Richard Bazeley reminds me that Mr Ahmadinejad is the son of a blacksmith. At which level do we begin our fundamental discourse? In an era of outrage like our own, in which the peasants of the world are manipulated by despots to insure their subjugation, remarks like those of Columbia president Lee Bollinger are needed, and yet there is need as well to begin discourse at a more fundamental level.

In the American Crafts Movement, we talk about the narrative qualities of work... that a hand woven rug, a clay pot or a wooden box can convey ideas and information from the deepest levels of human reality. It is not surprising to me that the word text has the same root as the words textile and texture. The string of words flying relentlessly through the internet and the media found its beginnings in the knotting of a string.

And yet, we are creating a culture that is illiterate in the fundamentals of human expression. Is it any wonder that we are falling into a world in which the only avenues of international engagement are angry voices or invasion?

Richard suggested that if perhaps two presidents were to meet at a table they had crafted with their own hands, it would be a peace table of the truest sort. Across the street from Columbia University in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, is a table made and dedicated to peace by by Japanese American, George Nakashima. It is beautiful, large enough for many to attend, grown from the richest walnut and expresses the world's longing for an outward expression of the kind of peace that craftsman and artists have long understood. Perhaps we need to bring dialog and discourse to the most fundamental level. The narrative of the hands. Could we talk more clearly in that manner to the son of a blacksmith? Making a table of Peace? Very sadly, we've not had a woodworker in the White House since Jimmy Carter. George Nakashima and his first Peace Table in St. John the Divine are shown in the photo below. It was Nakashima's plan to place one peace table on each of the seven continents.