“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Welcome to John Wayne International Airport. The current Homeland Security threat level is Orange. To enhance your safety, and to avoid transporting dangerous goods, please do not leave baggage unattended. Please report suspicious or unattended packages to law enforcement personnel.”

“We have a high degree of need to protect structure.”—San Diego County Fire Chief, on NBC News

Anaheim, California should be paved over, if it weren’t already. We’ve been going there weekly for six months, yet my friend J. and I still get confused between the 57 North and the 55 as we leave the airport. Our plasticky rental cars get no respect on these freeways, which crawl with wide-arsed vehicles that are probably bought with the profits from p*n*s enl*rgement spam. We cut them off through incompetence, and get cut off in our turn. Who cares? It’s not as if they’re human.

With names like “Hotel Drive,” “Convention Drive,” and “Airport Way,” the streets round here don’t even try. We can’t get a purchase on the geography, so we learn to swerve into U-turns. We drive past Christian superstores, Disneyland hotels, and PetCo chains. Cell towers and bulldozers and parking lots. We look forward to our few landmarks: Fritz That’s Too, our favorite strip-joint, or Mr. Stox, an early 1980s power restaurant straight out of Caddyshack. The memory of dinner there makes us laugh every time.

We drive by strip malls and theme malls and self-styled anti-malls, where the women have padded lips, new breasts, and pale hair. It’s the opposite of camouflage—without them, you disappear at thirty. Their daughters wear skirts that my friend G. describes as “two inches from the good stuff.” Surrounded by modifications, I’m struck by how human beings are hard-wired for facial pattern recognition. I catch myself staring at people in Starbucks queues, searching for symmetries and flaws, trying to tell what’s been altered. Cosmetic surgery is unsettling, in the way that shaved eyebrows are unsettling, and I fantasize that some Hallowe’en the whole population of Orange County will wear t-shirts printed with their first driver’s licence photos, for easy comparison.

Our usual hotel is full, and we call this one the Willy Loman Memorial Marriott. Instead of room service, there’s a communal mini-bar at front desk—a fridge with a tray of tiny liquor bottles, Lean Cuisines, and frozen burritos. At 10 pm, J. knocks on my door and holds up a miniature Dewar’s scotch and a Snickers bar. “Dinner,” she says, my organic, vegetarian friend. “I just wanted someone to witness it.” We make up German words to describe the feeling of opening the door to a lousy hotel room: Hiltonschmerz. Scheissekarpetzgeist.

At breakfast, men eat pallid eggs and make notes on their PowerPoint decks with cheap hotel pens. They’re already in meetings, and it’s just past dawn. Soon they’ll waltz to the ballroom to show the numbers at the All-Hands, while their colleagues doodle. Their company name is pegged up on one of those old-fashioned event boards. They sell drug testing solutions.

John Wayne swaggers at the entrance to his own airport—cast in bronze, bow-legged, a life-sized 12 feet tall. Those security announcements loop on the intercom, full of robotic warmth, while we line up to be searched and have our hummus confiscated. At the departure level, two fat cops on Segways roll past a wall of windows that frames a dark orange sky. The Santa Ana bellows is still blowing on the wildfires to the south, and we can smell the smoke even in the sealed terminal. The air is itchy and thick.

“Keep your hands up! Don’t touch anything. “ A woman sprays Purell on every surface near her son, murdering bacteria, while he asks where I’m going. He’s five, and his name is Miles. He holds his hands up patiently and kicks his light-up sneakers. “M-I-L-E-S, Miles,” he says, mumbling the last letters as she swabs his mouth.

J. and I soothe ourselves with trashy magazines for the plane ride home. The sales clerk at the airport newsstand is a friend by now, and every week we discuss Britney Spears. While J. counts out the dollars for People she asks her a question. Something innocuous; about weekend plans, maybe. However it comes up, the woman answers that, well, at the moment, she’s homeless. She lives in her car, sometimes sleeps on friends’ couches. She’s hopeful that something will turn up soon.

Behind us, there’s a line of tired people waiting, without much interest, to find out if Brad really has walked out on Angelina this time. Or was it the other way round? Everyone wants to escape.

