On the train this morning I was remembering a conversation I had with Kellan in the midst of the madness in DC last April. We'd snuck away from the IMC to look for a restaurant sometime in the evening, and ended up at a place called U.S.A. Pizza, or something equally as patriotic. America Pizza? The place was run by Iranians, and had some of the strangest decor I've ever seen -- plastic flowers with fake dewdrops and a map of Iran on the wall, I think. (I would wonder why I don't remember these striking details so clearly, except that I know I got less than ten hours of sleep combined over that whole weekend.)

It was good being alone with Kellan again. That night he was expressing particular love for a slogan we'd all been chanting: "This is what democracy looks like." I liked it too. It's a nice way of reasserting the better parts of America, the parts that McCarthyites would like you to think are Communist, like labor solidarity and grassroots organizing.

But I've been thinking about that since. All this -- DC, Seattle, the coming storms in Philly and L.A. -- isn't what democracy looks like, is it? What democracy is supposed to look like is higher voter turnout, maybe proportional representation; what democracy does look like is a bunch of monopoly capitalists laughing it up in train cars with candidates who have less moral sense than a houseplant. It's sweet, but a little simpleminded, to liken democracy to a parade of college grads with giant paper-mache puppets.

So I'm sticking with "Whose streets? OUR STREETS!" which is what people were chanting when I got arrested. That one's true, and feels just as good.

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I don't mean to be posting so many links to other blogs, really I don't, but this was irresistable. Not all of it. Just the entry on July 18th, 2000. File it under "This Modern World," you know? And this blog actually doesn't involve people talking about what soda they drank for lunch and what time they get off work, which is an improvement. I am still waiting for someone like Joan Didion or Scott Russell Sanders to make reading blogs worthwhile. I'd rather see blogs used as an art form than a bunch of pointless exhibitionist diaries, but maybe that's the pot calling the kettle black.