce our friend and colleague, Christopher Merrill, who has chosen for his topic today, the role of cultural diplomacy in winning back friends for the US. Chris. - [Christopher Merrill] Thank you Dee, thank you George. When Tom Baldridge asked me to speak on this subject we gave the slightly provocative title, he sent it to his sister who said that we were doomed in this enterprise. So you can think of this talk as an effort in futility. About a year and a half ago I received a phone call inviting me to serve on an advisory committee to the State Department on Cultural Diplomacy, this had been put together by an act of congress, by some of the wiser heads on both sides of the aisle, prominently Senator Richard Lugar and Senator Joseph Biden and our congressman Jim Leach, who were shegrinned at the way in which the United States is viewed around the world and I have traveled with this advisory committee, which is made up of people from around the country. We have been meeting, we have been trying to digest as much as we can about the subject of cultural diplomacy and I'm in the process of writing a report and recommendations for the Secretary of State, which we expect to deliver in the early fall, after Karen Hughes has been confirmed as the new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. So what I'm going to read to you today and talk to you about today is this big field of cultural diplomacy, which to a certain extent, The International Writing Program participates in that is to say when we bring writers here, at least one element of our mission is to provide an exchange of ideas between writers from this country and from abroad. History may record that Americas cultural riches played no less a role in the War on Terror than military action. For the noble values embedded in our artistic and intellectual traditions form a bulwark against the forces of darkness and cultural diplomacy which presents the best of what American artist, performers and thinkers have to offer can enhance our national security in subtle wide ranging and sustainable ways but because there's little or no understand of this at the highest levels of the US Government we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of people in every part of the world. It is time for change, time to articulate a vision of cultural diplomacy congruent with our position as what former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, called indispensable nation, time to show how the values we preach in the political arena are embodied in our culture and time to listen to what the cultures of the rest of the world are saying about us. There's a world wide debate about the relationship between Islam and the west, said an American Official and we don't have a seat at that table. Indeed, the Defense Science Board on Strategic Communications issued a report in September 2004 asserting that quote, "The contest of ideas within Islam is taking place not just in Arab and other Islamic countries but in the cities and villages of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Western hemisphere." End quote. Further, US policies on Israeli, Palestinian issues and Iraq have damaged Americas credibility and power to persuade. Cultural diplomacy is a means by which we may engage and influence that debate. The stakes have never been higher, anecdotal evidence and opinion surveys conducted by a range of organizations including Zogby International, The Pew Research Center and Gallup CNN, USA Today testified a widespread hostility towards the United States and its policies, particularly in the wake of the war in Iraq. This is brought into sharpest relief in the Arab Muslim world where large majorities in Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, for example, view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the World Order than Osama Bin Laden. Favorability ratings in Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan steadily declined in 2002, 2003 and 2004. A poll taken in 10 countries in October 2004 in Canada, France, Britain, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, Israel and Russia, some of our closest allies, although after some of the comments made yesterday in Georgia we may want to revise our thinking about Russia, revealed the same trend. What has happened? It is an axiom of international relations that the more power a country acquires, the more suspicions it provokes when it uses that power. Certainly this was the case with the US led invasion and occupation of Iraq, when large majorities of people around the world came to believe that the United States will impose its will where and whenever it chooses, without what Thomas Jefferson called, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind but a country can accumulate so much power that in the end it will have no friends at all and history demonstrates that friendless nations fall to ruin. Cultural diplomacy, which has been defined as the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding is the linchpin of public diplomacy. For it is in cultural activities that a nations idea of itself is best represented. Indeed, the ideals of the found fathers enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights take on new life in the vibrant traditions of American art, dance, film, jazz and literature, which continue to inspire people the world over, everywhere despite our political differences. The glories of our higher educational system, which remains the envy of the world despite the difficulties that foreign students face in securing visas to matriculate in this country, testified to the ingenuity, support public and private and solid intellectual traditions foundations intrical to the American experiment in