I'm not there, but I can do convention coverage too.

This morning a Republican family member greeted me with,

" Good morning. You reading the news? That speech last night, Obama's speech: He was good. He was really, really good. "

She's right. Good morning, indeed - now go read it.

The Martial family picked itself up and left Boston to make our way among the scattered households of our kinfolk. The Convention was not in fact a factor in our decision to use this week for summer fun. However, that it happens to be summer was a major consideration.

I confess I'm going to miss being there for the big shindig. I was thinking of wearing a t-shirt that said, "I'm local: ask me for directions" and on the back, "You can't get there from here". In Boston that happens to be true (and if tourists would accept this simple fact, they'd be a lot less frustrated). Next time.

My grandfather used to send his descendants out into the world with the admonition to "remember who you are and what you represent".

Our boy Pierce explains the good Commonwealth of Massachusetts and just what "liberal" means in our context.

The peso had once been pegged to the dollar, one-to-one. The peso is now worth about 33 cents. Argentineans say that the middle class evaporated, most of them moving down, but some lucky few who had kept their savings offshore moving up. The job market is stale, with very few new openings. Indeed, jobs are apparently developed through nearly closed networks of families and friends; you can only get a job as good as your network - if you can find one at all.

Walking around the crowded streets of the city, eating in its full restaurants, I kept asking myself "is this what a depression looks like?"¹

What does it look like? Everything could use a new coat of paint, most people's coats are threadbare and the fashions they wear are three years out-of-date. There are very few new cars on the road and heads turn to watch when one goes by. People are thin.

The shopping streets have a bright and shiny store in every space. The latest fashions from all over the world are on display. There are no vacancies, no empty storefronts, on the streets famous for their wares. Every corner has a shoe store and every block an internet shop. Moving off of the main drags and onto the cross streets there are some vacancies, but not so many as I anticipated, not nearly the rows of empty shops I remember from my own town in the early nineties.

Who buys all this? I walked into a crowded electronics shop to buy an alarm clock. There were five employees and they never stopped moving, never stopped selling. I had to take a number in order to be served. The main business was cell phones - which everyone has, as they do nearly everywhere in the world now - and watches. I found the same exact alarm clock I left at home for the same exact price. Later, I browsed in a shoe store and was the only customer. Bookstores are open until midnight and are always packed with people standing and reading. Do they buy the books or only browse?

People eat late in Buenos Aires and they eat out. We would eat at 8:30 and be the only people in the restaurant, but by 10 every place we went was packed. Every night. Food is cheap, even by local standards, but it was surprising to see every table filled and a line out the door.

There are very few beggars. I saw one in a week of walking around the city center. That doesn't mean there are not desperately poor people sitting on the sidewalks, but they do not ask for money outright. Instead they offer to sell you things (homemade jewelry on one corner, glowsticks on the next) or services (e.g. watching or washing your car) or they perform (juggling in the crosswalks during red lights is quite popular).

Then there are the cartoneros - the trashpickers. They are everywhere, with their dollies and their bicycles (the vast majority of bicycles I saw were in the business), their plastic sorting bins and their pocket rolls of bundling twine. Every garbage can in the city, every garbage bag laid on the curb at the end of the day has been, or soon will be, picked over for recyclables. People can earn a pittance for collecting cardboard, plastic, glass and bringing it to a central processing area. But a pittance is apparently enough to keep body and soul together in Buenos Aires these days, and I am told that the recycling in the city is among the most efficient in the whole world. There is one additional piece to the story: some brilliant entrepreneur has established a train, just a length of empty cars, that daily hauls the recyclers and their goods to the processing plant.

I am nearly overwhelmed with awe by the apparently spontaneous development of this new professional niche (make no mistake, the recyclers are highly professional and organized). At the same time, it nearly overwhelms me with sadness that this niche should be necessary. For some people, there are no other options.

