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No Ronald McDonald?

Saturday, June 25th, 2005

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.

Posted in Politics\ | 12 Comments »

The Home Equity ATM

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

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

…Accordingly, if “values” were the basis for the Bush victory last November, they were property values not moral principles or religious prejudices. In the face of the perverse housing bubble, the Kerry campaign, as with healthcare costs and the export of jobs, was simply running on empty. It offered no compelling alternative to the status quo. But the Republicans have more serious things to worry about than Democrats. As the real-estate bubble reaches its peak, George Bush may discover that he has been surfing a tsunami and that a towering cliff looms ahead.

The bubble has already burst in San Francisco, and the April 11th issue of Business Week headlined fears that a general deflation � perhaps of international magnitude � is nigh. What will life be like in the United States (or Britain or Ireland) after the home-equity ATM shuts down?”

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Compost

Friday, April 15th, 2005

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.

Posted in Politics\ | 4 Comments »

The World is Flat

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

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.

Posted in Books\, Ireland\, New York\, Politics\ | 1 Comment »

Armistice Day

Thursday, November 11th, 2004

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!— An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen

Posted in Books\, Peace and Love\, Poetry\, Politics\ | 3 Comments »

Eyes Wide Open

Thursday, November 4th, 2004

Boots Exhibit Amy works for American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that defends the dignity and worth of every individual. They organized the Eyes Wide Open exhibition that came to town during the Republican National Convention.

Eyes Wide Open showed a pair of boots for each American soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Most were bought from army surplus, though a few were donated by bereaved families. Pairs were added almost daily as the exhibition travelled around the country in the summer and fall. Each was tagged with a name.

Unfilled shoes are haunting. Think of the pile of dusty shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, each standing for for a person who was discarded. Naming the dead, too, is a powerful act—so powerful that we set up tribunals to give genocide victims back their names. It took Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial to reclaim real young men from Robert MacNamara’s efficient talk of “bodycounts”. We cannot imagine not having a name. We cannot imagine ourselves in bodybags or in mass graves, but we can imagine putting on a shoe.

In Bryant Park last August, almost a thousand pairs of tagged boots were laid out. Amy helped with security. Feelings were high that week as the town filled up with Republicans and protesters, and talk of September 11th flew again. A mother of a dead soldier walked past the exhibition—she hadn’t known it was on—and burst into tears in an attendant’s arms. She came back the next morning for a private viewing.

One young man, deep in the corridors of shoes, searched and found a name that meant something to him. He sat on the ground with his head in his hands and wept. Amy tried to give him some privacy by shielding the passage, but a small mob threaded around her, drawn by the sound of his grief. Five or six of them stood over him with cameras and clicked away. The young man kept sobbing, head bowed. She didn’t know if he saw the photographers, or their flashes.

They weren’t even professionals, she said—no press passes, just little digicams, clicking away, pleased to have got their Moment and chatting about it afterwards.
“Photo bloggers,” I told her. Everything was recorded that week.
Amy, who lives mainly in an offline world, was bewildered. Why wouldn’t they respect this guy’s grief? Had we become so incapabable of experiencing anything directly that we must suck on other people’s feelings just to get a Moment?

Oh yes.

Ruskin taught people to draw, not so that they would become artists but so they would learn to see. The new snapparazzi hasn’t learned that yet, focused as they are on toys and speed. I doubt they would get in a grieving man’s face without a gadget that miniaturized him. If a tenth of the people with shiny new megapixel cameras took the time to see and feel without their digital extensions, we would start to see art beyond people taking pictures of their own reflections. Emotional vampires, trying to see if they exist.

Posted in New York\, People\, Politics\ | 8 Comments »

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours� eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

—W.B. Yeats

Thanks, Mark, for leaving this in the comments to my previous post.

Posted in Politics\ | 2 Comments »

Misunderestimated Again

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

Saletan says it all. That’s why I’m backing Oprah in 2008.

Posted in Politics\ | 1 Comment »

Suffragette City

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

A day like this makes me feel rootless and voiceless. I’ve never voted, and I’ve never wanted to vote so much.

Now I understand what drove Emmeline Pankhurst.

Posted in Politics\ | 4 Comments »

New York Defends Johnny Cash

Tuesday, August 31st, 2004

“Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin’ everywhere you go,
But ‘til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.”
—Johnny Cash

“Q. What about permits?
A. This is New York City! Do you really need a permit to sing on the sidewalk and call attention to some rich folks exploiting the memory of a working class hero?”
—Man in Black Bloc

They’re off to Sotheby’s at 4pm to Defend Johnny Cash from partisan sacrilege.

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