“You are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished.”
—La Bruyere.

“In 1800, just 20% of Americans had an employer other than themselves; by 1900, the figure was up to 50%, and by 2000, 90%.”
—Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety.

When I was growing up—in a decade when condoms weren’t for sale in Ireland and the Jesuit church in Limerick hadn’t yet been sold for redevelopment—there were things that my friends agreed on. Variously, they had to do with ideas about sex before marriage; God; gays; who was a fine thing; who was a knob; and the tampon-virginity link. In the school canteen, where we tested our collective worldview through a fog of rancid chip-fat and condensation, we adjudicated that having sex might be okay as long as you were in college, really in love, and had been together for x months or years—where x took as long to solve for as the quadratic equations in our copybooks.

We took an inventory of symptoms of what “really in love” was going to feel like—trusting scripts more than swoons, as if already knew we were just trying this stuff on. We were in a hurry to get complacent, and when the boyfriends finally ambled in, we ticked off the weeks and months we’d been going out, racing each other to anniversaries. Though we sat around noting matronly truths about the nature of fellas, our commitment was to each other. Twenty years later, we all admit that for all the love talk, no boys from that time ever cost us anything like the girls who dumped us as friends. And everyone had one of those.

I didn’t agree with the canteen worldview, but it rarely occurred to me to say so. Not when I loved being in a warm little gang, at an age when everything was either hilarious or horrific. It took so little to nod along, and then take my own dogma from the stack of imported Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire magazines in my bedroom. As far as I knew, none of my friends read them, and I didn’t mind. It was the tribe that got me up to go to school every day.

People talk most about what they are hungry for, sketching their lack in words. At fifteen, it’s sex. In Dublin today, people go on (and on) about money and houses. In San Francisco, we talk about time, balance, and community. And in the corporate world, people talk about passion.

At my kitchen table the other night a friend blurted out her annoyance at a job interview experience that day.
“He kept asking, ‘What are you passionate about?’ And I just didn’t feel that was right in an interview. So intrusive. Whenever I tried to deflect it, he’d go, “No, really, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What’s your passion?“

Her complaint sparked the others.
“Oh god,” said someone else, “I worked at this company where they’d come up with all these words we were supposed to embody. And they installed them as screensavers, so if you stopped typing for a bit to think about the next paragraph, ‘Passion’ and ‘Excellence’ and all the rest would start floating down your screen like Tetris blocks.”

“I like my work. I’m good at it. I try hard. When did that stop being enough? When did it have to be my Passion? I just got married. There are things in my life that are really important to me. But they’re not necessarily all part of my work life, and I don’t want to bring them into a job interview.”

“It’s like, you’re not allowed to have a private life any more. They want to own all of you.”

“I think they started doing it because it took some of the responsibility off them. Let’s face it, there’s no loyalty to employees. We’re just not set up that way any more. So if someone has to lay you off, now they get to feel that this is your Passion, so you’ll just go and pursue it somewhere else. They get to feel better.”

“After all, it’s your Passion. That means you’d do it for free, right? So no need to worry about you, or worry about your family life when you’re there at all hours.”

“Except…”

“Except…nobody gives you those screensavers if you work for Doctors Without Borders or you’re, I don’t know, a fourth-grade teacher. Or a midwife. That’s where it goes without saying. It’s when you’re sitting in a cube, doing your best at a corporate job even though it’s not saving the planet—that’s where they’re going to start talking about Passion. And if you don’t join in…”

“If you don’t join in…”

What? What happens if you don’t join in?

If I were 15 in San Francisco today, instead of twenty years ago in Limerick, I probably wouldn’t spend afternoons sitting in a smelly canteen talking about life. I’d be too busy polishing my collection of Passions, ready for inspection by the college admissions officers. Instead of going along with really-in-love, I’d be pumping an interest in soccer into a fervor, or turning a trip to Mexico into a passion for international relations. I’d understand that, just like really-in-love, passion was just a code for getting to what you wanted. Not a lie, exactly, more of an…augmentation. I might even have noticed all those tip-off intensifiers—real love, genuine commitment, authentic passion—that admit fakery is possible, even likely. And I’d be well-trained by a culture in which all manner of passion is faked.

