Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

So you've all heard about the fellow who was forcibly ejected from a mall in upstate New York for the unspeakable crime of wearing a T-shirt with a peace slogan on it. When mall security asked him to take it off or leave, he refused and was promptly arrested for trespassing. Turns out he's headed to New Zealand in a couple of weeks -- he's retiring from his job as a lawyer, and this is the big trip he's been looking forward to all these years. He'll have earned a rest, after all the calls from the international media in the last couple of days. Give the man a kind reception, won't you? (For anyone who missed the story, check out the original coverage; you can also read the mall's version, and the security guard -- who probably came off worst of all -- gets his two cents in, too).

The whole kerfuffle seems to be one of those brilliant, off-the-cuff political demonstrations that just happen sometimes -- Rosa Parks in the food court, sort of thing. Come to think of it, though, Mrs Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus was part of a well-planned strategy, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this event had been similarly thought through in advance. Regardless, it's a huge embarrassment for the mall and by extension (because shopping is the national sport here, as in many places now) for the United States. It's also a signal reminder that malls are emphatically not the new commons or market square, where citizens may gather and chat and flirt and squeeze the produce and debate the issues of the day.

And it's just another version of what's been happening a lot here over the last year and a half: over-zealous security guards implementing new procedures to the letter and beyond, regardless of common sense. Children separated from parents and searched; a woman forced to drink bottles of her own breastmilk (expressed earlier, for handy use while in flight) to prove that it wasn't some dodgy substance. Jeez ... show me a woman traveling alone with a nursing infant and I'll show you someone who's too damned busy or tired -- or both -- to hijack a plane.

Speaking of bodily fluids, poor old Busytot has been barfing on and off all the livelong day. He gets a worried look on his face, hiccups once or twice, says "Uh-oh...booger..." and then boogers copiously all over the place. Looking forward to a brief respite, I left him with his dad for an hour while I went out to get my hair cut. It was my first haircut in about four months, so I cunningly wore my shiny purple docs, a groovy skirt and one of my least mumsy tops, just to make sure I got the asymmetrical spiky shag I was after (hey, don't be rude, it's a hairstyle), instead of some sensible wash-n-go soccer mom 'do. Mission more than accomplished (big ups to Hoshi Coupe on 108th and Broadway. I love that place, and it looks like I'm not the only one). I sauntered home feeling all sexy and fabulous. Busytot leapt into my arms for a rapturous reunion, hiccupped once, and then barfed welcomingly right into my cleavage. It was like a scene from one of those fraternity movies...or from Debra's latest blog :-)

So, where was I... fraternities... ah yes, then there was this week's Supreme Court ruling on California's "three strikes you're out" law, a statute which sends you to jail for the proverbial twenty-five to life if you're convicted of a third offence. In some states the third offense has to be a felony (big stuff: murder, rape, armed robbery etc) but in others, like California, it can be as simple as shoplifting. Or, God help us, perhaps even "trespassing" in a mall with your peace shirt on? (Dogs on the other hand, at least in the state of New York, get one free bite each, as I discovered a few summers ago when a passing Rottweiler who turned out to have a couple of "priors" made off with a bit of my calf). California toughened up in response to the Polly Klaas case (a little girl kidnapped from her house and murdered in 1994) because the perpetrator of that case had such a long and ominous record that he would have been safely locked away had a "three strikes" law been in place. But in the opinion of many, they tightened the screws just a little too far.

Anyway, the Court ruled -- by a narrow margin -- that the state's independent rights to set its own scale of penalties for crimes outweighed the rights of suspects not to be locked up for 50 years for, say, swiping a hundred dollars worth of stuff. Legal niceties aside (you can find more about the judgement here), what caught my eye were the squalid, tragic details of one of the crimes at the heart of the case. Leandro Andrade, military veteran, heroin addict, two time petty burglar (twenty years ago), and all round sad case by the sound of it, stole some children's videos from a K-Mart, stuffing them down his pants in full view of a security camera. He did it for his nieces for Christmas, and he did it twice in the space of a week. Because it was his third conviction, and because the shoplifting counted as two separate offences, he wasn't just nicked, he was screwed. Twice twenty-five is fifty years; sure, the man's a thief by any definition, but he'll die in jail for that copy of Cinderella. It's enough to make you want to retire to New Zealand.

