Kali Tal

Musings on Sicko

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:08:23 +0100

I'm not sure where people are getting their information about the German health care system, but I believe it's incorrect.

I'm a retired U.S. university professor (and U.S. citizen) now living in Germany. I didn't have an ax to grind about the U.S. health system when I moved here because, as a state employee, I was covered by an excellent insurance plan in the U.S. The plan covered 80% of my expenses when I went to plan-approved physician, and 70% when I selected my own physician. As a member of the upper-middle class, I wasn't bogged down in the HMO systems and I can pretty securely say that I had just about the best insurance program and access to care that it's possible to have in the U.S.

After moving to Germany I realized, within a year, that the German system is hands-down better than the U.S. system in every way possible. I didn't expect it to be better, but it was. Here are the differences:

In the U.S. I paid $320/mo for my insurance policy. When I went to the doctor, I paid 20% or 30% of the costs, which get pretty high for those of us who have chronic (but in my case not serious) health issues. I paid approximately $250/mo additionally for medications purchased under my insurance plan, and an average of $50/mo as my part of the fee for doctor visits. Over a 10-year period I had a couple of emergency room visits and a surgery, and my total out of pocket costs for those came out to $3,500 (20% of an expensive surgery is nothing to sneeze at.) I figure my total health care costs were approximately $600-650/mo. In addition, I paid my taxes which (at my salary of about $55,000) amounted to about 33-35% (federal, state, and local)... none of which went to my own medical care.

Now... let's see what happened when I moved to Germany... In Germany (where I am not employed), my husband earns about half of what I did in the U.S. Because of our low income, he pays under 10% in taxes. My better-paid friends pay up to 35% in taxes, though I hear it can go higher if you earn a lot more money. Here, though, we get medical care included in our tax payments (12.7% of one's income a year under our plan), so that reduces the 35% quite a bit, meaning that we actually pay far lower taxes here than we would in the U.S. overall.

I'll give you two stories about access to medical care here. The first is as an uninsured person -- a "private patient" as they say here. When I first arrived on a tourist visa I developed a serious retinal condition. I went to the local doctor (office in our apartment building). His nurses decided that my case was too serious for him to handle and he sent me to an "expensive" (they warned me) clinic down the street in the prestigious Axel-Springer building. I went to the specialist, with no appointment, and waited for almost an hour in her waiting room. She saw me, gave me a thorough examination with the latest equipment, and gave me two prescriptions with the order to return in 2 days. Although I was worried about the cost, obviously my health was the primary issue, so I continued to go to this clinic as a private patient, for several months while they treated my problem. Some weeks I was there 2-3 times. I never waited more than an hour, and usually less than 15 minutes. In the end, she mailed me a bill which I was terrified to open. In the U.S., such treatment would have been in the many thousands of dollars. The bill read: "672 EU".

It got even better after I got married. I am covered on my husband's insurance policy and the amount he must add to his payment each month is minute and more than compensated by the tax break the German government gives him because I'm not employed. In effect, I get my medical care for free and we now get an additional several hundred dollars a month out of his (admittedly small) paycheck.

Doctor visits have a quarterly co-pay of 10 EU, and if you visit a specialist, it's an additional 10 EU per quarter to see each of them. Thus, if I go to my primary physician and see four specialists a year -- no matter how many times I see them! -- the cost is never more than 200 EU per year. Pretty amazing. On average, I wait a far shorter time in European doctor's offices than I waited in the U.S. In addition, I've never had a problem getting an appointment with a German specialist, though the date might have been as much as 2 months away in non-emergency situations. The wait time was similar for getting into the offices of U.S. specialists, or even worse. (For example, in Tucson, I was told that not a single endocrinologist was accepting non-diabetic new patients for the foreseeable future -- I had to wait 6 months and go to Phoenix to actually be diagnosed and treated.)

The level of care here is superb. In the U.S. I made a point of going to the best doctors no matter what they cost -- health, after all, is everything. I'm not naive about the field of medicine and have some background in physiology myself. It is clear to me that I get the best care possible here. And, just like U.S. doctors, they are careful -- in my case, they needed to rule out a brain tumor and they did not hesitate to send me to get an MRI, even though the possibiliy was remote.

Germans do complain about the quality of their health care, but it's important to remember that their complaints are relative to their own system... not to the U.S. system. I, too, would whine about a 2-hour doctor office wait... unless I'd been used to sitting for 4 hours. And I, too, would object to the 10 EU co-pay being raised from once a year to once a quarter (effectively quadrupling my health care costs) unless I'd been used to paying more a month than a German visiting four specialists pays in a year. Likewise the cost of medications might seem high at 5-10 a prescription (though many are free!) ... if I hadn't been paying $20-40 per scrip in the U.S.

In the interest of honesty, I will say that when I started going to the university medical clinic for my eyes, to see the best specialists in the country, I did find longer wait times -- sometimes up to 3 hours. But this is an exception since it is a teaching hospital and the specialists are overburdened. Unlike in U.S. hospitals, I found that the younger specialists are directly supervised by the senior specialists, and I have never had an office visit to this clinic where I wasn't examined personally by the head doctor. It was unusual to find my care was not relegated to interns or residents, as it is so often in equivalent U.S. teaching hospitals (where I've spent more time than I'd have liked).

As for the "collapse" of the German medical system... any examination of the figures shows this is absurd. Costs are indeed increasing, and taxes are rising in different areas, but again, they are nowhere near what most of us pay in the U.S. and we get so much less for our money.

This is why Americans should travel -- a brush with the European health care systems can be very illuminating, and an illustration of what we should be demanding from our own government. For all the hue and cry about the dangers of socialism I hear from both right wingers and libertarians, I simply can't see the reality of it here in Germany. Germany's not perfect, but in many aspects -- and particularly in serving the broadest spectrum of its citizens medical needs -- it is indeed better.

