(5 of 5)
He isn't optimistic about the future, on either side. He sees Americans clinging to their Arab stereotypes -- the fat grasping sheik, the crazy fundamentalist bomber. Meanwhile, "most Arabs today, including cultivated ones, have no hope of any kind of cultural exchange between them and the West. The mood is so desperate. The fundamentalist movement is in a sense an act of desperation: 'The West won't listen to us, so we turn away from them.' That's the most discouraging thing, to me -- the wholesale condemnation of America and the West, without trying to discover that America is a very contradictory, various place." Were ever two cultures so far apart, so blinded by their own distorted images of each other? But what better subject could there be, in this insanely fractured time, for an authentic humanist like Said?