I couldn't agree with you more, not only about Oprah, but about this kind of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps stuff that tells the poor and oppressed they're only poor and oppressed because they aren't trying hard enough. I've just been teaching Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and he attacks the same argument, the American dream spiel that keeps people poor by having them focus not on the system that keeps them down but on finding a crevice to cling to so that they can pull themselves up the rockface of capitalism.

It's all about the self, is it? I once read an fascinating article by Barbara Ehrenreich (I probably spelled that incorrectly). She analyzed breast cancer sufferers and survivors as a sort of linguistic community. In the process, she pointed out that the focus on "lifestyle" in our research on and discussions of cancer, while rooted in common sense, has become extreme and lets industry, which has been systemtaically poisoning the world for some time, off the hook.

If you're sick or poor or thrown in prison without due process, well, maybe you're just not trying enough, maybe you just aren't willing your success. What a load of crap.