If you need still more reassurance, just take a look at the relative health of the German vs. the U.S. economy. On virtually every relative measure, Germans are healthier, live better, and are better educated than their American counterparts. It really is pretty embarrassing when you think about it, given our relative access to resources.

I'm not, of course, talking about the living conditions of the richest 5% of the American population -- the rich live well wherever they may be. But if you measure the quality of life of the other 95% of both societies, you might well be astonished at the results.

Of course health care is a right -- it's certainly one of the crucial foundations of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (or "property" if you prefer that version). And the U.S. is virtually the only developed nation that refuses to recognize that right. I find it sad when I hear Americans screaming loudly that people don't "deserve" accessible health care unless they can afford to pay exorbitant prices for it. And I wonder how durable their "get tough" attitude would be if they were faced with illness of a loved one or their own serious illness. It's a lot easier to say that strangers should die on the street, but a lot harder when it's Aunt Molly.

There is, of course, no convincing the hard core libertarian ideologues, who insist that selfishness is at the root of all human endeavor. But anyone who believes in empathy, in compassion, and in communal responsibility is going to have a hard time making an ethical argument against universal health care.

American Nightmare: Charter Schools

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:37:57 +0100

Joaquin Q. Malik commented that the only point he didn't agree with me on in my Predictions for 2007 blog was short summary of the problems with charter schools. Malik is working on a piece about charter schools himself, which I very much look forward to reading when he's finished. In the meantime, I'll expand on what I think are the problems with them.

If public schools were safe, decently funded, and the teaching was of high quality (as was once the case, most notably in the 1930s-1950s), charter schools would never have been considered an acceptable alternative. The folks who select charter schools with the goal of giving their kids the education they should have received in the public schools don't bother me -- I think it's sad that they have to do it, but I understand it given the current defunding of public schools. The intentional destruction of the public schools by the U.S. government, aimed at furthering a conservative agenda, is what forces progressives (who have historically believed strongly in public education) to consider private and charter schools in the first place.

What bothers me about the government's advocacy of charter schools is that they know they have less and less incentive to keep up the quality of public schools if "school flight" pulls out all the kids whose parents have the resources to see they're well-educated, leaving the public schools as a dumping ground for children the government either doesn't give a damn about, or would actively like to prevent from being educated -- the children of the poor and the "underclasses".

For those who thought that charter schools would end segregation, see Harvard University's Civil Rights Project report: Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education. Even when minority rights organizations themselves sponsor charter schools and give children a progressive education, they do it almost exclusively in segregated environments.

Furthermore, charter schools are subject to mismanagement, both unintentional and deliberate -- that's the biggest cause of charter schools closing. Public schools can't close and strand students. There's an excellent overview of this problem in Northwest Education Magazine: "Why Charter Schools Stumble -- and Sometimes Fall."

Additionally, charter schools give carte blanche to religious fundamentalists of all flavors, whose idea of schooling is in direct contrast to the ideals espoused by the (now defunct) American educational system. These people now educate their children at the expense of those (black, poor, female, etc.) people they specifically want to subjugate or to keep out of their schools. The idea that they get tax dollars to further their oppressive religio-political agendas really sticks in my craw. And they don't turn out more educated students, as this article in New York Teacher demonstrates with a very good graph.

One can, of course, rightfully critique public education in the U.S., particularly the influences of sociological constructs like Taylorism, which aimed to educate working class students to accept the place designated for them in capitalist society, and which certainly rests of a foundation of segregation, a legacy that continues long after Brown vs. Board of Ed. (A good summary of the critique is John Taylor's Gatto's, "Against School". For a popular, accessible overview of different views of public schools, check out the PBS series School: The Story of American Public Education.)

One can also criticize the funding methods of public schools, especially the problem of using the local tax base to fund local schools, so that people who live in more affluent communities can provide better educations for their children. These inequities were and are pervasive in the public school system and have been well covered for decades by Jonathan Kozol and others.

Traditionally, American public education has had the tasks of teaching students subjects, and also socializing them as citizens. It's absolutely no accident (though given Reaganite American chauvenism it's certainly ironic) that in the Reagan area "government" classes were starting to drop from most public school curriculae -- sure, it was often a stupid, boring class usually taught from a conservative and grossly nationalist viewpoint. On the other hand, it also told students how the machinery of the State operated and I know that when I took the class in a huge, mixed class, mixed-race public school (North Hollywood High, 1975), there was a contingent of leftist ("opposition") students who were happy to educate their peers about the contradictions in the rhetoric of "liberty and justice for all." Boring as it seemed at the time, in retrospect it gave us the opportunity to talk (in and out of class) and got us to think and -- although we didn't know it -- to take a position on politics upon which we could build over the years.

I believe strongly that there is a liberatory value in teaching children to read, write, cipher and analyze, whether or not the intent is to mainstream them and fit them into predetermined social molds. There's a reason why oppressed people in western culture seek literacy -- literacy is power (remember the scenes in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass where he learns to read by hook or crook, and at great personal risk). The degradation of literacy in the U.S. follows the curve of defunding public schools and the rise in charter schools. In the International Adult Literacy Survey, 1994-1998, the results indicate that when comparing U.S. adults to adults in other high income countries "the U.S. overall performance is mediocre at best, and that, as a nation, the U.S. is among the world's leaders in the degree of inequality between its best and poorest performers.." In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. ranked higher. In the 21st century, they rank lower than they did in the 90s.

There are disputes about the degradation of reading skills in the U.S. population. For example, Jeff McQuillin tries to debunk the widespread perception of a literacy crisis in "Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States (1998)." I've read his work and remain unconvinced, in large measure because schools have responded to accusations about literacy failure by "teaching to the test," ensuring students score higher (even, at times, teaching the test questions themselves, when they can get them), but failing miserably to teach students how to think about texts, to critique and analyze them.

