Passport fever

If you're an American and you own a passport, you're in the minority among our countrymen. Recent estimates say that 21 percent of Americans hold passports - a fact that my snootier European friends tend to believe explains everything about my country. A few weeks ago two friends who left Nairobi for London last year returned on holiday with their 10-month-old son. I marveled at the baby's ability to make that long journey. That's nothing, the father said - they'd taken him to Australia over Christmas.

Yes, not even a year old, and he's got a passport with more stamps than most Americans get in their lifetimes.

This may be changing. The number of people applying for passports each year actually declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but now it's rising fast. The L.A. Times reports that the State Department will issue a record 17 million passports this year - up from 12 million last year and 10 million the year before. People are being forced to wait up to 10 weeks for new passports as the agency tries to cope with the demand; even the $60-extra expedited service, which I love, now takes four weeks or longer, the paper says.

No doubt part of the rush is due to new travel rules that require Americans to have passports to travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. But that law doesn't take effect until next year. The trendline of American passport-holders clearly points upward.

People like to find all kinds of symbols of American provincialism, from the diminishing coverage of foreign affairs in our newspapers and TV news programs to the blind way we went into Iraq. And wasn't 9/11 supposed to discourage Americans from traveling abroad?

So while it's mostly symbolic - and while I'm sure that the bulk of the new passports will be used to travel to a foreign country that's accessible by car - I think this passport surge is a hopeful development. Despite all the opposition worldwide to the United States right now, it tells the world, Hey, we're coming anyway.