Last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington comedian Wanda Sykes turned her “tell it like it is” brand of humor to bear on the G.O.P. and Rush Limbaugh. Citing Limbaugh’s oft repeated assertion that he’d like to see President Obama fail Sykes suggested that this position is really a desire to see the United States fail–a stance which she argued is “treason”. Sykes then went on to say that Limbaugh is no different than Osama Bin Laden and she wished him a good, old fashioned case of “kidney failure”.
Of course I’m no fan of Mr. Limbaugh. I abhor his views about race in America and I think he’s dead wrong about the role of government in upholding the social contract and I don’t like his bluster which invariably reminds me of a drunken uncle shouting at the kids forgetting the pages of the magazines all sticky. Who needs all that hot headed , avuncular blather?
Kidney disease is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Yet my point has more to do with the easy availability of disability as pejorative symbolism even in liberal circles.
Apparently its okay to use disabling illness as a comedic lancet. You can say that Wanda Sykes employment of kidney disease was arbitrary, that she was really wishing Mr. Limbaugh a debilitating and painful demise and that she might have used any figurative device to get the point across. For instance she might have wished Mr. Limbaugh a long, screaming fall into an active volcano.
But that is not what she wished for Mr. Limbaugh. The context of her remark had to do with Limbaugh’s famous problem with oxycontin, the highly addictive pain killer which will in fact cause kidney failure if you are unlucky enough to be addicted and you never get help. That of course is the world of the poor and Wanda Sykes was playing with schadenfreude meets Munchausen’s by Proxy. Why not? Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t seem to like the poor very much.
Disability as metaphor or as symbolism is almost never used to promote a positive human characteristic (though there are exceptions–Tiresias’ blindness or the compensatory powers of superheroes who are exposed to toxic chemicals) and so more often than not a disability appears in a novel or movie as a figure that reflects bad character flaws. Blind Pew in Treasure Island comes to mind or Captain Hook.
Disability as vengeance fantasy is nothing more than the reapplication of a second rate Victorian story telling custom and in these times, in this age I demand more from my entertainment from Washington.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 