Stephen Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizer note the following in their article, "Sixty Years of Reading Research -- But Who's Listening?" [Phi Delta Kappan, V80, 1999]:

Actually, the opposition between conservative and progressive views of education has existed for a long time. Conservatives see children as primarily in need of discipline, while progressives see them as creatures seeking opportunities for expression and initiative. Conservatives look to education mainly to supply basic skills for a competent labor force -- skills taught one at a time and tested by standardized, impersonal instruments -- while progressives want school mainly to nurture active citizens and creative individuals. Conservatives think of education as socializing students to the status quo, while progressives view it as an opportunity to teach students to critique and question the world they've inherited. Many conservatives doubt that public education is even an appropriate domain for government, while progressives see it as the seedbed of democracy.

...

In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self- actualization. If you believe that books -- especially religious scriptures -- have only one correct meaning that is inherent in the text, you are not going to be very friendly to schools that teach children to explore a wide range of books and ideas, to write and discuss their own responses, to make critical evaluations of what they read, and to develop strong and independent voices as authors.

... there are clear distinctions between conservative and progressive approaches to education. A classroom in which children are working in small groups on various projects they've chosen looks and feels far different from one in which students are sitting in rows listening to a lecture or filling in worksheets. We've watched children from all backgrounds excel when given lots of opportunities to choose their own reading, writing, and inquiry topics and when classrooms are structured so that the teacher can provide lots of individual attention that's well-tuned to students' personal needs. Students at the Best Practice High School, a small Chicago public high school we helped found in 1996, prove to us every day that progressive ideas can be brought to life in the inner city. And on the other side of the equation, we've observed the failure of punitive approaches, of approaches that assume that young people bring to school no relevant knowledge or abilities of their own, and of lockstep scripts that prevent teachers from using their own judgment to provide what students need at a given moment.

What this suggests to me is that at the moment when "sixty years of research" was demonstrating unequivocally that "whole language" teaching -- reading rooted in the analysis of literary texts -- was most effective in educating students, particularly in the areas of comprehension skills and critical thinking, and when such research began to be institutionalized in the public schools, conservative forces marshaled together to slam public education and joined with the conservative government administration to defund public schools while funding these new charter schools. This was going on at the same time as the so-called "Culture Wars," in which right-wingers claimed that "leftists" controlled the universities and were teaching their students according to a "leftist agenda"... as if there was no "conservative agenda" already in place. What was really happening was that conservatives were panicking as study after study demonstrated that "liberal" methods worked better than the methods they espoused, and that their worldview was increasingly difficult to substantiate given the current state of research in just about every field, from biology to anthropology. (But that's another story...)

A 2004 report from Democracy Now discusses a Bush administration burial of its own government agency, which found that "children attending charter schools score lower on standardized tests than students at regular public schools." I suppose the Bush maxim, "No Child Left behind," is at least mathematically valid if all children receive an equally bad education. I could not avoid seeing the damage done by the privatising of public education; it was glaringly obvious over my 20+ years of teaching, most of which took place in state universities. Each year, my students would come to me less and less prepared for the tasks that college students must undertake: critical thinking, formulating questions, hypotheses, and arguments; evaluating evidence; college-level reading comprehension. Charter school students made up a large segment of this group, and the worst were the kids from the fundamentalist charter schools who, in the words of Joseph Heller's fictional character Ralph Newsome, "have no ideas, and they're pretty firm."

In the last five years, I've had class after class of good-hearted, well-meaning students who were stunned to find out that they, in fact, could not read. Well, most of them could read the words on the page, and often whole sentences. But they simply couldn't make sense out of a paragraph. One paragraph -- one idea: that was a foreign thought to them, and it tooks weeks of course time to teach them to be able to paraphrase even a paragraph of a critical essay that, 20 years ago, they would have been able to do blindfolded by the 8th grade. And writing... each semester I'd count fewer and fewer students who could write comprehensibly, much less coherently. By the time I left teaching at the end of 2005, I often had classes where not one single student could write at what I considered at 12th grade level.

20 years of charter and private schools down the line, and we've severely disadvantaged our children. We've stolen their potential and narrowed their chances for success. In a system like this, the only people who succeed are the few with the who are brilliant, inquisitive, self-motivated and lucky... or the ones who have money and connections already. Almost none of these kids are qualified to do jobs beyond a lower-management or menial level -- but of course the kids of the privileged classes, the kids with the family connections, will be hired whether they're qualified or not. They don't have much competition, after all. The rest will be left to rot in the enormous sea of American under- and un-employed, intentionally bereft of the skills that would help them successfully challenge an unbelievably unfair system.

Self-Hating Jew Products for Sale on Amazon!

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:47:42 +0100

I was researching the term "self-hating Jew" via google and hit this amazing Amazon.com page:

http://www.amazon.com/tag/self%20hating%20jew

Hey, be the first one to write a guide about self hating jews! Create a Listmania list! Sell products related to self-hating Jews! (There's already a Noam Chomsky book for sale!)

I wrote and suggested that Amazon remove the category. I hope by the time you click on the link it's not there any more.

Have I said recently how much I can't stand the crass consumerism of the net?

Political and Economic Predictions for 2007

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:51:39 +0100

I've had a couple of friends tell me lately that things I said about American politics and the economy 4-5 years ago turned out to be exactly as I'd projected. It's too bad, since they weren't very happy things. But I figured that since I was right last time, I might as well publicly go on record about what I believe the future holds for the U.S. My analysis is based on my study of history and culture and what I'm talking about are probabilities. I don't claim any of the skills of a seer.