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Things may be quiet here for a week and a bit. I'm churning out a dissertation chapter this week, and then heading to parts south next weekend to investigate life below the Mason-Dixon line. Our life, possibly -- thanks to an intriguing job offer landed by the scientist in the family. We may be leaving New York within the year! Who knows, maybe Busytot will swap his New York attitude, burgeoning New Zealand accent, and addiction to trains and bagels, for a tendency to say "y'all," a preference for sweet iced tea over OJ, and a tricycle of his very own. But what will happen to Noo Yawk muthah? Look forward next time to a report on my adventures down under.

Living in New York is, paradoxically, like living in a tiny village. You can walk pretty much anywhere, and pretty much everything you need is within walking distance. For a 16 month old freshly qualified perambulator who much prefers "wokking" to being strapped into his stroller, this quasi-village life is a bonus: it's three blocks from home to the supermarket, and super-toddler walks all the way. I get disapproving glances from those Manhattanites who prefer their toddlers firmly strapped down and unable to use their legs until the age of four or so, but we antipodeans enjoy the exercise. Each quick trip to the supermarket turns into an hour-long adventure, particularly if you spend a good twenty minutes running up and down the long wheelchair ramp, two buildings down. It's the navigational highlight of 112th St for the under two set.

The downside of this compact village life is that it's possible to go for weeks without getting out of the neighbourhood -– as I believe I managed over the last two weeks. Not quite true, come to think of it. I did spend two hours of precious paid babysitting time on Tuesday walking down to the nearest mega-bookstore at 83rd St and browsing aimlessly as I used to do before the bambino came along to monopolise my every waking moment. One of the books I happily scoped out was the new US paperback version of Mil Millington's novel "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About," loosely based on his legendary website of the same name. It's not just compulsively readable, but also (with a film version forthcoming) compulsory reading for anyone wondering how to monetize their otherwise charity-status blog.

Anyway, now we're back down to mere yellow alert status, which means braving the subway again, getting out and about a bit more, and finding other things to do with all that duct tape we were hotly urged to invest in a couple of weeks ago. (By the way, it transpires that the manufacturer who dominates half of the duct-tape market is a major Republican donor...funny that). So I patriotically used up the tail end of our roll of duct tape by doing a little engineering work on a wooden railway bridge, to the satisfaction of the youngest member of the household. And we got back on the subway today, to take back the city after a couple of weeks of not venturing much further than about ten blocks.

Today's expedition was to the venerable Museum of Natural History. We started out in the newest wing, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, with its large-scale model of the cosmos. Opened only a couple of years ago, the Rose Center is fabulous when seen from the outside at night: a glowing glass cube containing a spherical planetarium and several giant hanging planets (although not Pluto, much to the disgust of fans of the smallest orb). The building is not quite as dramatic from the inside on a rainy day, but still cosmic in its own way. Our toddler was particularly entranced by the dangling planets, or as he referred to them in a lusty bellow that drew the attention of most of the other visitors to the museum, "Big balls! Beeg beeeg balls!"

We ended up in the hall of African mammals, a gloomy space by contrast, with its crepuscular shadows and faded but creepily engaging dioramas of stuffed, beady-eyed animals posed for eternity against painted backdrops of the savannah. It's all very Philip K. Dick, a sort of mausoleum for a post-animal world -- an impression that was only enhanced by my misreading of the caption for the family of taxidermized elephants that formed the maudlin centrepiece of the room. Under the feet of the little baby elephant, a dimly lit sign appeared to say, rather grimly, "Last African Elephants." They were, it transpired, merely East African Elephants, but the melancholic mood lingered.

