Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 3 January 2004
Ignatius, the Washington Post editor and columnist, appeared with Robin Wright (another Post luminary) and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute to discuss the state of the country and world as the year dawns.
You can listen to the show at WAMU website. Here's a comment by Ignatius that was brought to my attention by some listeners. It occurs around minute 44 in the broadcast, when the quartet was discussing what America should be doing in response to the tsunamis disaster in Asia:
Ignatius: My favorite book of 2004 is a book called "The Pentagon's New Map" by a man named Thomas Barnett. And he argues that the whole issue today is whether the world is connected or disconnected. And, as I think Robin [Wright] said, the images of American soldiers out, not shooting people but helping people, you know, not disconnecting but connecting … reconnecting the world. That's what we need.
As I said in PNM, the whole goal of enunciating a strategic vision like this, is that you generate reproducible strategic concepts, meaning key ideas that are replicable in mind after mind, once they begin to spread. I think the SysAdmin and the connectivity concepts qualify in this regard, when you can see someone like Ignatius view something like the current tragedy in Asia and relate it back to the book.
Mark Warren and I often reiterated to one another, as we edited the manuscript, that PNM should aspire to be a theory of everything, and as such, would come to be viewed by many as quite arrogant in its ambition and scope, so it was crucial to pick terms that others could own and employ with as much ease as possible. When you hear mentions like this in the press, you can't help but feel some real and lasting success in this regard.
In other words, language and associated meaning has been changed.
| Permalink |