Foreclosures in the U.S. have already hit Great Depression levels in many areas and exceeded them in some.. This is coupled with unprecedented unemployment (well over Great Depression levels) if you use the real numbers and not the fudged government "statistics." And even the corrected stats don't count the underemployed and the working poor. My prediction is that the U.S. economy will continue to spiral downwards at an increasing rate, but that corporate "profits" (which, of course, include massive layoffs and neglect of infrastructure to appear to reap short-term gains) will allow the government to sustain the illusion of a potential recovery for a while yet. I expect that the facade will begin to break down completely after the 2008 election, and will be entirely gone by 2010, at which point the U.S. will no longer be able to pretend it's not in dire straits. By 2015 it'll be a recipient of international aid, rather than a bestower.

Along with the mortgage foreclosures, the contracting job market will plunge hundreds of thousands of heavy consumer debtors into bankruptcy, and the new laws will not allow those people to make a fresh start. Instead, they will be enslaved to debts they can no longer pay, and a new version of the crop-lien system will evolve in which creditors begin to control virtually every financial aspect of a consumer's life. Student loan debt will also push the current and next generation into debt servitude, without providing jobs that allow them to work off those debts in a reasonable time frame.

The U.S. stock market will become increasingly volatile as it's buffeted by one shock after another, and at first the world markets will take a hit ever time that happens. Eventually (and sooner rather than later), it will become apparent that the value of the dollar is no longer of primary importance to the rest of the developed world, and the European market will get stronger and become more stable as the U.S. market collapses. (Asian markets will remain more volatile, but will also eventually become independent from the U.S. market) This process will be accelerated when the world oil market -- except for U.S. holdings -- moves to the Euro.

As the dollar continues to drop in value, more and more of the multinationals with large U.S. holdings will invest in Euro, since that currency is likely to hold its value in the world market. (We can see this already, as large U.S. real estate companies are now buying up blocks of European apartments to counter the tumble in the real estate market in the U.S.) The U.S. dollar will go the way of the peso and the illusion of prosperity in the consumer market will take an enormous hit because imports will no longer be "cheap."

Debt-ridden, cash poor, with a diminishing tax base, a desperate U.S. will pursue acquisitions of oil and other resources via military adventurism. At the same time, repressive measures will continue to be employed, increased and tightened at home as an increasingly destitute population becomes more restless and resistant to a government that acts consistently against majority interests. More and more behaviors will become criminalized, adding to the artifical populations of criminals created by drug laws, "terror" laws, copyright laws, and the suggested "family violence" laws (which would criminalize any parent who physically disciplined a child). If everyone is a potential criminal, that will serve as the rationalization for increased surveillance, control and emphasis on "homeland security" and "protecting the public."

The U.S. prison population will continue to swell, as will U.S. "guest worker" programs (indentured servitude), so that the corporations that remain in the U.S. will have access to an enormous slave and indentured labor force. This will not, however, work out well for corporations in the long run, since even a huge drop in the wages in the U.S. won't bring the work force down to the level of labor in the third world countries they prefer to exploit, and U.S. made products will never be competitive with those produced in Asia, even if it were possible to retool the U.S. infrastructure and rebuild the country as a kind of third-world manufacturing base. The U.S. has also squandered the bulk of its easily accessible raw materials (oil, timber, copper, etc.), so that it is more cost effective to turn to richer stocks in Africa and Asia.

Destruction of the U.S. public school system and the promotion of largely unsupervised charter schools has already produced two generations of poorly educated additions to the citizenry and the work force. The lack of foundation makes it impossible for students to rise to high levels of achievement even in good colleges and universities. The U.S. underproduces highly trained personnel in almost every field in the sciences, and it has largely given up attempting to educate persons in the humanities and the social sciences. Increasingly, those corporations remaining in the U.S. will be forced to recruit from Europe and Asia to fill technical and professional positions.

Religious fundamentalism will rise as the economy worsens, and scapegoating of those who are different will dramatically increase, and will include the passage of laws (and perhaps Constitutional amendments) to abridge the freedoms of queers, women, and aliens and nonwhite persons. Black and brown people will be increasingly under the control of the criminal justice system, feeding the needs of the corporations who use them as forced labor and the police system that uses the threat of incarceration as a way to discourage political and economic protest.

Racist and homophobic violence will increase dramatically in this period, justified by the alleged "terrorist threat" that paints everyone who is not a Republican, white, American male as a potential "enemy." Profiling will be the rule, habeus corpus will be suspended for Americans, and detention camps for American political dissidents will spring up in different parts of the country. Dissidents will be criminalized, jailed, and isolated. Media control will continue to be more and more consolidated, and access to information will become harder to get. The U.S. internet will become entirely privatized and the large providers will be the gatekeepers, baldly employing a political agenda to limit free access to content. The "news" is already close to being as seamless as it was under the Soviet republic, and this will continue to be the case.

American military adventurism will continue to be justified by the "war on terror," and the U.S. will set up missile defense stations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other "friendly" countries. It will retool its nuclear arsenal and revive the nuclear threat, forcing other nations to beef up their nuclear programs in reaction. As U.S. real power dwindles, U.S. imperialist efforts will become more desperate, and U.S. foreign policy of the next decade will make the brinksmanship of the Nixon/Kissinger era look like a calm and friendly game of chess.

The Democrats are not going to make an iota of difference -- they don't have the power to stop the coming economic crash, which is already well under way. Nor do they have the will to walk away from the strategy of military-intervention-as-resource-grab. They don't give a damn about the poor, or about the fact that the American middle class has virtually disappeared. They don't have the guts to stand up to to corporations, to socialize utilities or medicine, or to insist on rebuilding our infrastructure. They don't want to reinstitute the civil rights that were stripped from Americans or foreign residents. They will not end the drug war, and they will not end the war on terror. They will hold power briefly and ineffectively, and they will be replaced by the cronies of the same Republicans they are attempting to oust from power. The electoral system of the U.S. is bankrupt, the Constitution is shredded, and we no longer live under a rule of law -- the Democrats have neither the ability nor the fortitude to confront that fact and to set things right.