As usual, Paul Graham says it well in this essay addressed to school leavers:

And what’s your real job supposed to be? Unless you’re Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word “aptitude” is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name “passion.” I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a “passion for service.” The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.

From “What You’ll Wish You’d Known”

It makes me sad. Cranky, too. We’ve used up so many great and needed words this way, and passion is a sacred one. It’s the language of Abelard and Heloise, Petrarch, Anna Karenina, Beethoven, and Oppenheimer. It belongs to lovers, artists, and worldchangers—who rarely need to talk about it, because they live it—and it means something more than “kick it up a notch.” We have good words for what we need—curiosity, enthusiasm, craftsmanship, and dedication. Let’s stick to them, and save passion for when we (really) mean it.

Tyerra Green, BAYCAT filmmaker, taken by michaele, Yahoo! Teacher of Merit, July 2006.

The first thing you see when you walk into BAYCAT‘s loft—once Villy lets you out of a hug—are the photos. There’s a wall of signed Polaroids of everyone who has ever visited: students, instructors, preachers, clients, donors, Bill Strickland, Jeff Skoll, and our fine-looking mayor, Gavin Newsom. Names and smiles; bigwigs and smallwigs.

BAYCAT trains young people from Bayview-Hunters Point in art, design, digital media, filmmaking, and human decency. These neighborhoods have by far the highest concentration of children in San Francisco, but the rest of the city doesn’t notice that that’s where we warehouse the future. “Historically-underserved comunities” seems to be the vogue term, but however you put it, these kids have had a raw deal so far. They are poor. Their schools are chaotic and badly equipped. The houses were built next to a power plant, on landfill where decades of toxic waste have built up, and so the children get sick more often than they should—but there’s just one pediatrician in the area. Until a Farmers’ Market opened last year, fresh food was a bus ride away, though liquor stores are plentiful. The gangs are armed.

Photo by Tim, 2005

Those are the problems, but there are 33,000 solutions. Bayview-Hunters Point also has artists, musicians, leaders, dreamers, preachers, businesspeople, and teachers who have it going on, and there’s no shortage of kids who want more. That’s where BAYCAT comes in. BAYCAT shows kids that they have a voice, and gives them the skills to give voice to their community. These are also, the theory goes, the skills that San Francisco and Silicon Valley employers want: design, video production, editing, and motion graphics.

Villy is the founder and CEO. She went from the New York projects to become an equity derivatives trader, then a corporate lawyer at a fancy firm. What she wanted to do was take these skills to make kids’ lives better, so she trained as a fifth-grade teacher. She was the kind of educator who teaches the Constitution by letting her kids draw up a class constitution: pushing them to move beyond because-I-said-so rules to identify the lasting principles behind them; encouraging them to test rewards and penalties and consequences; stretching ten-year-old minds around the notion of collective responsibility.

But she couldn’t reach all of them. Ten years old is too late. Five may be too late. No matter how much work you put in, how much you dig into your paltry salary for extra supplies, food, and field trips, no matter how many nights you lie awake with racing thoughts, you can’t save every kid. No Child Left Behind is the name of the federal act that has set public education up for guaranteed failure by mandating that every single child must pass standardized reading and math tests by 2012. Its goals are admirable, but no system improves by measurement alone—especially in California, where public education is still crippled by the staggering selfishness of Proposition 13. Where the principles of No Child Left Behind really live is in the hearts of dedicated teachers, who live in a war zone between hope and discouragement.

Villy left the public schools to start BAYCAT. She found an early supporter in Bill Strickland, the Pittsburgh social entrepreneur. I met Strickland (and Villy) when my company hosted a conference that brought together innovators from Japan and the US, and he held us rapt, as he does every audience, with his slides and his story. His power comes from his insistence on the elemental. The worst thing about poverty is what it does to your spirit, he says, and the cure for this spiritual cancer is to expose people to the best of the natural world. Beauty. Light. Water. Music. Art. Good food. Flowers. In the No Child Left Behind era, where principals are forced to force their teachers to drop everything but math and “language arts” drills, this sounds like granola-dreaming. But over the course of thirty-odd years, he has succeeded.