Democracy. What people throughout the world love about American culture, the idea of America if you will, is the sense of freedom coursing through the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willam de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, the choreography of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, the films Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese but as an American Official said of the governments declining support for cultural programming, "It's like sucking the air our of a bell jar, if there's no other way to engage us except in political terms, then we lose." With the end of Cold War and the subsequent abolishment of the US Information Agency, the USIA in 1999, American cultural presence abroad was significantly reduced, cultural programming was slashed even before the dispersal of USIA, personal throughout the State Department destroyed the institutional memory necessary for the maintenance of cultural ties. What remains is an ad hoc congeries of programs administered largely through the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs with a reduced budget and staff, a diminished position in hierarchy of diplomatic values and a vision of cultural diplomacy incommensurate with American ideals and foreign policy objectives. Cultural diplomacy is a two way street, for every foreign artist inspired by an American work of art there is an American waiting to be touched by the creative wonders of other traditions. Cultures spread from individual to individual often by subterranean means, in exchange programs like Fulbright to Humphrey and Muskie and person to person contacts made possible by international visitor and exchange programs, ideas that we hold dear of family, education and faith cross borders, creating new ways of thinking. And in this respect, I have this enduring memory of meeting with a couple of poets in Rangoon in Burma and they were publishing samizdat editions of their works in editions of 10 and of course to publish such a work was to subject yourself to the possibility, not only of imprisonment but of execution and I asked one of the poets what he was working on and he said he had just translated John Ashbery's, Some Trees, first book of poems picked by WH Auden back in the mid 1950s, and I said, where did you find that book and he found it in the American library and I said, what was its reception in literary circles in Rangoon? And he said the people were eating it up and I thought now there's a writer, an American writer, who at the time was completely on the margins when he was writing in the 1950s, he's now central to our literary discourse but those poems found their way into a library in Rangoon and became a source of inspiration because in so many ways they embodied who we are as a people. This talk synthesizes the findings of several academic studies, independent task forces and various commissions and committees of public and cultural diplomacy, incorporates the insights gleaned on a fact finding mission to Oman, Egypt and the United Kingdom in the summer of 2004, as well as from several state department sponsored visits to Greece, Malaysia and Norway. Interviews with artist, choreographers, cultural activist, educators, film makers and theater directors and writers in this country and abroad, discussions with American diplomats, program officers at the State Department and a range of foreign officials, journalist and experts, a sense of crisis was everywhere apparent. First in the growing perception of the United States as a hostile force then in the scale of diplomatic problem that must be solved, bridges rebuilt and new links forged. Put simply, we have lost the good will of the world, without which it becomes ever more difficult to execute foreign policy. "We Who Loved America", the title of a bitter panel discussion at an international literary festival in Molde, Norway has in the last three years become a common sentiment around the world. The question now is how to regain that love which was rooted in the promise of America. And I should tell you about that panel, it was an international literary festival in Norway, every event took place in Norwegian, which is really pretty funny for me given the fact that we're about at least 60 international writers and only 4 million people speak Norwegian and of course almost every Norwegian speaks English but one panel was in English, "We Who Loved America", a two hour harangue against us. If diplomacy is, as former Secretary of State George Shultz suggest, can be likened to gardening, you get the weeds out when they are small, you also build confidence and understanding then when a crisis arises you have a solid base from which to work. Then the rule of cultural diplomacy is to plant seeds, ideas and ideals, aesthetic strategies and devices, philosophical and political arguments, spiritual perceptions, ways of looking at the world which may flourish in foreign soils. Cultural diplomacy reveals the soul of a nation which may explain its complicated history in American political life. When our nation is at war, every tool in the diplomatic kit bag is employed, including the promotion of cultural activities but when peace returns culture gets short shrift because of our traditional distrust of public support for the arts. Now that we are at war again, interesting cultural diplomacy is on the rise. Perhaps this time we can create enduring structures within which to practice effective cultural diplomacy and articulate a sustaining vision with the role that culture can play in enhancing the security of this country. Just a brief history here, the first efforts in US cultural diplomacy date from World War One, though it was not until 1938, in the face of