LOS ANGELES — Serious intellectual narrowing can happen to even the brightest folk once nested down on the U.S. East Coast. They become preoccupied (almost neurotically, almost provincially) with the problems of the past — especially with the Middle East and Europe — and lose sight of the new problems and opportunities of this 21st century. They become lost in the inner space of a 20th-century time warp.
Yet, it is the near-unanimous opinion of everyone, that the big news of the current century is the whalelike emergence of the Asia-Pacific region as the new center of global geopolitical gravity. People on the East Coast sometimes lose track of this, and thus it is our noble civic duty from this end of the United States to remind them what's what.
After all, before too long, the presidential mind and body of Barack Obama will take leave from his friends in hometown Chicago to establish White House residence in the intensely provincial environment of Washington D.C.