Strickland was a 16-year-old from the Pittsburgh projects, on path to nowhere good, when an art teacher introduced him to ceramics and took him to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. When he found his calling as a grown man, he persuaded a student of Lloyd Wright’s to build a cathedral-like training center in the middle of the projects in Pittsburgh. That’s where he trained students in the ceramics he had come to love. He loved jazz, so he built a concert hall as part of the center—and Dizzy Gillespie came to play. They started a jazz record label that has won four Grammy awards. He wanted the kids to see beauty, so he built a greenhouse to grow Japanese orchids—and now they supply the Whole Foods grocery chain with flowers and hydroponic tomatoes, grown in the projects in Steeltown. He worked with local Pittsburgh businesses, Heinz and Bayer among them, to set up facilities to train a new generation of workers in food service and lab technician skills, so they could find jobs—and eat good food every day. Sunshine, he insists, is for everybody on the planet, not just for rich people. Good food is for everybody on the planet. His Manchester Craftsman’s Guild trains students in art, not academics, but his students’ graduation rates are so high that the city of Pittsburgh recently asked him to take over a failing high school. His first action will be bring in fresh flowers. People understand those kinds of messages. We are creatures of expectations, he says, and once you put people in the light, they shine.

Villy is an artist and musician too, and the BAYCAT loft reflects their shared belief in the power of beauty and high expectations. It’s spacious, light-filled, and stylish, and designed for people to work together. Buildings have emotions, I think, and BAYCAT’s place is warm and playful. It’s in the Dogpatch neighborhood, between Bayview-Hunters Point and downtown San Francisco.

Across the street, my friend Celine has opened a wine bar, one of several new small businesses drawn to Dogpatch by the mirage of the Third Street Light Rail, which will connect Bayview-Hunters Point to the city that has ignored it. That’s where Villy and I drink Rioja and Viognier from time to time. Dogpatch reminds me of Brooklyn’s DUMBO eight years ago, with its waterfront light, beautiful old warehouses slowly converting to design studios and apartments, and mostly peaceful agreements between the artists and the crack dealers. “I talked to the crackheads and the drunks from the beginning,” said Celine, who is as matter-of-fact as you might expect of a woman who can both pass two kidney stones and open a wine bar in the last two months of her pregnancy. “I told them, I have no problem with you being here, but you just can’t piss in the doorway any more. I can’t do business if you piss in my doorway.” They are obliging. Now they piss in the bus shelter at the end of the block, and greet her warmly as she opens up.

Last July, a team from Yahoo!—my favorite clients—hired the BAYCAT students to make a documentary about a project we were working on, a weeklong summer camp to celebrate 60 local teachers and introduce them to blogging, Flickr, and other web goodies. Every day, Villy drove Tyerra and Jason from Hunters Point to Sunnyvale in her green VW Bug. They interviewed dozens of teachers and Yahoo! staff, including Terry Semel, the CEO. They filmed it, shaped the story, and edited it in two weeks, with the help of BAYCAT instructors. Tyerra’s 14. Jason is 16. That’s Tyerra speaking on the BAYCAT homepage. Yahoo! liked the results so much that they sponsored a BAYCAT “Oscars” to show off the students’ work at the end of the summer. There was plenty to celebrate: graphic design for local businesses, a new design identity for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, documentaries made for Yahoo!, for the Mayor’s Office, and for NetDay; a film about the Alice Griffith Housing Projects; an interview series on obesity they filmed at local McDonalds. They’re learning to bear witness: by shaping stories, you can shape a future.

Villy has huge plans for BAYCAT. Every time she tells me about them over Italian wine, my brain starts fizzing with her spirit—that’s the Villy effect. She believes that change starts with personal connections, with asking open-ended questions and being willing to listen to the answers. This autumn, she’s going to let me learn how to teach writing at BAYCAT. It’s a tiny commitment—once a week, a couple of students a time—but I want to be there to watch her dreams bloom.