Over the years a lot of people have called me a pessimist when it comes to predicting what will happen. I'd like to take a moment to point out that I have been on the money about everything I've said would happen, and that things are just as bad there now as I said they'd be... and they're heading for worse.

Personally, I'd suggest getting and staying the hell out of the country if at all possible. If you have anything to invest, do it outside the U.S. and stay away from the dollar like the plague.

Authority and Enlightenment Ideals: Reason in Progressive Thought

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:14:37 +0100

A discussion on the nature of authority developed on Brother Art's blog, and I wanted to addresss the question at some length, so I brought it over here. I've been thinking about the way "authority" relates to "experience" for a long time; the issue has been at the center of my intellectual and activist work since at least 1979. I can't claim to any "authority" over the answer, since in my opinion it's one of the most complex questions that we face, but I can frame the question with some confidence.

At its heart this is a question of who can and should be regarded as an expert (an "authority," a "legitimate" analyst, an "authentic" voice to speak for a community, the person who "really" knows, and so on). As with any discussion like this, it has to start with the questions that are almost always begged by the assignment of "authority": 1) Who grants expertise? 2) What constituency does the expert serve? 3) What is the expert's personal stake ("material interest," in Art's words) in the question? As usual, my exploration of the question is roundabout, so think of this as a tour of my mind while I attempt to assemble the information and ideas from the various disciplines in which I work in order to address the issue as holistically as I can.

Western culture -- with its embedded white supremacist ideology and its sexist foundation -- has a real stake in determining who is and who is not an "authority" on a matter. The gatekeepers of authority are almost always the same gatekeepers who have a material interest in preserving hegemony; shutting down challenges, and shoring up the totalizing structure upon which their power depends. Virtually all institutions that grant "authority" in this culture are steeped in bias -- but they almost always claim neutrality while enforcing inequity and punishing those who question that inequity. (See, for example, my recent complaints about racism and sexism embedded in the Citizendium project.)

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

One of the central features of Western claims to authority is the lip service given to philosophical ideas that rose to prominence during and after the Enlightenment (the Age of Reason), so I think it's important to talk at least briefly about why the Enlightenment is central both to projects that enforce hegemony in Western culture, and to many that challenge it. It's important to remember that the patterns of thought that were crystalized and refined in the community of Enlightenment thinkers during the 18th century in Europe and the U.S. were outgrowths of the long conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism and reflect a struggle over authority: who had it, who wanted it, and why.

I'm going to engage in a crass but useful generalization here, to sum up the situation. Historically, Catholicism was linked to an ultimate and centralized hierarchical authority structure -- the Church's claim that its highest official (and no one else) has the direct ear of, and is the right hand (man) of God on earth. Politically, this had long meant that Rome claimed the right to tell even kings what they should and should not do, and to challenge royal authority with its orders and its armies. England's rejection of the Church's authority, and the establishment of its Anglican state religion by Henry XIII (cemented in place by Elizabeth I) was a radical move -- both politically and philosophically.

Archiving Your Myspace Blog

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:33:41 +0100

A month or so ago I was complaining to my partner (a computer programmer) that backing up my blog on MySpace was a real hassle. Unlike for LiveJournal, there didn't seem to be any MySpace blog archiving and posting software out there. Backing up by hand was getting to be so time consuming that I often didn't bother to do it. Plus, there was no way to back up all the comments my friends have so helpfully posted.

My partner is a wonderful person, and he wrote a script to back up my blog. It worked great and I thought maybe other folks could use it, so I bugged him to make it generally available. I think it's a time and aggravation-saver if you want to back up a blog where you've posted a lot of entries. Plus, the nifty archive format lets you navigate your MySpace blog archives on your own computer and creates cool index and category pages to make it easier for you to search through your posts.

Check it out at http://www.spacewrapper.com.

If you like the service, feel free to pass the information around to your friends, post it in your blog, etc., so that everyone who wants a full copy of their MySpace blog on their own home computer can have one.

More on Racism and Citizendium

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:51:38 +0100

Here's Gina de Miranda's letter to Larry Sanger and Citizendium. I encourage others to write and express their opinions to Sanger as well.:

From: benet_gesserit@sbcglobal.net
Date: November 30, 2006 10:43:04 PM MST
Subject: Citizendium.org and real enlightenment
To: sanger@citizendium.org

Dear Mr. Sanger,

I read postings by Kali Tal and Florian Cramer that delineated their reasons for withdrawing from your project at Citizendium.org. Then, as is appropriate preparation for determining the merits of their allegations, I went to your site. They appear to have a credible basis for taking you to task for your decision as regards Ethnic groups and women.

You, sir, are not trying to put together a project that will add to the wisdom of the world. You are shrinking knowledge and thought to fit within the paradigm of the "PC" academia. I want you to know how that feels. You seem to believe that women have been given equal treatment in academia as regards what is written about them or by them. How did you arrive at this determination? Had you read medical literature, you would have discovered that the relatively recent requirements to include women in FDA studies revealed that men and women metabolize medication very differently. You would have discovered that the knowledge of these differences has changed treatment regimes and made them dependent upon gender. Is that politically correct? I think that it is actually appropriately neutral and efficacious.

If you had read literature about women in political science, sociology or half a dozen other disciplines, you would have discovered that women think and act differently from men in a wide variety of ways. Women are geared towards cooperation, fairness and building consensus in group settings. Women bring problem-analysis and problem-solving skills that are different from those of men. By virtue of these differences, the writing, thinking and analyses provide more varied ways of considering any issue. Surely, the significance of these facts is not lost upon a man who prides himself on neutrality. Why on earth would you wish to reduce the richness of thought that different genders and ethnic communities bring to interpretation, analyses and problem-solving? Instead of opening up the process to the vivid panoply of human perspectives that might result in a more robust cogitative activity, you've put blinders on.

How sad that we have learned nothing from the last 6 years where US policy was driven by a similar myopia.

