not much fusion here....not very Brazilian.

I would be interested to see a Salon article on how this looks from the POV of the countries which are getting the outsource contracts. Take a look at their standard of living - even the better-off parts of the developing world do not have the level of material goods that we do in the USA. Are we more deserving? do we work harder? Why do we have it better? Our standards of living in the first world have been subsidized for centuries by slave labor, whether in our own American South, or in the global south. Can we really complain about paying some of that wealth back?

Optimists loved the science fiction future of Star Trek - but the imagined future which we are living our way into is the paranoic dystopia of Philip K. Dick - the America of the fifties/sixties, just more crowded, dirty, and depressing. If you have been reading PKD for the past few decades, then you have been prepared for what has been going on, particularly since 2001. In PKD's world we colonized Mars, but it was just a colder and drier version of Nevada.

The notion that a city dweller can be anonymous was never more than a fantasy of the disconnected, family-less American urbanite who has moved to a new city where he/she has no family and no friends. Anyone who lives in any city for an extended period of time will develop a web of relationship which means that he/she can never be certain that brother-in-law won't be walking around the corner just as city-dweller is engaged in an act which he/she doesn't want to own up to. This is more the case the smaller the city one lives in, but it is still true for huge cities like Rio de Janeiro, where social stratification means that you tend to move in the same physical spaces as your peers.

The interesting question is why, psychologically, Americans need to believe that no one can see/is aware of their slips from social decorum.

Tolkien called it the Gift of Men - death. Gary Kamiya received that gift at 53, but it was there for him along. Each day could be our last, or that of our friends, families, enemies. Mortality means that we have to choose, and try to choose well. We have to create an identity for our selves that takes death and dying and aging into account. This is the beauty of the third of Hillel's questions ("If I am not for myself, who is for me? and when I am for myself, what am I? and if not now, when?") Mortality means that we cannot go on forever denying that which cannot be denied, whatever it is that is deep down inside for us. We need to look and see who we are, and why, and once we know, we must act, for this is all the time we have.

For those who may think that Jane Austen would not have written novels had she married, think again. She was not exceptional in being a woman and a novelist - she was an exceptional novelist, but women were often successful novelists, and married as well. Example: the great Fanny Burney, who was extremely popular in her day (b. 1752, d. 1840), but who is forgotten today, except by scholars.

About Burney, the Wikipedia article on her work says "her fiction is now widely acknowledged for its critical wit and for its deliberate exploration of the lives of women."

Thank you, Garrison Keillor. You have it exactly right. Freedom to speak, to publish, to read, to discuss are fundamental to our liberties in these United States. In small-town New England, where I grew up, even the smallest town had its public library, which often sat across the main intersection from the only church in the town, and both were built with equal pride and affection. Bravo, Garrison.

Debra Dickerson is right on the money about the cruel economics of New Jersey's abandoned cities. The flight of the middle-class from once-prosperous Newark, Trenton, and Camden left a huge economic vacuum, and the situation for the citizens who are left is not pretty. If the capital of the state, Trenton, is in the condition that it is (try walking two or three blocks north from the state house toward the Battle Monument, which once faced the now-abandoned Reading RR station), why should Newark fare any better? And then there is the unbelievably grim state of Camden, once home of RCA Victor and Campbell Soup, and now an immense landscape of abandoned housing, directly across the river from the beautiful and prosperous Old City district of Philadelphia. Those left in these cities are the ones who have no alternatives and no way out.

how did the Norwegians ever manage to take over the world with this kind of attitude? those macho Norsemen who left children with blue eyes and blond hair all over Europe? of course, they were at work, not on vacation, while raping and pillaging....I suppose the ones who stayed in Norway had GK's attitude.

At least Richard Reid had explosive footwear. Imagine if he had been discovered with an explosive rectal suppository....

The foreclosure rate in Massachusetts is reported to have gone up 76 percent in the last year. What are those figures nationally?

Nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring travel South to a land of Darkness and Evil, headed up by A Big Old Nasty guy whose name begins with S (Sauron, in this case, not Steinbrenner). After lots of suffering, Frodo steals home, Big Old Nasty Guy croaks,

and his ballpark falls down in flame and magma. Evil is vanquished forever....

and yet this defeat means that enchantment (read Elves) leaves Middle-Earth for good. Sometimes the Quest is the important thing, not the Goal.