Richard Sennett has a newish book out called The Culture of the New Capitalism. I heard him interviewed about it on a BBC podcast, and there’s only one copy left at Amazon’s UK store, but he’s less admired here in his own country, as far as I can tell. Sennett is concerned about the people who don’t fit the needs of this economy. They’re not the stars the talent spotters want, or they are too old, or too needed by dependents to hold a Blackberry tether with grace. Or maybe they’re the kind of people who find that shifting loyalties make them anxious and sad.

I had just enough of a taste of the old work culture of pantyhose, punchclocks, and marble lobbies to be grateful to be born into this new work style exported from the Bay Area. By Sennett’s standards, I was designed for this economy. I have more curiosity than ties. I’m childless. I’ve moved like a stone skipping across a pond: 120 miles, 500 miles, 3,000 miles, 6,000 miles from my hometown, touching down only lightly in each place. In Hernstein and Murray’s creepy Bell Curve analysis of intelligence structures, I’m a “symbol analyst.” A “master of change.” That makes me a good catch.

“When we hired you, we weren’t interested in your experience. We were only interested in how fast you could learn,” I was once told. At 24, that’s flattering. It’s also a relief—thank God, it doesn’t matter that I know feck-all. I’m a little bundle of potential. But at 34, it’s disconcerting to have a dozen years of your life dismissed. I could have stayed in bed rather than bothering to get trained on Wall Street? I didn’t need to sweat through those startups to learn why entrepreneurs have more in common with artists than with MBAs, and what it really takes to turn an idea into a change? I needn’t have bothered with volunteering, with learning to write, with riding the public buses around Bolivia?

For all that this amoral economy suits me well, I’m making a promise to my future self that if I hear at 54 that my experience is uninteresting to capitalism—and I expect to—I’ll stand up, excuse myself with a big smile, and go back to the woods for good. We’re human beings. Our stories matter. Grown-ups have more to contribute than babies. And where we have been and who we take care of matters more to me than symbols, models, and theories.

“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents, Stanford UP 1995

“And for those of you who don’t know what Barnard is,” says LaTonya into the microphone, hands on hips, “let me tell you: it’s Ivy League, aright?” Everyone laughs. She’s earned that swagger, along with the scholarship that promises to put her all the way through graduate school before she’s even started her freshman year. Now there are hundreds of grown women in the hotel ballroom, eating salmon to celebrate her and her GirlSource sisters.

GirlSource hires 150 poor girls a year, aged 14 to 18, mostly from the Mission, Bayview, Hunters’ Point. They’re trained—and paid—to run a chatty health information website, by girls, for girls. They design, research, write, and code the whole thing, picking up skills they can sell. “We’re not from the kind of communities where we all got the internet at home,” one explains. As part of the program, they also get tutoring, help with college applications and scholarship research, and a safe place to hang out with other girls.

“Can you imagine that I used to be so shy I didn’t want to open my mouth to strangers?” Marisa says gleefully to 600 strangers. “ I’m Filipina-American. We’re raised to obey authority, but not to have high self-esteem. That turned me into a hater. I didn’t know how to appreciate my own qualities, so I hated on other girls to make myself feel better. Girls do that. They hate on people until that person’s confidence is totally destroyed, and that makes them powerful. But when I’d hate on people and bring them down, I’d still feel empty inside. GirlSource taught me to flip the script. When I met the other girls in the program, I was de-fen-sive, wondering what they were thinking about me. Now I look at these beautiful girls, and all they can do, and I feel sooooo proud to be a GirlSource girl.”

In America, just 4% of Hispanic 12th-graders can read at their grade level. For African-American students, it’s even worse. But in spite of poverty, pregnancies, family problems, and sometimes even homelessness, 96% of GirlSource girls graduate from high school. 80% get to college—and most are the first in their families to do so. The organization directors believe that the best way to change a community is to pick a small number of individuals and stick with them. In their turn, the girls tend to stick with the program.