Gina de Miranda

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"A brave heart is a powerful weapon"

maisoon

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who Is A Nazi? Name Calling and Hair Pulling

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:02:38 +0100

In a moment of lovely synchronicity a friend mentioned that she found my name and photograph on a "hit list" of "self-hating" and "anti-Israel" Jews. I'm not special -- there are about 8,000 people listed -- but I'm among the minority of folks who have photos and blurbs posted about them. Part of what's awful about me (in addition to the fact I signed a petition supporting Palestinian rights and a fair peace settlement) is that I'm "bi-sexual, bi-racial and tattooed." You can see my mug shot if you like; I think it's a cute picture and I find myself in pretty good company with other Jewish progressives and folks who don't think that the genocidal campaign against Palestinians is a good thing.

The blurb of course doesn't mention I'm a Holocaust scholar who worked at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum for years. That would sort of undermine their claim that I'm the equivalent of a member of the "Judenrat" -- the Nazi bureaucracy administered by Jews themselves and set up to manage the ghettos and deportations; in other words, a Jewish Uncle Tom.

But it's interesting (if more than a little nauseating) to be called a Nazi collaborator by one group, while at the same time being charged with calling the members of another group Nazis by implication. Certainly it tells us a lot more about the power and traumatic significance of the term "Nazi" than it tells us about my politics or beliefs, since any term that's used so broadly and in such conflicting ways by groups with such different agendas loses any concreteness of meaning it might once have had.

What "Nazi" has really come to mean in U.S. discourse is "unspeakable." It's the ultimate conversation stopper, after which no comment is really possible. Chomsky talked about this a long time ago, when he was describing the radically pro-Israeli response to his critiques of the treatment of Palestinians. Once somebody publicly calls you a Nazi, what do you say? You're damned if you say you're not, because you're put on the defensive and allow yourself to be sidetracked from your original argument. And you're damned if you say, "Go ahead and call me a Nazi" because nobody thinks being a Nazi is okay and rhetorically such a stance is repulsive. And you're damned if you don't say anything, because once somebody has called you a Nazi the burden of proof is apparently on you to clear yourself.

All of this makes it very difficult to talk about Nazism itself -- a real historical phenomenon with a real history, documented by real evidence -- and to make legitimate comparisons between, say, Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Nazi policy towards Jews and other "undesirables." We've lost an important tool for understanding power structures and oppressive regimes if the word "Nazi" is off limits in analyses and comparisons. And who does this benefit? Certainly not people who are oppressed and suffering.

When I look at who is coopting and appropriating the term "Nazi," it's not generally folks who fall into the camp I consider the "good guys." I don't hear people on the left, feminists, those struggling for black liberation, queer activists or others on "our" side of the fence using the term as a pejorative label to describe general behaviors. No, it's conservatives, war-mongers, racists, sexists, and haters of all varieties who are out there both calling people Nazis and claiming to be called Nazis, right and left, to an extent that has left the word practically meaningless.

Update on Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:44:13 +0100

Larry Sanger quickly responded to my critique of Citizendium in a very predictable fashion. He called my critique a "threat" and my analysis of his racist and sexist POLICY a "personal insult ... not unlike accusing someone of being a Nazi or fascist." My words are "shocking" and a "conversation stopper" that should be responded to only with "contempt." I'm a "bigot" and "prejudiced" because I use "white man" as a categorical description of... white men.

Challenging a man on racism or sexism apparently gives him license to go on a name-calling spree that so far exceeds the charges about his behavior that it spills over into absurdity. It's another way of making our critiques inaudible or unlistenable. If challenging a person on racist and sexist behavior is instantly inflated into "She called me a Nazi!" then there's really no conversation possible, is there? And who stopped it? Me, by describing policy as racist or sexist, or Sanger, for claiming that the mere mention of racism or sexism is so outrageous that it deserves nothing but contempt? Racism and sexism are the rules in U.S. contemporary culture -- empirically demonstrable phenomena -- but we can't label anyone's behavior racist or sexist because it's too insulting? Nice trick.

And then there is the victim component: Sanger claims that being accused of racism or sexism can cause "social and academic death." I only wish that were true. Unfortunately, racists and sexists carry on every day -- whether they're accused or not -- without interruption, and with a great deal of social approval. As is exemplified by Sanger's own post, where he carries on with great self-righteousness and proficiency, untouched as head of CZ.

The bottom line is that Sanger's categorization policy creates a chilling environment for women and minority participation in CZ, whatever he intends or believes. It does not, despite his protests, create the impression that CZ encourages participation from scholars in those groups. That's just a fact. A nice, neutral fact. And it will be borne out in the demographics of CZ.

Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:58:30 +0100

A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted.

I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked, in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there were significant participation from black or women scholars from its inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship.

I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him.

Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies:

"I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently
cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying
what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to
make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely
American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and
that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated
groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium Editors listserv]

The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral" is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary, power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub-categories under the control of larger white and male dominated groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are "political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism and racism -- women and minorities.

Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white man in charge.

Sanger claims that his version of neutrality is rooted in Enlightenment principles. But as anyone working race and gender studies knows very well, white men have traditionally only applied Enlightenment principles to each other. It is the work of women and minorities that has extended those principles and challenged those who espouse them to apply them more and more broadly... and it is women and minorities who have risked their livelihoods and even their lives as they have engaged in over 250 years of activist work dedicated to building communities and nations that are free not only in principle, but in fact. By refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories, Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and equality, as conservatives everywhere have been trying to roll back all of our gains.

Frankly, I am embarrassed to have had anything to do with CZ and I will be publicly critiquing Sanger's policy in various venues. I hope that all supporters of race and gender studies will join with me in boycotting CZ, and with protesting Sanger's decision.

