Pico Iyer: An Empire in Isolation

On the matter of “getting over†9.11, what would it take to “see oursels as ithers see us,†in Robert Burns’ prayer? Yesterday we spoke with the writer Pico Iyer.  I think of him as our eyes and ears on the global culture. He had Indian parents, an English boyhood, American university education and now citizenship; he’s married to a Japanese woman, and his home base now is rural Japan, but his career is traveling to the far places – Somalia, Iran, Latin America on recent assignments.  We put the question to him: How are we Americans looking to the rest of the world in this long post-traumatic time?