Felix

Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, “Fighting to make America America again,” was borrowed from the “pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.”

“No I had nothing to do with that,” Santorum said. “I didn’t know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.” The student, whose name was not immediately available, was referring to the poem “Let America Be America Again.”

When asked a short time later what the campaign slogan meant to him, Santorum said, “well, I’m not too sure that’s my campaign slogan, I think it’s on a web site.” It was also printed on the campaign literature handed out before the speech.

I had a great meeting at Pure Digital several years ago, prior to the merger. They were housed above a department store in San Francisco, in a weird funky space with lots of consumer atmosphere. The office was surrounded by restaurants and shops.

In contrast, visiting Cisco is like visiting a factory. Every building on their massive campus looks the same, with an abstract fountain out front, the walls painted in muted tans and other muddy colors. The buildings are surrounded by an ocean of cars. The lobbies are lined with plaques of the company’s patents, and the corridors inside have blown-up photographs of Cisco microprocessors. In the stairwells you’ll usually see a couple of crates of networking equipment, shoved under the stairs. And all of the cubicles look the same.

Cisco is an outstanding company, and an excellent place to work. But it screams respectable enterprise hardware supplier. To someone from a funky consumer company, going there would feel like having your heart ripped out and replaced with a brick.

We never saw Luxembourg in the daylight…

At the Louvre, we picked up another Chinese-speaking guide, a hummingbird of a woman, who shouted, “We have lots to see in ninety minutes, so we need to pick up our feet!”

The guide advised us to focus most on the san bao—the three treasures—the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and the Mona Lisa. We crowded around each in turn, flanked by other Chinese tour groups as identifiable as rival armies: red pins for the U-Tour travel agency, orange windbreakers for the students from Shenzhen. We’d been going non-stop since before dawn, but the air was charged with diligent curiosity. When we discovered that the elevators were a long detour from our route, I wondered how Huang Xueqing, in her wheelchair, would get to see much of the museum. Then her relatives carried her chair while she hobbled up and down each marble stairway, and rolled her in front of the masterpieces.