You can find more information on Citizendium at http://www.citizendium.org. Most of my discussions with Sanger took place on the Editors listserv, but there are a few on the Citizendium Forum pages:

http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,259.msg2165.html#msg2165
http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,251.msg2164.html#msg2164

Kali Tal
http://www.kalital.com

Dropping Knowledge -- Dropping The Ball

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 01:14:11 +0100

There was a tremendous amount of press about a recent event in Berlin called "The Table of Free Voices," hosted by Dropping Knowledge last month. This table featured over a hundred notables answering "the most important questions" facing the world today. It was certainly an interesting group of people, spanning the spectrum from shamans, to musicians, to scientists, to theologians, to NGO workers, and I'd have to say that representation was truly global — a rarity even in organizations that claim to be widely diverse.

I wound up at the dinner the day after the event in a sideways sort of fashion: my boyfriend's mother was one of the "Voices," we live in Berlin, and so Yaro and I went as guests. Because it's a small world, I ran into a couple of people I know there (other "Voices") and it was quite pleasant. The participants seemed to enjoy themselves and to feel that the "Table of Free Voices" had been quite a successful event. Coincidentally, another friend and colleague wrote to me a couple of weeks later asking if I'd attended, and saying he was going to be participating in the Dropping Knowledge web site discussion. I hadn't known about the web site, and so I went to check it out. It was a serious disappointment.

The site is pretty techno-spiffy if you have a fast connection and up-to-date hardware and software. There is a nifty graphics function that allows you to surf through the "topics" and sift down to the particular questions that were asked over the past months, and out of which the "100 most important questions" were chosen. For a visitor, however, the information is both overwhelming (in the sense that there are thousands and thousands of questions and answers) and disappointingly sparse (very few questions are well thought out, and almost none of them are answered in anything more than a superficial fashion).

The project is swaddled in the kind of rhetoric about the "unprecedented democratizing power of the internet" that seemed so exciting in the mid-1990s, but the process by which "knowledge" is "dropped" is of questionable utility and it is hard to see its potential for human improvement or liberation, or its practical application to social justice causes.

The categorization system is arbitrary and sometimes downright foolish: "Animal Rights" is a top level category, as is "Gender," but "Racism" isn't a category header at all and seems to be scattered and buried under various sub-headings in "Ethniticy & Culture," and "Justice and Civil Rights." Likewise, there is no entry-level category header for "Education," while "Democracy and Freedom" floats right at the top. While ideological bias may be unintended (and is certainly unacknowledged), it nonetheless is embedded in the structure of knowledge presented to the public.

Practically speaking, the forum is also disappointing. To follow a discussion, you have to keep coming back and checking in to each Q&A, without any system of notification when a new answer has been posted — a courtesy we've come to expect even from old-fashioned web-based bulletin boards. Furthermore, variations on the same question are asked again and again in different sub-sections, and so the answers ("knowledge") are scattered to the winds, and can be harvested only if you are a diligent, informed, a patient user of keywords, and willing to scroll through the often incoherent questions and comments that surround the very limited collection of useful answers.

The biggest problem, though, is the pedagogical model on which "Dropping Knowledge" is based. It's elitist education at its worst: the money comes from corporate and individual sponsors (i.e., the rich — however well-meaning they may be). The participants are picked on the basis of either name-recognition (how famous or "interesting" they are), or on cronyism ("I know a person who would be great for this...") at a first or second remove. The presumption is that the public can ask (carefully filtered) questions, which the "important" people can answer for them; hardly a liberatory paradigm of education and one that Freire, for example, would despise.

I felt, walking around the enormous dinner "round-table", and talking to participants, that they had all really enjoyed themselves, and enjoyed each other's company. This isn't a bad thing if we're talking about a dinner party, and multi-million dollar parties aren't that uncommon among the super-rich. The celebrities were enjoying themselves because they had the opportunity to meet "interesting" people without being inundated by press or autograph hounds, while the "interesting" people got to meet and talk to celebrities they'd always admired. Both groups got to feel like they were doing this for "a good cause." This is how the rich and famous mingle, but it bothers me when such socializing is couched in the language of leftist politics and progressive causes, and when the public is told that they will benefit from such mingling.

Given the quality of the answers (transcribed from the videotaped event) to the "100 questions," I have to wonder what might have resulted if a requirement for participating in the Table of Free Voices had been to think rigorously and answer even a fraction of the questions in a prepared, concrete, and truly useful fashion. I believe that at least some of Voices would have agreed to that request (and some may well have been glad of it). The fault lies not with the participants in these situations, but with the event organizers. Perhaps they were afraid to scare their celebrities away with requests that went beyond simple appearance and lending their names to the project. In any case, the Q&A format was seriously flawed and resulted in the production of nothing more than sound-bytes and feel-goodism, the simplification of inherently complex questions, and the impression that progressives are very, very sloppy thinkers.

Educating the public is a lot of work. The biggest challenge is not producing content (there is more good content out there than we could ever utilize). There are two central challenges: 1) People must be convinced that the pursuit of education is in their interest, and that it is an essential part of building free and humane societies. 2) People must feel an investment in, and a responsibility for their own educational process; a goal that cannot be achieved without building educational systems that truly serve the whole population, rather than serving the middle- and upper-classes.

Top-down education is often oppressive (and can replicate and reinforce repressive social structures). In the West, the top-down model has met the consumer model. When kids don't see a connection between their education and their "real life," they cut classes, drop out, and avoid school work as much as possible. That's why we have truancy and compulsory schooling laws. Adults often don't have to continue their education and often Western cultures encourage them by making education "fun." But too often, "fun" means that education isn't rigorous, doesn't encourage people to think deeply, and avoids anything smacking of critical thinking because critique can be uncomfortable and even painful. Consumers will avoid products that make them feel uncomfortable or inadequate.