Speaking of which, oh dear, the Americas' Cup. So this is how it feels to be on the other end of a 5-0 trouncing. See, the trouble with sport is that it is, by definition, a zero-sum game. I suppose if you're philosophically inclined, you can take some comfort in the thought that your vicarious misery is somewhere else balanced by somebody else's vicarious delight. But is it, in this case? Are the citizens of Switzerland dancing in the streets, waving their red and white socks and shredding chocolate wrappers into glittering confetti for a ticker-tape parade through downtown Geneva?

Somehow I doubt it, and that is probably a large part of the pain that many New Zealanders (I'm assured) are feeling. It's like a custody dispute over a beloved pet; we were always in it for love, goes the argument, but they just want it for the cold callous principle of the thing. "But your honour, they won't love the cup like we did. They won't polish it, fondle it, stay up late and worry about it sitting all lonely in its glass case, design T-shirts around it, name menu items after it, toy lovingly with its little jug-eared handles and call it pet names..."

I do secretly love this madly personalized aspect of our national character (or what passes for national character, or what people are informed, by their "mirror mirror on the wall" media, constitutes their national character), even though in this case the fantasy was about feeling intimately linked to what is, in the end, a rich man's folly. Impossibly expensive boats crewed by hunky young men, zipping up and down the harbour like so many sporty triremes rowed by serried ranks of slaves and urged on by toga-clad tyrannical potentates...at what benefit to the average citizen? It's hard to know from this distance whether the economic wake of the racing has trickled down any further than the champagne flutes of the chortling crowds frequenting the over-priced and attitudinous Viaduct cafes. I guess, too, that bread and circuses are always handy when the world's falling apart, although that was probably just an accident of timing.

Still, from the feel of it, the emotional investment was profound and fairly widespread. It's just so New Zealand to want to take things that personally, to be persuaded get in behind, to sign up, to sing along. The flipside of this massive overcapitalization in one social stock is familiar to anyone who, say, bought into the dotcom bubble. There we all are, psychically dismasted en masse by the sight of that willowy national phallic symbol snapping at the root and flopping around tragically before being gruesomely amputated by hacksaw (and, ouch, without anaesthesia) in a sad final gasp of hardcore pioneer do-it-yourselfism. Oh, the agony. Oh, the hubris. And oh, the timely, painful warning to put not your long-term faith in highly portable trophies, nor run your flag of pride up a frangible, wind-whipped pole.

My friend Vanessa once found herself trying to explain the "tall poppies" metaphor to an American acquaintance. As she elaborated, he looked increasingly aghast. "Oh my God," he interjected, "They chop their heads off? Because they're too, what, tall, you said? That's the most barbaric thing I ever heard!" Vanessa was pretty impressed by this gung-ho defence of the divine right to be the best, even if it seemed a tad over the top, and assured him that many New Zealanders agreed that cutting down the best specimens was a counter-productive practice. "But I mean," the disturbed American persisted, well off on his own train of thought, "just the image of all those poor little decapitated doggies..."

Tall poppies, tall puppies -- I guess it's all in the way you hold your mouth. What got me thinking about this classic intercultural mixed metaphor was the ad on the Herald website for the second Knowledge Wave conference, which just took place in Auckland. Last time round, as befitting the conference title, the imagery was all about waves, the ocean, surfing... all that unharnessed intellectual hydropower just waiting to be dammed, er, I mean channelled, and then sold off. A Think Big for the new millennium. I seem to remember a graphic that looked like a small but determined kiwi breaking the sound barrier... maybe that tied in somehow with the Douglas jet, always near the top of the laundry list of our marvellous contributions to the good of humankind.

