Mark--
Actually, yes, I do think that one should nail one's colors to the mast when dealing with what is an inherently political question--who gets to speak for what experiences? How is authority accrued and maintained? To what extent does art, particularly a boutique art such as contemporary page poetry, "speak for" broad experiences of large numbers of people? In the United States, how do discussions of "privilege" intersect with a political climate that has historically redbaited discussions of class and its centrality, and where "meritocracy" has in recent decades (read: my whole life, and I'm not especially young) supplanted notions of social justice. While I agreed with many discrete points, the Scylla/Charybdis situation the essay describes is largely avoidable if one jettisons the idealism and individualism inherent in American (and, really, Western) liberalism. The root of my complaint, which goes much further than this essay, is a lack of a sense of political economy and praxis.
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