18-year-old Cristina tells how she’s worked to help support her family since she was thirteen. How she took BART for an hour and a half each way to get to school, and worked after school, and made time for GirlSource, and still kept up a 4.2 grade-point-average.
“There was this one class where I got a B. But it was AP so it counts as an A, right?” She had always dreamed of going to New York City. The hardest moment, she said, was one night when her father was sick and she brought him something to eat in his bedroom and he cried that he was so lonely, that things were so hard in the United States. How could she think about leaving home when her father would miss her so much? And then she remembered what she had learned at GirlSource, about standing up for herself, honoring her own needs, using her new confidence to set boundaries. It made it easier for her to make the choice that was right for her. That’s why, she said—with a delivery Steve Jobs might envy—she was going to Columbia in the fall.

There were whistles.

I clapped too. How can you not clap a girl from Richmond who gets herself to Columbia University?

“It’s crazy, right?” she says, eyes shining. “I mean, they’re gonna pay for my tuition, my housing, my books—I’m even gonna get my own psychologist.”

I walk around the Mission a lot, sharing the streets with Norteño gang kids, Salvadoran toddlers, junkies, vendors selling brain and cheek tacos, tattooed hipster gringos, Sixties acid casualties, street preachers, broken hookers, and slumped day laborers hoping to get hired on Cesar Chavez Street.

In the Mission, fruit and vegetables are cheap, and the buses are studded with nuts. Mariachis strut from restaurant to restaurant in white cowboy hats. Full-throated ranchero songs float out from the bars, but when you peep in, there might be only a few old guys on the barstools. On Sunday mornings, dressed-up families walk to church, the stocky kids exact half-scale copies of their parents. Once in a while I follow a little Mexican or Peruvian family a block or two, enjoying kids who are so sure of themselves that they don’t need to come up with snot-nosed demands just to prove they still exist. I like that these families seem to like each others’ company.

(My friend Alex is principal of a bilingual charter school in Silicon Valley. Though it’s in one of the richest towns in the country, 97% of his students live below the poverty line. Their parents clean houses and mow lawns for the engineers and Biz Dev Directors. “Americans think poor people don’t care about their kids’ education,” he says, “but no one wants their kid to read as much as a parent who can’t.”)

Last Thursday night, in a week when hundreds of thousands of my fellow immigrants had marched for respect in cities across the country, a shy young guy invited me to stop for tamales outside a storefront church at the bottom of my hill.
“De puerco o de queso?” said the old woman with the mantilla, almost hidden behind her styrofoam cooler.
“Meat or cheese?” he said, trying to help me out. He was from the Yucatán. I asked if he missed it. “Claro que sí” he said.“Pero hay que ir adelante.”

Hay que ir adelante. You’ve got to move forward. I suppose that’s what drove our forebears out of the primordial ooze, onwards and upwards towards seven-fifty an hour. It’s what pushes Cristina from Richmond to New York City, armed with a precocious biography of self-esteem and boundaries. But still, I’m uneasy for her. Her story is too neat, too Oprahfied. I don’t know how it will serve her when she’s surrounded by slick, expensively-trained classmates at Columbia. What will it be like when she’s three thousand miles from the family who so wanted her to have a better life—and who needed her?

Cristina’s not leaving a village in the Yucatán. She’s already just a BART ride away from one of the best-loved cities in America, and from Stanford and Berkeley. Choosing Columbia means that she’s grasped the California mantra of personal choice, and so her decision brings you-go-girl cheers: distance equals independence equals strength. But I want more for her, and from her. I want her to show Americans how to include love and family in success.

Maybe she still can. Her own Oprahisms are as sincere as they are canned. She’s of a generation that knows how to try on and package identities, and this one is wrapped up for the convenience of the busy women in the hotel ballroom. We’re looking to feel good about throwing a few hundred bucks to young women fifteen years or twenty years behind us, and it works. I believe in GirlSource enough to set up the direct deposit donation, to read through their essays and wonder if I could tutor, or hire some of these girls as interns. (They’d find out what the snacks are like in an innovation consultancy, and we’d learn more than we’d teach.)