The Teatro Colon, the city's major opera house, offers some tickets for the equivalent of fifty cents - but we couldn't get a ticket for any price. They were sold out. There are theaters all over the city, musicians and dancers booked for months, whole seasons of art planned. The movie theaters, as I've mentioned, have long lines waiting to enter. That last, at least, reminds me of stories from the US in the thirties.

I've been poor places, places where one meal a day was good living, where ten square feet of corrugated steel makes a good roof, where the choice is between deadly thirst and water bourne sickness. Buenos Aires is not poor in these ways (though parts of Boca may be trending in that terrible direction). Indeed, many people around the world would be delighted to be "poor" in the way Argentineans are poor. That is not to say the situation is good, but it is not yet desperate, nor is it likely to be.

There are two great strengths in Argentina. First is an incredible energy to work coupled with a strong pride in doing a good job. Argentineans work hard despite a situation which would seem to suggest that working hard is no guarantee of success. There is no complacency or falling back on destiny or despair. Second, the Argentinean system has not fallen apart. There are laws and rules, traditions and shared ethics which bind the people one to another and provide a framework for working out their problems. This is not a nation starting from scratch.

. . .

¹ "Depression" may not be the right word (the authors of the linked article above believe it is the right word), however it is one people in Buenos Aires used. "Devaluation" isn't emotional enough to capture the local imagination. It was explained to me many times in Buenos Aires and in many contexts that living is something that you have to do with your heart and not just with your head.

Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in Argentina while I was there.

There were long lines at the downtown movie houses, but there seem to be long lines for most movies. I certainly couldn't judge if the crowd was of different size than for other movie openings - or matinees for that matter. However, everybody I spoke with was very excited about one film and only film. To judge from what people said, everybody will go and see Fahrenheit.

Most amusingly, one of the ubiquitous posters advertising the opening of the movie apparently says (hey, my Spanish is not so good, so I won't offer my translation): "If Michael Moore says it, it must be true." The Argentineans with whom I was working don't care one whit for the "exaggerations" or "implications" that have the US media so worked up. Indeed, that the US media has been so critical is just a further selling point in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is big and it feels like a big city: block after block of ten or more stories, with street level shops and apartments above. In this way it feels like New York.

The city has a wealth of public sculpture. Every square has its monument. Strange statues seem to pop out of the ground around every corner. In this way it feels like Paris.

There is incredible energy in the crowds who push their way up and down the sidewalks of the city's seemingly endless grid. There are people moving everywhere and the hustle and bustle of business is so thick you can smell it. In this way it feels like Bangkok.

The cafes are full of lingering friends, men with men and women with women, drinking one coffee over an hour or two. In this way it feels like Belgrade.

The sidewalks are atrocious, cracked and broken, in many places bare dirt rather than tiles. At the same time, the streets are well kept, recently paved. In this way it feels like Nairobi (a very recent, post-Moi Nairobi though).

In truth, Buenos Aires feels like none of those cities. Buenos Aires feels like Buenos Aires.

I'm home. The trip was excellent: my people were sweet and kind and intelligent, I was brilliant, the beef flavorful, and the tango sexy.

I once knew a step or two of tango, but that was many years ago. In Buenos Aires, if you go to a tango club, amateurs are discouraged. So I sat and watched and marveled.

The old, dingy joint had something to do with the magic. The paint was peeling and the soundsystem was atrocious; the waiters were slow and the beer weak; the chairs were uncomfortable. We stepped into a timeless world, living by its own rules, living for one thing and one thing alone: tango.

The man who took us claimed to not tango himself, though he was dragged onto the floor for a dance by a matron who ignored his refusal. In a wistful voice he told us that his generation had not learned to tango. "We danced the twist. You could say we were globalized."

Waiting to dance, people sit at tables around a cleared space. Offering to dance, some wander among the tables trying to catch the eye of potential partners. A glance, a quirked eyebrow, a hesitant smile. A new pair threads their way through the tables to the dance floor. They hold one another for a moment, establishing the style - close or far - and then they glide. The first two dances, they learn to feel each other. The third, they just dance. Then the music plays an interlude, something not at all a tango, and the dancers return to their seats or return to stalking among the tables, looking for the next partner.

