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.

Carpal tunnel syndrome and long work days are making me terse these days. But someone has designated today as Day of Conscience for Sudan, and that makes me think of politics and the English language.

Words have such power. Here in the US, we put a five-second delay on live TV shows in case viewers are struck by the force of a word.

We shield ourselves, too, from the force of the word ‘genocide’. It is so powerful that when a government names it it is under legal obligation to fight it. An eight-letter word, in the right mouth, can mobilize armies, doctors, diplomats, logistics experts, and lawyers. Rafael Lemkin spent his whole life struggling to get that level of moral and legal authority for the word he coined. It didn’t occur to him, I suppose, that we would dodge his intent by simply renaming of what we saw. It costs no tanks or taxes to condemn ‘atrocities’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘Bad Things’.

Here’s a New Yorker article by the dazzling Ms. Samantha Power: Dying in Darfur

Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders use money well.

TV execs as coyotes: in Gana la Verde, a new reality show, immigrants jump off fast-moving trucks and eat worm burritos for the chance of help from a top Green Card lawyer. Which is not far from what some of us do to get here in the first place.

It’s muggy August in New York. Today it’ll get to 87 degrees outside, but in the office I’m wearing jeans, socks, boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and an alpaca poncho. I still have goosebumps. My co-workers are bundling up in fleecy sweatshirts.Every half-hour or so, I stick my torso out the window to get warm enough to keep typing.

American air-conditioning makes me crazy. You have to pack a blankie to go to a summer movie. Subway cars are like meat lockers. Stores pump cold air out onto Broadway, just because they can. In America, we have mastered nature, and every individual has the god-given right to freeze his ass off all summer long.

And we tell China the planet can’t afford for them to have cars?