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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Caitriona is visiting with her husband Dan, reuniting my favorite trio. She’s here to cover the protests against the Republican Convention as a stringer for the BBC.

The move from Tehran to DC has been hard for her. She’s been turned down for all health insurance coverage due to her “pre-existing medical condition”—the seven-month-old American, conceived in the Axis of Evil, who squirms in her belly. Here, where doctors pay huge premiums to insure against malpractice claims, it costs ten to fifteen thousand dollars to deliver a baby without fripperies like pain relief. A Caesarian costs fifty grand—and American doctors are quick with the scalpel even on women who aren’t too posh to push. Those are the price tags for healthy births.

Forty million Americans have no health coverage. That’s 3.7 million more than when Bush took office. You can end up paying off an appendectomy for as long as a college loan or a mortgage. Cait has spent her first month back in America walking from hospital to insurance office to birthing center, trying to strike a deal, but there’s no room at the inn.

As she schleps her new belly and her tape recorder in the the New York heat, interviewing Republicans and ukelele-playing protestants, it must hard for her to stay out of the fight for health care and decency. There’s little common about decency.

This morning we were stopped on my block by a tall man who wanted to know if we were going to the rally. We said yes, even though my mouse arm was already numb to the shoulder at the prospect of yet another long day at the office keyboard. My protest has to stay personal and portable.

    “That’s good! Make your voices heard!” he said. His voice still had a trace of the islands. He pointed at my “Run Against Bush” sticker and then at her bump. “You, I can see running. But honey, they’re goin’ to catch you!”
    “She’s much tougher than she looks,” I explained.
We chatted a while, glad to share outrage with a neighbor. Then he said “But I don’t know what’s going on with Kerry. He’s playing dead!”
    “That’s exactly right! He’s just rolling over.”
    “Playing dead. He won’t fight back.” He shakes his head. “But you know, when you’re falling off a cliff, you’ll take anybody’s arm that’ll save you. You can’t look too close at who it is.”

He handed us leaflets and wished us luck with the votes we don’t have.