Nazi Germanys cultural activities in Latin America that a division of cultural relations was created at the State Department. The government agreed to support exchange programs for students and artist under the 1936 convention for the promotion of American Cultural Relations, the model for the numerous exchange programs intrical to public diplomacy during the Cold War. The spread of American knowledge, skills and ideals are success in the war of ideas with the Soviet Union can be traced to the vitality of the very programs created in the wake of the second World War. The late Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Afghan President Harmid Karzai, these are some of the many world leaders who benefited from international visitor programs. Meantime, countless people were introduced to our cultural traditions at American libraries and information centers, which after 1953 were administered by the USIA. The Central Intelligence Agency even entered the cultural fray in the 1950s, covertly supporting exhibitions of American art, performing arts tours and the publication of Encounter, one of the more dynamic journals in its time, a practice that was stopped in 1967 but actually at one point, the CIA was the largest grants giving organization in the world. Isn't that great? Makes me think of how the IWP got started. But after the Cold War, when cultural diplomacy ceased to be a priority, funding for its programs fell drastically and since 1993 the budgets have fallen by nearly 30%, staff has been cut by 30% overseas and 20% in the US, dozens of cultural centers, libraries and branch post have been closed. In short, we have stepped back from the rest of the world. There's so much to say and so little time. I'm gonna push ahead to something here though. Some of you probably remember Eddin Khoo, who came to talk, I think two years ago was it, here's an example of cultural diplomacy in action. His efforts, Eddin Khoo's efforts, to document and preserve the traditional ceremonies of Kelantan, a province in northern Malaysia against the strictures of the local Islamic Authorities. He's a fine example of cultural diplomacy in action. With a small grant from the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation and this is a fund that has 2 million dollars for every Ambassador, all together in the entire world, with a small grant from this fund he's helped to maintain the ancient traditions of dance, shadow puppetry and healing rights training a new generation of local artist. These practices which mix Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Animist elements fly in the face of the purifying doctrines of the Islamist and the political consequences cannot be ignored. After more than a decade of banning such ceremonies, in the recent elections the Islamist lost many seats because as one political commentator noted, the Islamist only know how to ban things, they have nothing to offer to replace them. What this NGO promotes then is a foil to Islamic Extremism and this small investment is paid off handsomely, clearing a space in the uncommitted middle of the political spectrum for more moderate voices to get a hearing. Just as a side note to this, I actually went to see one of these ceremonies with Eddin Khoo last year and I have to say that as a journalist, I was somewhat skeptical about all the stuff I'd heard he was doing up in Kelantan until I went to this village in the middle of the jungle, a village that for two nights running, four hours in a night, the entire village turned out, 400 people, to watch a traditional exorcism. I was with somebody from the State Department and we were watching what was a really fascinating thing, a woman of middle age was suffering from indeterminate ailments, perhaps a doctor here might diagnose her as having depression, I'm not sure and after about an hour and a half of watching what was absolutely thrilling, Aiden turned to me And he said, "this ceremony has really gotten interesting." And I said, "well it was already pretty interesting." And he said, "no, no that woman is actually a man." And I said, "what?" And he said, "well she's a transvestite." And I said, "is that common?" and he said, "yeah, very common in the villages." And I said, "No wonder the Islamist were so nervous about what you're doing here." And the guy from the State Department said to me, "I didn't know I was coming to an X-rated event." The point I wanna make about that is that they would have turned out for anything, anything and this small thing that Aiden was trying to keep alive was the sort of thing made possible a kind of dialogue in the middle of the political spectrum. Just a couple of scenes from our travels in the Middle East. In Muscat, Oman a senior official raised an issue that our committee was to hear repeatedly, that the idea of an American ideal is drowned out by Arab media coverage of the Israeli Palestinian impasse and the war in Iraq. The fallout from the Abu Grhraib prison scandal, the photographs broadcast repeatedly and circulated continuously on the web of hooded prisoners attached to electrodes of leering American soldiers and so on would long haunt the image of the United States. In fact, a diplomat said to me in Southeast Asia, when this story broke I was there at the time, he said, "it will take us 50 years to get over that." We almost don't talk about it at all in this country right now, you'll notice just low level people are in trouble, right, all that talk about accountability, remember that, the only people held accountable are the ones on the lower part. You'll remember Rumsfeld saying to us, "Now the world will see how our system works." Well the world has seen how our system works and the point of cultural diplomacy is to hold