My Summer Reading List

The district where I went to high school rejected a proposal to ban nine books [link]. The books are:

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin
"Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner
"The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World" by Michael Pollan
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Steven Chbosky
"Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers
"How Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised by this. There are a lot of conservatives in that area, but the high school district was very liberal, or at least it seemed to be ten years ago. A lot has changed in ten years. Now, conservatives feel empowered, and believe they have a mandate to take charge of society, driving out of the schools such "controversial" ideas like evolution, sex education, dinosaurs, the laws of thermodynamics, global warming, and pretty much everything else which is in conflict with either the literal interpretation of the Bible, or the ideals of consumerism and ultra-capitalism.

The only books that I have read from this list are "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "The Things They Carried" and there is certainly nothing in any of those books that is more that anyone can see on prime-time network television. The difference, I believe, is the attitude toward violence. It is perfectly acceptable to glorify state violence. On television and in movies, the "good guys" routinely get into shootouts with the "bad guys" and invariably the bad guys are shot, instantly drop to the ground without spilling a drop of blood, and are never seen or heard from again. No one ever suffers. But a book like "Slaughterhouse-Five" (one of my favorite books) is unacceptable presumably because it depicts violence in general in a negative light, and fails to depict the "good guys" as being universally good and the "bad guys" as evil incarnate.

It seems that invariably, when people try to have books banned, it is not because of violence or language. Some of the most violent, graphic books are hardly contraversial. For example, "Lord of the Flies," which I read in my sophmore year of high school, is very violent, but the ideas in that book are not anti-conservative and so they are not controversial.

This is not about violence and language, this is about ideology, plain and simple, and I applaud my high school district for making the right decision. It's a scary thought that a group of people who don't believe in dinosaurs might be able to sieze control of the public schools.

Contradictory Headlines

Fox News: "Federal Trade Commission Says Oil Industry Did Not Manipulate Prices After Hurricane Katrina" [link]

ABC News: "FTC: Some Gas Price Gouging After Katrina" [link]


If you read the two headlines seperately, you would probably expect to find two very different articles. Actually, both stories were taken from the same AP story, and the content is virtually identical. Both articles mention 15 instances of price gouging, but no widespread market manipulation.

Even if there was no widespread market manipulation, I don't see how the Fox News headline is appropriate. 15 instances of price gouging hardly seems like nothing.


* * *


ABC News: "Hurricane Center Predicts Calmer Season" [link]

Washington Post: "U.S. Predicts Busy Hurricane Season" [link]

Again, the content of the articles is virtually identical. The National Hurricane Center has predicted that the coming hurricane season should not match last year's record season, but that it should still be significantly above average. This one is maybe not quite so overtly contradictory as the previous example, but I thought it was pretty strange to see both examples in a single day.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I do not believe in either a liberal or conservative bias in news, but rather in a bias toward profits, which often causes a bias toward sensationalism. The above two examples seem to illustrate this example well. The issues were not totally black and white, but the headlines necessarily had to choose sides. People don't want to hear the news, people want to have it boiled down, until it can hardly be said to represent the actual information.

Pfizer Tests Unapproved Drugs on African Children

It has been a recurring theme in this blog that there are no lengths that pharmaceutical companies won't go to furthur their profits at the expense of human life. Most of my accusations against them deal with excessive, unnecessary advertising which drives up costs of prescription drugs, as well as a reluctance to invest in research into disease-curing drugs, as it they are not profitable compared to symptom-treating drugs.

Now, it seems that Pfizer has been testing unapproved drugs on Nigerian children during a 1996 outbreak of meningitis [link]. According to Pfizer, they only wanted to help with the crisis, but as soon as the clinical trial of the drug was complete, the Pfizer doctors left, while "the epidemic was still raging." The drug, Trovan, had never been given to children with meningitis, and five children died after being treated with it. The drug was approved for use in adults in 1997, but due to many cases of liver damage and several deaths, the FDA has severely restricted it's use, and it has been banned in Europe.

Medicine is hardly my specialty, but it seems meningitis it is treatable by traditional antibiotics [link].

It is of course possible that no one died as a direct result of taking the drug, however, even if that is the case, it is truely criminal for proven drugs to be withheld from children for the sake of testing an unapproved drug. It seems that Pfizer was able to keep this secret for years, and it is highly unlikely that anyone involved will face criminal charges.

More NSA Revelations

USA Today has an article this morning about how the NSA, under an executive order signed by Bush, have been secretely collecting phone records of tens of millions of Americans with no ties to terrorism [link].

As I wrote in January [link], every article about the illegal NSA wiretapping program stated as fact that the target of all of the investigations were people who were suspected of having ties to terrorist groups. As I said then, the only evidence to support this limit is simply that the Bush administration says so. There is still no information available about the extent of the program. Now, more information is coming out showing that they were lying then. Are we to believe now that this latest revelation is the full extent of their abuse of power?

As a side note, the reaction to these revelations by the right-wing puntits is very troubling. It used to be, I believe, that conservatives feared "big government" invasions into private lives. It seems their reaction has been pretty universal. Essentially, the problem is just that these "disloyal" officials keep leaking this information.

I can't forgive the Democratic party for allowing this to happen. Members of both parties were briefed when the program began, and they did nothing. Then, they put up almost no fight at all when the Republican controlled intelligence committees refused to hold an investigation into the secret wiretapping program.

May Day

Today is May 1st, and I plan to observe it by taking part in the nationwide demonstrations in favor of immigrant's rights. I originally wrote the following last year for May Day.

The international holiday, celebrated May 1st, a week from this Sunday, in virtually every country around the world except the United States, ironically began here in Chicago during the worker's struggle for the eight hour day. On May 1st, 1886, the American Federation of Labor declared a national strike to demand an eight hour work day. Two days later, police in Chicago fired into a crowd of striking workers at the McCormick Harvester plant, killing several workers*. The next day in Haymarket Square, a demonstration was called in response to the killings. Although the demonstration was peaceful, the police attempted to disperse the crowd, and a bomb was thrown, killing several police officers*. Eight labor leaders were arrested, seven of which were not even present at the time of the bombing. With no evidence linking them to the crime, they were tried based on their beliefs, and some to all* were sentenced to death. *In researching this holiday, I found tremendous discrepencies in the numbers. The number of workers killed by police during the McCormick Harvester strike ranges from 1-4, the number of police killed in Haymarket Square ranges from 2-15, and the number of individuals sentenced to death ranged from 5-8. The description of the history depends entirely on the source. Conservative sites, who still seem to still see this as a communist plot, manipulated the numbers in their favor, and also gave very detailed descriptions of the killed police officers' identitys and the supposed brutality of their deaths, but described the worker's deaths as simply "a shooting and one fatality when police tangled with rioters." Left wing sites were equally biased. The disparity between accounts of the events, as well as the lack of recognition of the holiday here in the US, where it began, demonstrate that Americans are losing the struggle for workers rights. The eight hour work day is all but gone. Workers are only entitled to overtime after working more than forty hours per week, and even that is under attack by conservatives. Just last year, the Department of Labor regulations were changed, reclassifying more than eight million workers as "management" and thus not entitled to overtime pay. May 1st was officially recognized as "Loyalty Day" in the 1920's to contrast what was seen as a "communist" holiday. In this official proclaimation by George W. Bush in 2004, citizens are encouraged to "demonstrate their commitment to our country by supporting our military, serving each other, and teaching our young people about our history and values." Apparantly, by "teaching our young people about our history and values", he actually means creating a ridiculous holiday to attempt to erase aspects of history which he would rather we forget.