This time around, however, the Herald wrapped its coverage of the conference in imagery that was grounded (as it were) back in the earth, evoking good old primary production, agriculture, the fat of the land. The ad on the Herald website -- it's no longer there, so you'll have to trust me on this -- displayed a field of jaunty, cartoonishly red tall poppies. But what on earth was that odd, looming red object at the bottom right of the picture? A lopsided magic mushroom? A menacing weed-whacker? (Aren't poppies one of the "unwanted organisms" on MAF's new list of banned flora, along with the jasmine and daisies?). More than anything, it looked like one of those little telephone-periscope things that pops up and tells the Teletubbies it's time for tubby custard. Further examination suggested that it was just possibly meant to be the snout of a watering can, but I couldn't swear to it.

Initial confusion aside, it was a very potent image, ripe with all sorts of poetic associations beyond the obvious one. Something about those poppies made me want to click my ruby slippers together and be whisked off home: a poppy-carpeted field as opiate for the distant masses, designed to lure expats back off the yellow brick road of global capital and into the dreamy delirium of life on the mild side, for truly there is no place like home. Then again, "in Flanders field the poppies grow..." and even the chipper-looking flowers on the Herald page summoned up the stern bugle call of history, recalling the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who joined up, sailed off, and never came back. (Let's take a moment to remember brave Bright Ernest Williams – his real name – the last surviving Kiwi soldier from WWI, who died this last week; when asked if he'd do it all over again, he replied with a firm "Oh, hell, yes!").

Lest we forget, the tall poppies metaphor has an ancient pedigree: you'll find a wheat-based version in Herodotus, when Periander (the tyrant of Corinth) sends a messenger to Thrasybulos, the despot of Miletos, to ask his thoughts on how best to run a city. Thrasybulos takes the messenger on a walk through a wheat-field, not deigning to answer the question, but savagely lopping off the tallest ears of wheat with his stick. The messenger returns home none the wiser, and informs his boss that Thrasybulos is uncommunicative and quite possibly barking – after all, he wrecked his own field. Periander, being a canny sort of tyrant, twigs to the message right away, and sets about chopping down the most prominent Corinthians. The wheat-ears become poppies in the Roman version, in which one Tarquinius Superbus (now that would be an excellent name for a band) is dishing out the same advice. (I haven't tracked down the version with the maltreated puppies yet: late 20th C American, I'd guess.)

In any case, classics lessons aside, the triumphalist slogan that went along with the Herald's poppyfield / watering can graphic is equally open to historical free-association: "Let the Tall Poppies Bloom!" Never mind the meritocratic subtext inherent in singling out just the tall poppies for a spot of fertilizer (by rights, the short ones probably need it more), and the classic liberal hands-offness of that "Let…" construction (like the old chestnut "Girls Can Do Anything!" it nattily sidesteps arguments about pervasive structural inequalities). More worryingly, the slogan has more than an echo of a certain mid-century dictator's exhortation to "Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend." In that particular prelude to a cultural revolution, debate bloomed just long enough to identify the most enthusiastic debaters, after which the Chairman snapped shut his little red book and opened the prison doors.

Not that I'm saying the Knowledge Wave promoters are closet Maoists. Far from it, by the sound of it: a hundred schools of thought did indeed contend over the last weekend, and may they bloom nicely into a hundred plans of action on every front: educational, social, economic, technological, constitutional. I'm just doing a little close reading of some of the narrative threads that this idea-fest has been cloaked in, because if you're going to tell a story, it helps to know a little of where it comes from -- and what else it might be saying. And sometimes it's a good idea to revise the old stories, as one speaker at the conference did by suggesting that the "no. 8 wire" metaphor is past its use-by date. (That will not come as news to a young interviewer I heard of a few years back, who, upon being told by a pioneering television producer that it was "all done with no. 8 wire back then", asked what exactly it was that people did with the no. 8 wire in the olden days -- was it used to fasten the cameras together or something?).

