As soon as I get to choose, I want to be Christiane Amanpour. You think it's the CNN credentials, the world travel pass, the adventurous lifestyle, her place in history as one of the greats in broadcast journalism (fuck gender)? Yeah, sure. But there's more. I want that fabulous style, that Cleopatra-black hair blowing across her tall cheekbones in the Sarajevo wartorn breeze, those pouty lips that part sensually to tell us more bad news, her almond eyes hooded by thick, midnight lashes. I even like the lines under her eyes from lack of sleep or, as I imagine it, too much partying with the rebels.

She's sexy alright. She sexy because she's calmly telling us the worst possible scenarios while always looking marvelously caught up in them - not bruised, but slightly blown with bomb dust, earnest in her wrinkled khaki clothes, so utilitarian they beg us to imagine her in something far more revealing.

Her style of personal reporting - some would even call it advocacy journalism - changed media standards for war correspondents, and relegated Peter Arnett to CNN's backseat. (Certainly, it wasn't hard. Remember that bogus story last year that the defense department ordered the strafing of AWOL American soldiers during the Vietnam war? Ever since he sleazed his way out of being fired for co-reporting that one, he's been AWOL himself.)

Christiane Amanpour's CNN headshot. Read her CNN Profile or search CNN for her stories.

Rarely does any TV anchor blondie keep her waiting, or even interrupt her. In fact, she's been known to go on a little too long in her dry, British-educated accent explaining in far too much detail the politics of "the region." She should know by now that news about the "region" will always be confusing -- each war is about the same as the last, and Americans don't want to know the dead the way she knows them. Kosovo, Bosnia, Sarajevo, Algeria or Rwanda, we just want her transmitted image to tell us where we are. We're at war again, it seems, Christiane is on the screen.

We're lazy, and she knows it. But she'll set it to order, sort it out and translate our message that the Americans are on their side, and we'll do what we can to empathize as much as possible while we blow their homes to pieces. While we can tell she's one of us, her tone scolds us for our Western blindness, and reminds us that here real suffering exists if we would only see. It is the same suffering that goes on in our own homes but without the drama of a televised war. The same destructive impulse that drives us to bomb other countries "to guarantee peace" is reflected in how we greet each other on our own streets - with distrust, racism, malice and greed.

My fantasies about the off screen Christiane - that she has intelligence and intuition, develops workable philosophies to share the infinite horizon she inhabits, remarks upon the insanity to escape it, and laughs long and hard to guarantee real peace - are the same ones I have about myself. That all the outward attributes are actually created by the inward qualities, and that going places other people don't want to go constructs a person who serves the world in turn. This is the person I want to be, the one who travels farthest, and stays the longest, the one who knows the people and the region and can communicate it back to a world that never takes her off the air.