up what's best about what we do. In a country as small as Oman, population 2.3 million, cultural diplomatic efforts are small, a concert by Mary Wilson, a CultureConnect Ambassador, micro scholarships for the study of English, the opening of a fifth American Corner, the Public Private Initiative, designed to replace the American libraries closed after the Cold War, in which every aspect of American culture is represented, support for exhibits, exchanges in the International Visitor program, et cetera. The problem is sustainability, said an Official, echoing a story told by a diplomatic southeast Asian, who was at the opening of an American library in the 1960s. "Aren't you pleased to finally have an American library?", the diplomat said to his host. "Actually this is our sixth library" said the host. "During every international crisis, you open a library and then when the crisis passes, you close it down and disperse the books, When you close this library, don't bother to distribute the books" he concluded, "we have plenty already." It's pretty pathetic. To echo this, "cultural diplomacy emerges at a time of crisis," said a Senior Egyptian Official "but this should be a process of building bridges not a one way street. "Developing respect for others and their way of thinking, this is what cultural diplomacy does. Let there be a dialogue, we've had a cultural agreement with the United States since 1962, why not implement it, we want people to know about real Americans, you have the right to be different and I have the right to be different. Let your people know that Egyptians are not just fanatics, Islam is one religion but there are many ways of applying it. I won't let what happened at Abu Ghraib, change my feelings for the American people. My idea of America is the Statue of Liberty opening her arms, not turning away. Americans should build bridges, they shouldn't be afraid, they need to open up again, don't go into a shell." So what did we learn from our mission, from our traveling? Cultural diplomacy can help create a foundation of trust with other people which policy makers can build on to reach political, economic and military agreements. It encourages other peoples to give the United States the benefit of the doubt on specific policy issues or request for collaboration, since there is a presumption of shared interest. This is what we kept hearing, especially in Egypt, we met with a group of about 30 independent artist, writers, film makers and they kept saying to us, ya know, you probably have seen those statistics that we give more money to Egypt than any other country in the world except for Israel and our favorability ratings in Egypt are in the single digits and as one man said to me, "For every hundred soldiers you finance, one exchange with a film maker would make all the difference. Don't give us anymore military hardware." And when that argument is made in this country all we hear is that what we are giving, all the stuff that we give to the Egyptians, what we give is largely military. But as a diplomat said to me there one day, we went to visit a performing arts center in Cairo, built by the Japanese for about 60 million dollars back in the late 1980s, and everyday at least 700 people visit this place for different performances, operas, theater, art exhibits, concerts and as this diplomat said, "Every Egyptian that comes in here and over the course of the year, thousands and thousands, somewhere in the back of their heads they say to their saying thank you to the Japanese people." He said, "We on the other hand, we put in the water system for all of Cairo, that has saved countless thousands of lives but it's like when you're invited to dinner, if you bring flowers that's great but if you bring the main course, you're not gonna be liked very much." Cultural diplomacy is finding a way to bring those flowers and not to drop the main course on the dining room table. It demonstrates our values and our interest in values and combats the popular notion that Americans are shallow, violent and Godless. Cultural diplomacy affirms that we have values in common with others, it creates relationships with people which endure beyond changes in government, it can reach influential members of foreign societies who cannot be reached through traditional embassy functions, especially now when it's very difficult to get into an American Embassy, they are, almost all of them around the world resemble fortresses. It provides a positive agenda for cooperation in spite of policy differences, we can argue over political differences but if we can meet on the cultural level, it makes those arguments a little bit easier to manage. It creates a neutral platform for contact, it serves as a flexible universally acceptable vehicle for rapprochement with countries where diplomatic relations have been strained or absent, I would say right now one of them might be Iran. What an exciting country that is, culturally speaking but all we hear about at the moment is, what else is going on there with their nuclear weapons. It is uniquely able to reach out to young people, to non-elites, to broad audiences with a much reduced language barrier, it fosters the growth of civic society, It educates Americans on the values and sensitivities of other societies, as we know from the experience of the many visitors who come to Iowa City, helping us to avoid gaffes and missteps, such as our President made yesterday, it counterbalances misunderstanding, hatred, and perhaps in the long run terrorism and it can leaven the foreign internal cultural debates on the side of openness and tolerance. That book of poems that the Burmese poet translated may seem like a very small thing, published though however it was in a newspaper