One major revision of an unhelpful old metaphor, addressed at the previous Knowledge Wave conference, is already a fait accompli – that of transforming the "brain drain" from a deficit into an asset. Whereas only a few short years ago everyone was scrabbling round in the supposedly rapidly emptying bathtub frantically looking for the plug, you can't open a newspaper or a magazine today without hearing something about the fabulous Kiwi Diaspora and how extremely good it is for our little nation: blah blah global network, blah blah strategic advantage, blah blah "brand New Zealand." Let a hundred Earls Courts bloom, and a hundred working holiday visas contend!

Funnily enough, back before it became commonplace to use the words diaspora or network to refer to New Zealanders who'd buggered off overseas and hardly been heard of since, a small bunch of expatriate academics (me among them) wrote a wee paper on the subject of what we dubbed New Zealand's "intellectual diaspora." We listed the potential advantages of reconnecting with New Zealanders pursuing their creative and research careers overseas, and a few suggestions on how to do it, using that excellent new technology the internet. The paper kicked around Wellington desks for a while before sinking from view altogether. We felt, at the time, like tall puppies who had barked too soon or too impertinently or up the wrong tree and been spanked on the bottom with a rolled-up newspaper. Now maybe we can think of that sketchy paper as one of several like-minded poppy seeds in the wind that is finally taking root and blooming into full-blown meme status.

So networks like KEA are springing up all over the world to bring homesick New Zealanders together to quaff Gisborne chardonnays, compare paypackets, and discuss the yacht racing, while swapping business cards and "do you know so-and-so"s -- hey, that's what networking looks like and it's great that it's happening. The government even has a webpage, albeit a very threadbare one, devoted to "connecting expats with NZ enterprise success" – it's called the NZ Connection (for the lovers, the dreamers and me?). And the flag-waving PR-savvy crew at NZEdge have been strumming their patriotic banjo in their own zippy way for several years now, gaining a critical mass of readers and contributors who are keen to sing along. Academia is, as so often, embarrassingly slow to follow: while the Kiwi Physicists Abroad have had their own web-based drinking fountain for years, there is still no centralised fount of knowledge for other researchers looking for university jobs, research projects, conferences, fellowships and connections in New Zealand.

But here's a paradox. Sure, the internet is making it vastly easier to be a displaced New Zealander and still feel somewhat at home, but I get the sense too that it's somehow making it easier to simply not go back. You can get your virtual top-up of local news and real-time letters from home just by sitting down at the keyboard in the morning, and for the rest of the day go about your elsewhere life, dreaming on and off of that elusive job that would make going home a real possibility. I'd love to crunch the numbers on the diaspora. Who's going? And where? I'd especially love to know the numbers of people who left fully intending to return but who simply can't get back into the sector of their choice. I suspect many of them would be academics, researchers, scientists. That's normal; it's always been a diasporic profession -- but we'd love to be doing our work in New Zealand, if we could. We didn't necessarily mean to leave for good (although, worryingly, many have returned and then left again, having tried and failed to imagine carrying out a functional intellectual life in New Zealand).

Perhaps that Flanders field aura of the Knowledge Wave tall poppies is worth pondering. What if -- despite all the enthusing about the rose-coloured diaspora, by me and others -- many of us overseas are largely lost to New Zealand? It's sacrilegious to say so, but are we even as lost -- practically speaking -- as the vast numbers of men (and many women) who headed off to fight the good fight in two world wars? They were away for years at a time, and many thousands of them didn't come back at all, leaving a huge hole in a generation (a massive blow to mid-century Maori communities in particular, which could afford the loss of a generation of leaders even less than Pakeha New Zealand). My New York-born baby -- whose first words include "bagel" and "train" and "taxicab" where mine ran to "milkman" and "creek" and "Nana's house" -- can count two great-grandfathers who survived Gallipoli, while his other two great-grandpas spent years on the Pacific front in WW2. All four of those great-grandfathers made it back, but some days I wonder if we'll successfully find a way to bring their great-grandson home again.