And so it goes in Buenos Aires, until the dawn.

This afternoon I am off to Argentina for just over a week. This will, remarkably, be my first trip to South America - which is the one continent¹ to which I've not yet been.

Amusing to perhaps only myself, I will return having trained people as trainers on every continent except for North America.

. . .

¹ Counting continents as those which have more people than penguins.

Sillier. Much sillier. Though perhaps only my metalhead friends will truly understand. And among them, only those with a well developed sense of the absurd.

(via Unfogged)

Barbara Ehrenreich:

" [I]t is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: 'And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.' Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that 'the Constitution is not a suicide pact.' In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

By signing Jefferson's text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. "

The Constitution is a suicide pact. If we were for some reason to set the Constitution or some inconvenient pieces of it aside, then this country would, in an essentially fundamental way, no longer be the United States of America.

When people invoke the "not a suicide pact" argument, they are in effect saying that nothing is worth more than their own lives. In order that they can have life, they suggest that they are willing to pay any and every dishonorable price. They are so weary of freedom's burdens, so desperate for the safety of slavery and the comfort of chains, that they practically beg to be relieved of the terrible and constant effort required to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Generations of Americans have willingly avoided the safest course in favor of the strait path in support of freedom and, whether reluctantly or forcefully, they have answered every challenge. Many have fallen along the way, making the terrible choice to uphold our fragile ideals no matter the cost and their sacrifice spurs us on to increased devotion. Now some seek to tarnish that devotion by pronouncing it foolish to think anything is worth more than life.

As for me, I answer as Americans have answered for two and a quarter centuries: "give me liberty or give me death!"

. . .

Rhetoric aside, the source of the "suicide pact" phrase.

How is it that this idea, that the Constitution "is not a suicide pact", should be first expressed in 1949 at a moment of supreme American power? How has it taken such firm root when American power is at its zenith? What threats loom so large that some feel it might be necessary to kill our system of governance in order to save their worthless hides?

I've added five blogs to the blogroll and reorganized the factions a tad. The five new are big - three of them among the biggest - but as Mrs Martial has found, I have a tendency in conversation with her to refer to articles written by or linked from these folks. And she wants to be able to click through without having to go elsewhere first.

The Boston Globe recalls that Sibel Edmonds exists. And then Ann Kornblut strikes a few blows for democratic ideals!

" Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said, she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English.

Edmonds, 34, who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi, said she quickly reported the mistake to an FBI superior. Five months later, after flagging what she said were several other security lapses in her division, she was fired. Now, after more than two years of investigations and congressional inquiries, Edmonds is at the center of an extraordinary storm over US classification rules that sheds new light on the secrecy imperative supported by members of the Bush administration.

In a rare maneuver, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered that information about the Edmonds case be retroactively classified, even basic facts that have been posted on websites and discussed openly in meetings with members of Congress for two years. The Department of Justice also invoked the seldom-used ''state secrets" privilege to silence Edmonds in court. She has been blocked from testifying in a lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and was allowed to speak to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks only behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, the FBI has yet to release its internal investigation into her charges. And the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the bureau, has been stymied in its attempt to get to the bottom of her allegations. Now that the case has been retroactively classified, lawmakers are wary of discussing the details, for fear of overstepping legal bounds. "

Ladies and gentlemen, the Executive Branch of the United States.

I don't normally do this, but READ THE WHOLE THING!

The Baltimore Chronicle has the transcript of an interview with Ms Edmonds today. Read that too.

Finally, The Memory Hole captured the early episodes (cached version because thememoryhole.org isn't responding today).

The Declaration of Independence, with its decent respect to the opinions of mankind, with its crescendo of fury at injustice, with its run-on penultimate sentence that forever smashed the chains of hereditary tyranny, never fails to move me to tears.

