"Divided by the number of people they finally let go, how many kilos of grain were paid for me? Or my mother? What was the price in grain for the Moscow boy who became a student at Stanford and invented Google? ". An immigrant student loses it at a forced-attendance anti-war poetry reading, and tells her professors - the majority of the "poets" being faculty, of course - exactly what she thinks of them.

Thankfully, few "anti-war" poems have surfaced at the State College slams. It isn't the local political cause. That would be feminism and anti-rape ideology. You know, our bodies, ourselves stuff. Impossible to object to, because there's nothing controversial or hateful about it. Well, I suppose someone coming from a hard Christian point of view would get pissed about pro-gay or feminist material, but hell, why do I have to carry water for the sensibilities of those folks? Let them come and object, if it would even occur to them to do so.

Of course, that feminist or queer-ideology material sometimes comes wrapped in a paranoid persecution-complex. Make that "often", come to think of it. And paranoia never comes across well in an aesthetic context - it reeks of narcissism and self-involvement.

Via Mark Miyake, who has some interesting stuff in between the scary linguistic material. But why the gratuitous Deutsche in the article-title, Mark? The immigrant-author is Russian, and the people driving her up the wall were standard-issue Northern Californian leftists, not particularly known for their Teutonicisms.