We're not the only ones stuck in a sort of holding pattern, hoping to go home, some day, but meanwhile building a life over here. It's not clear how many of the modern-day diggers won't make it home again, although one estimate has it that currently as many as a million self-identified New Zealanders live overseas, which makes for a twenty-percent outpatient rate. The country certainly seems to be doing perfectly well without us, the plutocrats and the peacekeepers and the poor students who live somewhere else for the moment and maybe forever. Perhaps, as someone once said to me at one of those chardonnay-quaffing too-loud expat receptions, it's just a case of rural to urban drift on a global scale – people are moving to the big smoke, like they always have; the big smoke just happens to be overseas, and once you leave the small town, it's hard to go back. And if you asked even the most homesick overseas-based New Zealanders if they'd do it again, I bet they'd say "Oh, hell, yes!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm still keen to paint a rosy picture of the global scattering of New Zealanders -- little pockets of poppies all over the world, putting down roots, bringing up little seedlings. It's not new, either; at the turn of the last century we were all still moving around like crazy, and the back and forth migration won't stop any time soon -- if anything, it's becoming more and more common. It's just that, thanks to the curiously suggestive Herald graphic, I'm also suddenly picturing forlorn little memorials in all the wee towns and the big cities all over New Zealand, listing the names of the Missing, Presumed Buggered Off Overseas Somewhere. How many of us will ever return to swap stories at whatever our watering-hole equivalent of the RSA will be? And will you wear a poppy (tall, medium, or short) in your buttonhole on Waitangi Day, and think of us?

For a while there last week, it felt like we were all living in Baghdad. I'm pretty good at living day by day, more or less oblivious to the fact that New York City has been on "orange alert" for the last year and a half. But the latest warning got me rattled. Someone posted to a mailing list I'm on with helpful info on how to prepare a disaster response plan. At that point, my disaster response plan consisted of running round the apartment saying "holy shit" repeatedly while shutting all the windows and counting the disposable nappies and cans of beans. I actually went out and bought bottled water and spare batteries. The duct tape was sold out, although it turns out that mightn't be such a good idea anyway – I heard someone say on the radio this morning that duct-taping yourself into a room is a pretty good way to die of suffocation... eventually.

I've been here before, in a way. A sharp early spring morning in Tokyo; I'd farewelled my partner and settled down to write for the morning. On the radio (the English-language U.S. Armed Forces radio station: "Serving You, While You Serve In the Pacific"), there was a sudden burst of the bleep that usually heralded warnings about impending typhoons ("secure your porch furniture and stay indoors"). But it wasn’t typhoon season. I listened carefully but couldn't quite follow what was being said, even though it was all in English. Something about the subway, something about terrorists, something about being advised to stay at home, but I was already halfway to the door, tugging my shoes on, to call my partner back. The next couple of months (until the police finally busted the nutty sect that was behind it all) were not great for nerves already shredded by the huge earthquake in Kobe.

So, remembering what it once felt like to choose a subway car based on a quick scan of the people inside and the packages at their feet, I've not been using the subway much recently. I confessed my jitters to a very level-headed friend, who confessed in reply that she had scoffed at her husband when he ordered potassium iodide tablets online, but is now kinda grateful to know they're in the bathroom cabinet. Hmmm. The scientist in the family reckons that the tablets would be useless for anything other than a nuclear explosion in the not-too-immediate vicinity (apparently they don't work for the fallout from "dirty bombs"). Oh well, that's all right then!

So I'm having 80s flashbacks, and they don't involve fishnet stockings, Haircut 100, or hot-pink blusher. Remember the TV series Threads, a British counterpart to the American nuclear holocaust film The Day After? If you saw it, you won't have forgotten. There's a famous scene where a woman looks up from a busy city street to see a mushroom cloud forming in the sky; the camera pans down to the puddle forming at her feet on the footpath. Striding south down Broadway last week, looking down the familiar canyon it forms all the way down the island, I wondered if I'd have similar occasion to wet myself in fear one day soon.