" For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. " - Thomas Jefferson

UPDATE: After the traditional breakfast reading, punctuated this year by the trill huzzahs and the buzzing cheers of the local birds and squirrels, along with the appreciative knocking of the woodpeckers, and after the also traditional wiping of the eyes, Mrs Martial led the neighborhood fauna in a moving rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner". She has a lovely singing voice and, no caterwauling diva, she started the song in a key that any normal person could fumble around¹.

Along with nearly a half-million other Bostonites (noticeably fewer than last year), we ended the day with fireworks. Boston is a small city and we walked downtown from our neighborhood up in Somerville to our viewing spot just off the Esplanade on the Community Boating dock (we actually commandeered a boat, but remained tied up). While tickets are required, there aren't many better places to see the fireworks and CBI even throws a barbecue on the 4^th. CBI is a good cause too, and they deserve support.

The fireworks were hyped by the announcer (CBI had speakers up broadcasting the broadcast) as "the greatest display of fireworks in American history". They were very impressive, but not quite up to that lofty standard primarily because they were synchronized with some truly awful music.

The highlight occurred early with Louis Armstrong's rendition of "What a Wonderful World", easily the best piece of music and a song for which firework synchronization really works. The lyrics are colorful and their blossoming was a nice, low key, very American moment. This being America, it didn't last.

The most egregious moment was the finale to Celine Dion's rendition of "God Bless America", a song of which I am not fond in any case. One, the song only has one verse - so people always feel the need to sing it again ("second verse, same as the first" as some great Americans once said). Celine's version repeats it three for-the-love-of-god-make-it-stop! times. One-A, in order to make three repetitions even mildly interesting, each new version of the verse is accompanied by a key change, a brutalizing, soul-numbing key change - a gearchange, if you will.

Two, her voice just rises and rises and rises on that "white with foam" line². As a choice of lyric on which to exercise one's pipes, it perplexes me. It makes America's essential foaminess the emotional center of the song.

Three, she's a goddam Canadian! There's no American singer who can dredge up the appropriate histrionics? No American who can adequately capture the rich, foamy center of our blessings? I concede that this is an odd little quirk, but on July 4^th I only put on music by American composers or bands. You should do no less.

The whole Celine thing was a downer. Especially as the fireworks approached their finale, booming and flashing, lifting spirits in celebration. OK, in truth, not even Celine could dampen my enthusiasm or overcome the brilliance of the rockets' red glare. But this unfortunate choice was sadly characteristic of many of our public spectacles.

Every event now needs its musical accompaniment. But what should be a companion, helping to frame the main event or providing an entertaining interlude while, for example, the set is changed and the coach exhorts the team, now is presented as an end in itself and even as a reason to attend or watch the event. The vast majority of music presented in this way is simply not aesthetically up to the standard of the event!

The Boston Independence Day fireworks are regarded as one of the premier displays in the world and they are brilliant. They don't need musical accompaniment to be beautiful or meaningful. However, if there must be a musical accompaniment, the vast catalog of American popular and patriotic music offers several pieces that can aesthetically stand next to and up to the fireworks. Louis Armstrong springs immediately to mind, which is why going from the early high of Armstrong to the low of Celine was so disappointing.

. . .

¹ "The Star Spangled Banner" has been hijacked. It has been stolen from the people by a loose affiliation of anorexic vocal terrorists and is now just a battlefield in their private vendettas.

Our national anthem has been stretched thin, like a canvas upon which any and every vocal technique is splashed in some ill conceived art-student imitation of Pollock.

The national anthem of the United States of America should belong to the people. It should be sung by the people. At a public event, such as the celebration of a holiday or at a sporting event, a singer should be invited to lead the crowd, not to explore their own insecurities.³

² Celine Dion's voice paradoxically climbs the scale as the song's lyrics take us down from the mountains to the prairies and even further down to the oceans. At the very top of her considerable range, we are suspended as high as her voice can take us - at sea level - on the edge of a wave "white with foam". This wave is, her voice seems to suggest, the wave of America itself and all its virtues, poised to wash over her listeners and bathe them in God's blessings. As Celine reaches up, so she seems to say does the wave, and this wave will have to be very high indeed to reach the top of those mountains - or even all the way up to Canada.

