But Pundita gets your
drift and appreciates it: as private citizens we should strive to create
relationships that are based on our personal value system. Yet if 9/11 has
taught us anything, we should also pay more attention to our civic duties.

don’t know how to term
this matrix, except maybe to call it, “What Americans and especially Americans
in big business, the news media, State Department, Pentagon, Congress and the
White House need to know about peoples in really old cultures who are stuck in
their ways and very proud, and who know they have to change their ways but who
don’t appreciate peoples from very young cultures who act like know-it-alls just
because they’re
rich.”

I sense from the
wording of your proposal that this matrix is also of interest to you. If so, let
it be known that we here in Pundita-land — this would include even the squirrel
member of Pundita’s foreign policy team — applaud all intelligent efforts to
bridge the old-young gap in US foreign policy relations. It is this gap, rather
than the communism/ capitalism, democracy/ despotism, WTO membership/
nonmembership gaps that is the most important one for American foreign relations
to bridge.

On my way out, a legislative aide who was attending stopped me to chat and asked, “Isn’t this a one-sided panel? Two moderate legislators and an administration official.”

I guess he meant that there were not enough partisans on the panel.

But only in Sacramento could a Republican, a Democrat and a Democrat working for a Republican be considered one-sided.