But even as I write the checks, and cheer Cristina and her friends, I think, oh baby, you’re going to need that Columbia shrink…

“In October, a schizophrenic homeless woman threw her three young sons into the San Francisco Bay. The mother, Lashuan Harris, had been living with her children in an Oakland shelter, and had stopped taking her medicine because she believed she was cured. But voices, she later told police, told her to throw her sons into the water. Relatives told the press that they had sought custody of the boys, but that social workers had failed to act. Less than two weeks later, a homeless man, Johnell Kirk junior, died after being set on fire by another drifter, who was said to suffer from schizophrenia.San Francisco has struggled to deal with the many homeless people who come to the city for its temperate climate and generous welfare programmes. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco�s mayor, has made the issue a priority. His controversial �Care Not Cash� initiative, which offers homeless people services rather than welfare cheques, took effect in May 2004, and there are signs of success. The programmes have reduced the street population by 28% and housed nearly 1,500 people…But the city has a lot more work to do.”
—The Economist

“You heard what she did? Three little kids. They struggled, man. She had to work to do that. That took hard work, harder work than she’d ever probably done before in her goddamn life. They found one of ‘em, but I don’t know if they’ll get the other two, tides and all. Filthy water. Can you imagine? She just walked away, pushing a fucking empty stroller like no big deal. Said she heard voices. Said the voices told her to push her three little kids into the San Francisco Bay and hold them down until they drowned.

“And you know what’s going to happen to her, right? You know, right? She’s not going to jail. She’s going to go to some psych ward and get the medication and the good food and the gym and the therapy. She won’t do a day in jail. And she’s going to sit there, her and her voices, you and me paying for her doctors, and she’s not going to pay for squat. Not for rent, not for her dinner, not for her occupational therapy, not for her doctors, and sure as hell not for what she did to those three little kids.

“Know what I’d like to do to her? I’d like take a manhole cover—nice big round one—and explain to her how the voices told me to chain it to her ankle and roll it off the pier, right there in front of the sea lions. Or—no, wait—I’d put her in a giant microwave. Rig it up in Giants Stadium so she could sit there in her chair in her giant microwave, and I’d set it to High for as long as it takes to drown three little kids. Multiplied by two. And I’d bring the whole city out to watch her cook, so they’d get the idea it’s not smart to listen to the voices. Or, know what I’d do? I’d stake her out, tie her down, so she couldn’t move a muscle, and I’d pour sugar syrup over every fucking inch of her. And then I’d bring out the fireants, man…Real slow, that’d go. Wide awake.

“You know they don’t even use the electric chair any more? Said it was inhumane. It took a whole five minutes to die. And they’re doped up with valium, having sweet dreams. Oh, what a crying shame, to take five minutes to die, after you probably tortured someone for three weeks. These people with the prisoners’ rights, man. You give up your rights when you take someone’s life, all right? I’ll give ‘em rights: hang ‘em with an American flag. That’s their right. It’s God’s job to condemn, not ours, but let’s just go ahead and arrange the meeting, you know what I’m saying? Fire up Old Sparky, cut the crap.

“I hear they tried to rape Scott Petersen already. I hope he’s getting it good, after what he did. Know what I’d do? I’d let five of the largest, strongest relatives into that cell, armed with baseball bats and let ‘em blow off some steam. Or maybe a very large, sexually-deprived silverback gorilla…”

The train slowed. A woman stuffed headphones into her bag, stood up, and excused herself. He jumped to his feet, head bowed, voice soft.

“No problem, ma’am.”

“You’ve been pumping a lot?” his friend asked when he sat back down. He pushed up a sleeve, examined a bicep and frowned. His scalp gleamed.

“Eighteen inches. But I want to get it to twenty. It’ll take a lot of work. A lot of focus._ I wanted to get to the gym tonight, but my little guy has a soccer game, and it’s important to me to be there. Sends a message. My dad never made it to my soccer games. I know he was working to put a roof over our heads, so it’s not like I mind. But I’m going to be there for my little guy at his games. It’s the kind of role model I want to portray.”