in Rangoon but I would argue that that sort of move can, in the long run, pay off handsomely. That's what cultural diplomacy is all about and after the break I'll be happy to take some of your questions. Thanks very much. - [Dee Norton] Chris, how many IWP participants are supported by funds from their home countries and how has that been going, is that changing, are we supporting most of them or are they supporting a lot of them? - [Christopher Merrill] Well actually, at the beginning of most of IWP writers were supported by the USIA but when the USIA was folded into the State Department that changed the funding stream. So last year, 38 writers from 28 countries, we had 11 funded by the State Department and the rest of them were funded by lateral agreements we have arranged and negotiated with different governments by private fundraising efforts, by turning to foundations and we try to piece it together in every way that we can. What's funny is to be putting together such a report at a time in which the Federal aspect of the cultural diplomacy initiative has plummeted in its support. - [Dee Norton] You described the decline of the cultural diplomacy quite brilliantly, what specific suggestions do you have for evening out or stopping the decline? - [Christopher Merrill] Well it's an interesting moment, we have a number of recommendations to increase funding of course for international exchanges. The essence of the cultural diplomacy seems to be listening to create forums in which you have a chance to listen to other people. Coming here, letting us bring our writers from abroad, come to the Foreign Relations Council and say their piece, I think it one of the ideal ways to find out about other countries. You'll remember we've had two Malaysian writers in two years, the first of whom, Rehman Rashid, spoke quite dazzlingly but if you were to walked away from that talk you would have probably suspected that Malaysia was a country of 90% Islamic. The next year, fortunately we had a chance to hear from Eddin Khoo and we heard a different side of that story, in fact, Malaysia's a country of only slightly over 50% Islamic population. It's a complicated thing. There in miniature is what it means to have, to listen just to two different views of one country and how many countries are there around the world, Malaysia happens to be an extremely important country to the United States at this point, it's one of those hinge countries when we think about this so called War on Terrorism, the relationship between the west and Islam and to hear from couple of different writers, their perspective, that's a terrific thing to do. So the main thing is to try to find the money to create more of these exchanges, to make it possible for more Americans to hear about things going on in other parts of the world and for people from different parts of the world to come here to find out who and what we're all about. The great surprise for our writers when they come to Iowa City, they have images of America and suddenly they get off the plane in Cedar Rapids and their coming to Iowa City and that's not LA. You're not in Kansas anymore, right. But what they find repeatedly is you'll notice that strategically we only have them here in the fall when it's very beautiful and it's warm. When the IWP started it went through the winter but for funding reasons that wasn't a good idea and for many of our writers from warmer climates that was not a good idea. But when the writers go home they have a slightly, even idealic view of what life is like in America, they've been in a city where writing is taken seriously and they have sense of what a great university's about, what a wonderful town this is, ways in which people reach out to them, the kinds of hospitality that we can take for granted that's something that many of them don't find in their own countries and it gives them a different view of what the United States is about. - [Dee Norton] Doctor Yaroslava Mosagrova, in a visit last month to Cedar Rapids blamed American films with promoting violence, decadence, greed et cetera for Muslim distrust of our culture, especially when seen by uneducated young men. What can we do to offset the power of film? - [Christopher Merrill] That's a question every writer ask him or herself every minute of the day, right? I mean, there's not much you can do to offset the power of Hollywood, people wanna see those films. I covered the Sarajevo Film Festival during the siege of Sarajevo the fall of 1993 and there were a lot of great foreign films in that but at certain point all the Sarajevans wanted Hollywood films, I mean, they love those production values that we specialize in, even if they don't necessarily like the content. I don't think you can do anything about Hollywood, it's a huge force with an awful lot of money. But again, it's like our politics, if the only image that you have of America is from Hollywood or from our foreign policy then it's a pretty two dimensional view of who we are as a people. If you have a chance, for example, to go to our museum and look at that Jackson Pollock painting, well then you realize, oh that's what America is and Mark Tobey or our dance programs, that gives you a more nuance to more complicated understanding of who we are as a people. That's an incremental approach to a very large and sustaining problem. - [Dee Norton] What reception do you anticipate for your report at the State Department? I'm asking, how is life under Karen Hughes likely to be? - [Christopher Merrill] Well, I'll put it this way, when this committee was started it was started Margaret Tutwiler was in charge of it, she resigned within days of the scandal of Abu Ghraib breaking that story then it was put into the hands of