Or not. The thing is that images are contagious, and so is fear. Combine the two and even if you've never witnessed destruction first-hand, you've got a mild to severe case of what we might call virtual shellshock. Wilfrid Owen, or was it Siegfried Sassoon (one of the Great War poets, anyway, and probably most of their fellow combatants too) was haunted by visions of injured and dead friends as he walked the streets of London on sick leave. Some days -- especially slightly cold, perfectly still, blue-sky days -- this city is shadowed by stunned and dust-covered survivors walking away from the wreckage. Even those of us who didn't witness it first hand see their faces.

There's a different haunting happening this week though, courtesy of the Baghdad Snapshot Action. It's a brilliantly simple idea. A New York artist fresh back from Baghdad, has posted on the internet some of the many photos he took while there. A mother and child. An old man (grandpa?) and two cute kids. Two tough little boys posing in nifty jerseys. Everyone's smiling. The pics are free to download, and the idea is that you print them out and display them anywhere you feel like.

It's working. All over New York – and, I hope, other cities too – ordinary Iraqis smile out from bus shelters and telephone poles and newspaper vending boxes. The faces are in some ways an uncanny echo of the smiling faces on the heart-breaking "missing" posters that gazed out at us from walls and bus shelters all over the city in the days and weeks after September 11. It's a beautifully literal way of putting a face on the "enemy," something I think the Bush administration doesn't want people to do...

You know, if I had my way (speaking as a scholar and sometime teacher of language & literature here), it would be illegal for a person to declare war on a country whose language they don't speak and whose major literary works they haven't read. Like maybe George and Colin and Condi can get back to me after they've spent four full-time years at the Navy Language School mastering just enough Arabic to get by in daily situations, and then we'll talk about this war thing. Hey, it's not a perfect proposal by any means (Pol Pot studied French Literature at the Sorbonne, and let's not even get started on the Austrian artist), but it's a thought.

Anyway, I think I'm going to print out a few of the pictures and put them up in my neighbourhood, especially since I didn't make it to the march on Saturday (I wimped out at the thought of subjecting a small, slightly under-the-weather child to sub-zero temperatures and large crowds, although several friends successfully took their wee ones along). I'll be watching out for plain clothes cops, though, like the ones who arrested a pregnant artist and her friend for putting up the same pictures in Soho the night before the march. Yeah, yeah, it's technically illegal to post flyers on bus shelters and telephone poles in this city – quality of life, zero tolerance and all that. But you don't get a stint in the cells for sticking up a "Futon for Sale, Best Offer" poster, so how come the city is jailing people for asking "What Price War?"

You find some pretty cool things in the trash in a city this size. I'm always on the lookout for discarded goodies, and have scored some fabulous free stuff – chairs, baskets, house-plants. But this was different: more than a trash treasure, it was a perfect metaphor for how things are right now, just sitting there, leaning up against a pile of garbage bags. I would have pounced on it, had I not been in a hurry to get somewhere else. By the time I made it back, it was gone, eaten by the garbage truck or picked up by someone else with an eye for the absurd. I didn't have my digital camera with me, so let me draw you a verbal portrait.

It was a huge full-colour map. Or, more accurately, part of a map: one large vertical slice, a quarter perhaps, of a map of the world. In a touch almost too good to be true, the legend in the top corner said "The World" but the map itself showed only -- in top-heavy Mercator projection -- a gigantic, looming North America and a retiring, minuscule South America. It reminded me of the beautiful line from a New Yorker review of one of those movies about comets crashing into the earth, that went something like "The world (played, in a particularly bold piece of casting, by the United States)…"

I wish I'd grabbed that map, now. I could have whisked it to Washington, smuggled it into the august chamber where the State of the Union address took place, and propped it up behind the Leader of the Free World -- played, in a bold piece of casting, by the minority-elected President of the United States. It would have made a beautiful backdrop. Talk about agit-prop.