He squinted at his bicep again.

“Takes a lot of work to build up the right dimensions. But it’s fun to have the size. Especially in bars. I am not a violent person. It’s part of my credo. I’m very controlled. But I get some guy in a bar, someone inappropriate, maybe being a jerk to some woman, and you know what I say? I say, real quiet, “You’re going to apologize. Or I’m going to break your arm.” Total control, total calm, total polite. And my friends say, ‘Uh, yeah, he will.” And then you just get to watch this asswipe back down…”

He folded his arms in satisfaction.

“Only bad thing is it can make it hard with women. You meet these women who just like big guys, that’s their thing. Makes it hard to tell. They can be fine as a person, quality people, but they’re not necessarily candidates for a serious long-term relationship if they’re only with you for size. I’m seeing a woman right now, she’s a quality person, but she’s not over her divorce, she’s just getting used to dating. And she’s really into the muscles. Likes the big guys.”

“Not over her divorce? Fuck that shit, man. Get divorced, move ON.”

“Right. Move the fuck on.”

They looked out the window. Palo Alto passed.

“Karl Rove. You know what’s going on there? You been following it? Karl Rove is guilty of treason. He deserves to share a large, smelly cell with the most horrible inmate…”

Discovery Channel viewers have picked a shortlist of the five greatest Americans of all time. It’s one of those memes that starts on the BBC or the CBC and spreads to US television, like The Weakest Link or those LiveJournal “If you were a bodily fluid, which one would you be?” exercises. This particular soap opera is sponsored by Tide.

The top five does not include Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Frankln D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, or Mark Twain.

It does, however, include Ronald Reagan.

From Andie in South Africa, further reading on the housing bubble: Riotous Real Estate.

I’m learning a new language, with a one-word vocabulary. In California, everything is organic, down to the bottled water they fly in from New Zealand. Organic oats Organic cayenne pepper. Organic cotton cleansing pads. Organic jicama. “Is it or-gan-ic?” they ask in restaurants, even when the menu is bloated with the word. After New York City’s grubby bodegas, where a Slim Jim cost as much as a pallet of strawberries here, I am round-eyed at this west coast feast. (The proof: I’ve put on five pounds in five weeks.)

I’m glad that I’m rich enough to afford gently-reared food, even if it’s fertilized by the bullshit of fussy white people. I love the Bernal Heights Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings. The pro-dooce, as they call fruit and vegetables in this country, tastes wonderful. Still, the prissiness of it all makes me want to lick an oil tanker.

In the Trader Joe’s parking lot I stuff the saddlebags of my little bike while all around me people load up their armored vehicles with well-travelled organic artichokes and Eurotrash water. Their bodies are well-cared for, but the planet is still battered.

When Elvis sings “I’m just a hunk, a hunk of burnin’ love,” I’m ready to sign up for U.S. citizenship right then and there. Only a country of genius could produce that kind of art. Nevertheless, America needs to get out more. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist , has recently discovered that the world is flat, that Indians are smart, and that other countries have workers and telecommunications infrastructures as sophisticated as the homeland’s. Perhaps we foreigners can even produce glib essays for a tenth of Friedman’s wages (as long as you pay us in Euros).

Eight years ago I shared H1-b visa gripes with Indian engineers in Times Square, while we worked to fix bugs with the Hyderabad colleagues who lived twelve hours in the future. The older IIT engineers, who had gone to graduate school in the US, acted as cultural brokers for the delegations that went back and forth between Hyderabad and Broadway. We could have told Friedman what was coming, if we’d been at the right cocktail parties.

Gokul, my colleague and running partner then, went on to MIT graduate school and now runs Google’s AdSense program. We’re neighbors again, in a region where fully a third of start-ups were founded by immigrants, including Google. Eight years on, at a time when USCIS has made it much harder to come here, we could now do just fine or better where we came from. The next generation of Gokuls can start their empires at home, and that’s why the US Ambassador to Ireland has had to tour the universities to beg Irish students to take up summer visas to visit the US. They’re not interested.