Patricia Harrison and now it will be in the hands of Karen Hughes. This could mean either very good things or very bad things, she of course has the ear of the President, Condoleezza Rice has the ear of the President much more than Colin Powell did and we hope that the reception of the report and the fact that someone with so much power as Karen Hughes as been put in this position means that indeed the President and the Secretary are interested in taking these ideas, these recommendations seriously but we shall see what happens. I been around long enough not to be too optimistic. - [Dee Norton] We'll just take a couple more. Can you comment on, for the audience, on your work, which resulted in Iowa City being designated as a city of refuge for writers. - [Christopher Merrill] Well the International Parliament of Writers which was founded in the early 1990s, show support for Salman Rushdie, created 30 or 40 of these cities of asylums around western Europe and when they moved their offices to North America with the intention of trying to create cities of asylum here, one of the first cities they thought of, of course, was Iowa City because of our long heritage as the place of writing. Also, the International Writing Program has always offered safe haven to writers at risk. This coming year we'll be housing a writer from Burma, who spent six years in prison, she's a cardiologist and a dazzling writer, went to prison for six years for a short story she wrote. So this is something we have always been doing and then working with the International Parliament, which has been renamed as the North American Network of Cities of Asylum, we decided to try to work very hard to become a city of asylum so that it might attract more funding, more support both within the state and around the country to make possible year round residencies, safe haven for writers at risk. A writer from China has been invited, we are still trying to raise the funds to bring her here but we hope that we'll have her here before the end of the summer. - [Dee Norton] This question says, why don't the neo-conservatives give a damn? - [Christopher Merrill] Dee, I'm a writer not a psychologist. - [Dee Norton] This is the final, I read that there's an increasing number Peace Corps volunteers, you regard that as a good sign, does it fit into the cultural diplomacy? - [Christopher Merrill] I think we all know this, anytime an American goes abroad for more than a flying visit, they have the chance to engage in other people, another culture, another society more deeply than they might otherwise be able to engage them and any sort of activity like that Peace Corps for young people, for older people. Any efforts to get into another society, to understand something about that promotes that kind of cross cultural dialogue that I'm talking about here. It gives us a chance to listen to what other people are saying about us. I have to tell you to go back to the very beginning of my talk, that panel in Molde, Norway, "We Who Love America", it was really not pleasant to sit there for two hours listening to these Norwegians go on and on after us about how bad we were and in fact, a Norwegian writer came up to me afterwards and said that she was very sorry that that had happened and I said, well, ya know, in America we have an expression, a football expression, we would call that pilling on. I said, but it's useful for us to hear that. And the interesting thing is one of the poets who came up to me was, we had a poet here in 2001 from Norway and I think she really came to the United States not liking this country at all and then of course the events of September 11th happened and she was the first to ask if the IWP would come to an early close, then the war began in Afghanistan and she also thought it would come to a close. I thought throughout, this is somebody, she doesn't like it here, what to do? Well, then I got to Norway and I saw her again after a few years, she was just about to publish a book about her experiences in Iowa and she said that when she came back to Norway and her friends would start talking about how awful Americans were she would find herself saying, wait a minute, I went out to this farm and I met the Hemingway and I met the Danes and I found out that's not how all Americans are. I thought, oh my god, she sees things differently now because she spent three months here and because of that she sees us in a more complex relationship, she understands that what the government does is not exactly what all Americans want, she understands more than just black and white visions of who we are as a people. That's what the IWP does, that's what cultural diplomacy does, that's what we're in this for. Thank you very much. - [George Bedell] We have come to the time to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council I want to thank Chris Merrill for sharing with us and with our radio and cable TV audiences, his observation on The Role of Cultural Diplomacy and Winning Back Friends For the US. I also wish to thank our sponsors, International Programs at the University of Iowa, Iowa State Bank and Trust and the New Pioneer Co-op and an anonymous donor for today's program. If you have questions about joining Iowa City Foreign Relations Council please call the office 335-0351, for those of you here in this room and who are not members, you can get a membership application from Mary Anne on your way out. She's at the desk where the name tags were handed out. If you enjoy listening to this program on the radio or by cable TV, please consider supporting us by sending a contribution to Iowa City Foreign Relations Council 140 International Center, Iowa City 52242. Thank you for coming, please return your name tags, we are adjourned.