This absurdity is not entirely Celine's fault. Irving Berlin's melody for this trifle does lead in this direction. However, the melody is supposed to peak not on the word "foam", but rather on the first word of the next line, which is "God".

³ There is a time and a place for deconstructions such as Jimi Hendrix's (while the most famous version is the one he played at Woodstock in 1969, the SSB was frequently a part of his sets from the summer of 1968 onward). America needs every opportunity to see itself anew. But this is not what the divas (female and male) are attempting, nor would most of them even be capable of it. These singers are engaged in a fundamentally totalitarian exercise by demonstrating that the anthem is unsingable by the citizens and, therefore, that the anthem does not represent the citizens or their dreams.

And what was the no less (indeed, significantly greater) virtuoso Hendrix up to with his rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner"? Charles Shaar Murray writes in Crosstown Traffic that it:

" is probably the most complex and powerful work of art to deal with the Vietnam War and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche. One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs, and movies put together. ... It was both a performance which no other living musician would have been capable of conceiving or executing, and a graphic demonstration that Hendrix's artistic ambition had grown in proportion to - but in a radically different direction from - his immense popularity. "

That's a "Star Spangled Banner" we could use today.

" I'm asked, and have been asked for the last two years or more almost continuously ... isn't the world more dangerous now? And, in particular, ... isn't the world more dangerous since the attacks of September 11th, 2001? "

You and me both, Rudy.

" I believe the world is safer than it was before September 11th, 2001, and I believe it's safer in very realistic ways - in ways that it wasn't before that. "

Really, it's a good gig you got there, Rudy. I don't begrudge you your new private sector life. I'm pretty sure you deserve it and I like to see former public servants succeed. But it's a real shame anybody would ask you to speak on a topic about which you appear to know very little - though you do have all sorts of beliefs.

"I believe the world is safer ..."

Your world, Rudy. Your perfectly planned, first-class world of five star hotels, bullet-proof limos, and wall-to-wall, point-to-point security. You sure appear to believe a lot of things, Rudy. It's real easy to believe when someone else does the driving, makes the bed, picks up the garbage.

My world - coach-class, guest-house, and one ear always to the ground - my world isn't any safer, Rudy - even though, unlike many of the people with whom I work, I get to leave behind the bombs and bullets, the corrupt officials and the blackouts, the terrible boredom of unemployment and the sharp bursts of fear. I don't have a lot of beliefs about that world, and neither do the people who can't leave. We can't afford to believe.

Instead of believing in things, Rudy, listen to yourself:

" [W]e were viewing the world and people in the world maybe the way we'd like to think they were, not really what was going on. And the world was dealing with terrorism and dealing with it in a way that I believe made it much, much worse, and in a way we have to analyze if we really want to end it in the future, because we can't keep repeating the same set of mistakes. And part of growing is analyzing history and trying to figure out what mistakes you've made so you can improve in the future. And there are some basic things that in here, maybe even in our personality as Americans that we have to analyze and look at. This is not the first time that we have been unrealistic about threats in the world that got much worse than they would have been had we confronted them earlier. "

It's good advice for a dangerous world.

Boston can be cool. It's a town which can be on the cutting edge of more than just high tech. It has its hip neighborhoods. I do not live in one of them. Still, I do try to keep my finger on the pulse.

Earlier this week when we were nearly bowled over by a youth zipping along on a teeny, tiny motorcycle and Mrs Martial asked, "what the hell was that?", I had to confess that I had no idea.

Ask and perhaps an answer will appear.

They say the internet is evolving. But this evolution isn't about "fitness", with the race to the swift or the battle to the strong. No, internet evolution is all about a little applied Lamarckism:

" [A] change in environment brings about change in 'needs', brings change in behavior, brings change in organ usage and development, brings change in form over time — and thus transmutation of the species. "

Kevin Moore has dusted his old code and dusted off some new. Welcome to . . . KevMoTown!