Dropping Knowledge seems to buy, without question, into a consumer model of top-down education and is careful to make both its questions and its answers vacuous enough to be inoffensive (and also, uncoincidentally, ineffective). Although the group of participants was diverse in terms of race, nation of origin, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, it did not appear to be diverse in terms of class. It was a distinctly upper- and middle-class group, and — by the answers they gave — very out-of-touch with the concerns of working people and the poor, with some notable individual exceptions. The classes that were represented are specifically those to whom top-down educational models most appeal, and who have a vested interest in believing that they are the possessors and potential bestowers of knowledge.

The problem is a lot more obvious if we turn the Dropping Knowledge model on its head. What if a group of powerful and influential celebrities were invited to ask questions of a large and diverse group of grass-roots and indigenous community workers, and to listen respectfully as they answered at length in their own idiom? What if they were charged with turning their wealth and power to serving those communities without being in charge, without being "authorities," and without being asked for their opinions on the topic? It's a bit hard to imagine, isn't it? The idea that those with the money and the fame should dictate answers to the "nobodies" has been thoroughly naturalized in Western cultures (and Dropping Knowledge certainly springs from Western roots — European and U.S.).

I am struck by the difference between the methods and the results of Dropping Knowledge and an organization like Tostan, described recently by gUaVa jAm in her blog. Through community-based education, TOSTAN managed, in a period of about three years, to allow women in Senegal to take charge of their education, and to educate themselves and each other about their bodies and health. The women responded by building an indigenous movement to eradicate female genital mutiiation in Senegal — an organization effort so successful that it's believed that in a year or two the practice will have almost entirely ceased throughout the country.

Like Dropping Knowledge, Tostan relies on donations. Unlike them, they don't throw fancy dinner parties where famous men and women can come and praise each other. Nor do they have a fancy web site or, as far as I can find, a web site at all. What they do have is people on the ground, working to empower communities by providing free education and information to those who need it and want it.

Some might say that there's room for both organizations like Dropping Knowledge and like Tostan, but I don't think so. It seems pretty clear to me that there's a limited amount of progressive money out there, and events like The Table of Free Voices suck money out of the pool for the gratification of people who really don't need another fancy dinner or the wonderful free Robbie Conal posters and shirts that were available to all participants. (And yes, I have both the shirts and the posters. I think Conal is a great political artist and you wouldn't believe how expensive t-shirts are in Germany, where they tax the hell out of imports from countries they think don't have fair labor practices.)

We Didn't Know What Would Happen: Opening the Discourse on Incest and Sexual Abuse

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:37:25 +0100

The work of putting Worlds of Hurt online is going well. The seventh chapter, "We Didn't Know What Would Happen: Opening the Discourse on Incest and Sexual Abuse," is now available. I hope it will be helpful to those who are searching for substantive material about the cultural and political history of the feminist struggle to reveal and challenge the institutions that support and conceal violence against women and children. I think this chapter is also particularly important because it directly addresses the racism of mainstream, white feminism and argues that any true progress will need to be based on the recognition that race and gender are inseparable issues for women not just women of color, but for all women.

Trauma, Community and the Revisionary Process

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:04:04 +0100

Just a notice to let folks know that the sixth chapter of Worlds of Hurt is now online: "There Was No Plot and I Discovered It By Mistake: Trauma, Community and the Revisionary Process." I think it's particularly timely given the rising U.S.-Iraq veterans antiwar movement. The chapter discusses the ways in which the political protests of antiwar Vietnam veterans were gradually channeled into the medical system, with the institutionalization of the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Angry veterans became "sick" veterans, paid by the VA to take and stay on medications and in therapy that dulled their inclinations to protest and invalidated their critiques of U.S. policy via the process of medicalization of their complaints.

The Farmer of Dreams: The Writing of W.D. Ehrhart

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:30:21 +0100

Another chapter of my 1995 book, Worlds of Hurt has made it to the web. Check out "The Farmer of Dreams: The Writing of W.D. Ehrhart." Though my discussion of Ehrhart's work ends ten years ago, the writer has kept on writing. I encourage scholars and writers &emdash; especially those interested in the effects of war on soldiers and veterans — to use my work as a basis for further discussions of Vietnam veteran and later veteran writers. Also check out Ehrhart's web site, which hosts a lot of great recent writing and will bring you up to date on this long-time antiwar activist, novelist, non-fiction writer and poet.

Favorite poets...

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 23:33:32 +0100

I've been reading poetry since I was a kid. My father was addicted to it, though he likes more dramatic verse than I ever did. (I'll never forget his impassioned rendering of the "The Highwayman.") My grandmother taught me a love of Dickinson and Millay, but it was really the discovery of the Norton Anthology of Modern English Poetry that converted me forever. This edition is, sadly, no longer available, but it was new and shiny in 1976 or 1977 and full of poets it was easy for a young woman to love, from Wallace Stevens to Etheridge Knight to Sonia Sanchez. I read the whole thing, page by page, and felt like I was discovering a new world. In those days I had a near photographic memory and a lot of those poems stay with me still, if I close my eyes and visualize the page.

Selected Poems Margaret Atwood	Selected Poems II Margaret Atwood	Transbluesency: The Selected Poems, 1961-1995 Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)	The Complete Poems William Blake
Selected Poems Gwendolyn Brooks	Complete Poems Stephen Crane	Complete Poems 1904-1962 e.e. cummmings	Complete Poems Emily Dickinson
Just For Laughs W.D. Ehrhart	The Outer Banks and Other Poems W.D. Ehrhart	Four Quartets T.S. Eliot	Collected Poems Langston Hughes
Fruits and Vegetables Erica Jong	The Essential Etheridge Knight Etheridge Knight	Collected Poems Edna St. Vincent Millay	Collected Poetry Dorothy Parker
The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga ntozake shange	nappy edges ntozake shange	ed., Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Jon Silken	The Complete Love Poems May Swenson
Collected Poems Wallace Stevens	God's Trombones James Weldon Johnson