A funny thing happened to me at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco in 1990 (some pretty strange things had happened when I was last in San Francisco, in 1968, but I won't go into those here). The bus in from the airport was set high enough to see behind the billboards, into what looked like vast sales lots for mobile homes, but which I soon realised were permanent housing for the San Francisco poor, tucked away out of sight behind the commercial façades, exactly as Engels had recorded the journey into Manchester in 1844. I felt uneasy, too, stepping over the beggars on the sidewalk to enter the Hilton Hotel, but you have to hand it to US academics: they sure know how to organize a conference that feels like a serious business convention. There were actually men and women there in suits, especially those silver-sheeny ones in a mottled semi-reflective material that looks as if they descend from a job-lot of curtain lengths delivered by UFO somewhere over Colorado circa 1955. (Baudrillard might well call them crystalline.) By dressing below this level, it was possible to regard oneself as a marginally dangerous intellectual presence, or at any rate a marginal one. (In the UK, by contrast, it is physically impossible to dress so low as to be the worst-dressed person present at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association.)