By the way, wasn't it interesting that the United Nations covered up their tapestry version of Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica, in front of which Hans Blix delivered his report and Colin Powell made his speech, lest it provide too vivid a commentary on what the strategy known as Shock and Awe will do to Baghdad? Ah, the subversive power of art. When I hear someone say the word gun, I reach for some culture, but the UN reached for a dropcloth. As the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd notes here, the UN whitewash is reminiscent of when the deeply uptight Attorney General John Ashcroft allegedly ordered a cover-up of the allegorical statue of Justice because her naked bronze breasts offended his sensibilities (if you missed it at the time, a deliciously angry poem came out of that whole affair).

Anyway, I have to confess, I didn't watch the whole State of the Union address. Bush gives me the willies, especially that sly "who farted?" smirk he tends to use as punctuation. Flipping between the TV channels only offered a dozen different angles on the presidential face. Alarmingly, not one angle showed him as having any actual eyeballs, just bottomless Mephistophelian blanknesses (which makes it not difficult to feel that we may indeed be living in end times of one variety or another; see Russell's mapping of Bush's millennialist tendencies here). But it was the obligatory applause and the standing ovations that made me switch off – each and every one of Bush's proverbial "two cents worth" got a five dollar response, regardless of the actual exchange rate. The mandatory applause is standard for the State of the Union address, regardless of who's delivering it, but this time it really rankled.

I found myself indulging in a little TV-inspired fantasy, having just spent the previous hour watching one of the first episodes of the new series of American Idol. Just in case you're living on an iceberg and haven't seen or heard of it, it's a pop-star wannabe show, you know the sort of thing, where thousands of people audition for a place on a streamlined talent-show aimed at producing more fodder for bloated exploitative music companies and indiscriminate buyers and downloaders of so-called pop music. Oops, I did it again; I mean of course that the show is aimed at discovering the next brilliant musical talent, born in a humble stable but destined by fate and naked talent for the big time.

At least that's certainly how the prospectives viewed themselves, and this is one of those things I love about this country – the sheer chutzpah. Just about everyone who got their fifteen second soundbite of fame seemed to truly believe that they were the golden child, the musical genius we've been waiting for. They came in all shapes and sizes and colours and registers and accents (that's one of the other things I love about this country), and whether they sang like angels or like crows, the one thing they were not prepared to countenance was any judgement of their talent that fell short of how they graded themselves.

The judges are a triumvirate of good cop, bad cop, and big sister. There's Simon Cowell, an acid-tongued British impresario who doesn't just not pull his punches, he swings a mean verbal sandbag; Paula Abdul, the still-sprightly 80s singing' and dancin' gal who can't bear to be nasty; and Randy Jackson, an industry big-shot whose job is basically to say "'Sup, dawg?" and place the casting vote. And every time someone got voted off, the response from the wannabe popstar was the same: hands on hips, quick side-to-side head-snap, and incredulous expression: "Excuse me? Did you say I sucked? Hell, NO! YOU suck." And so on and so on. As one contestant in the last show said, "Who are YOU to judge ME?" Uh, honey? Pick up the clue phone. They're the judges!

It makes for great TV, of course, especially given the cunning tendency of the producers to let through both the very best and the very worst contestants, some of whom produced noises I last heard down at the natural birthing centre. And then there was the poor fellow who was informed by the British judge that his singing was "ghastly" – "Thank you!" he murmured fervently, before someone kindly explained to him what ghastly meant. It was at about that moment that I had my vision of George W. delivering his State of the Union address in front of the panel of American Idol judges, only to be stopped after two lines and informed "You are, quite possibly, the worst leader of the free world I've ever seen." But you just know he'd snap his fingers and say "Who are you to judge ME?" Uh, honey? We're the rest of the free and not so free world… you know, the other three quarters of that tell-tale map I glimpsed on the side of the road before it was scooped up with the garbage.