Month: June 2009

Being blind I have this little bit of luck: I’m not prepossessed of the idea that I “know” the place I’m visiting. On the airplane headed for Tucson I hear the businessmen talking of golf–Tucson is for them simply a kind of shopping mall.

By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country…

Being blind its all a strange country…

To which I’ll add: by faith its all a strange country…

I don’t get my news of the United States from TV.

I take my news from well meaning strangers.

I take my news from the sheep eating apple peels.

Its all a strange country…

I can find well meaning strangers.

I can walk in strange cities alone.

Can you?

 

S.K.

If you spend enough time in the world of blogs and if in particular you spend lots of time thinking about people with disabilities you will see very few representations of those same people just being people. There are thousands of obligatory images or stories about pwds (persons or people with disabilities) seen counteracting their disabilities by mountain climbing or skiing; or they are dressed in Madison Avenue business attire–seen conquering the world of business. To be sure, these are important images, especially when our culture thinks of “the disabled” all too often as jobless or at least bereft of human satisfactions. I think the large head of cultural disableism works its way into the nooks and crannies of assumptions–so much so that pwds themselves fall prey to writing or posing for stories in which they appear as over-compensators who go above and beyond the realm of ordinary living. My meager post for today concerns the simple observation that “just hanging out” is what I like to do. Here’s an old photo of me with my late guide dog “Vidal” and yes, we were just hanging out. Vidal wasn’t being Rin Tin Tin and I wasn’t fresh from climbing Everest. I’m sure Vidal could have been Rin Tin Tin but he preferred eating cat food to heroism and mostly I prefer my sofa to mountain climbing. I also like to eat Doritos. & so my brief point here is that just being is its own compensation. Just knocking around. That’s the kind of story I’m interested in.  

 

 

S.K.

It was a bad century in Mother Russia or Schenectady and the circus was the only public fun the people could enjoy because the stocks and the pillory and the dunking stool had been taken away. (Well, okay, Russia never had these things, they only had ritual horse draggings but its the same deal.) Anyway as I say, it was a bad century and the villagers, the noble rustics needed all the diversions they could get. That’s why when the circus came to town no one stayed home. Not even the crippled people were kept away. They were wheeled in or, in some instances they were carried aloft like lumber but in any event all were given seats.   

Is good the people get dancing bear, is good they see brutish creature perform ballet. It makes even the most besotted think about their lot.

God bless Smolensk or Schenectady.

Yes it was a bad century especially for the bears.

Compare and contrast this vulgar circus with the declining hours of your own small town newspapers.

Today’s online version of the dying local press allows the noble rustics to throw dung and horse chestnuts at their neighbors who of course are guilty of public intoxication or shop lifting.

The villagers write blog responses to these things. Their contempt knows no bounds.

The dancing bear was pulled over for DUI and his picture is under the headline.

“Whoa!”  writes the first blogger. “Dancing bear looks just like all the other village idiots. Thank god we now have our own village idiot here in Lone Tree or Horseheads  or Dumas which is NOT pronounced “dumb ass”.”

This is just the beginning. Vulgarity Fair is just getting started.

“Dancing bear looks like my neighbor except for the shrunken head.”

“Dancing bear is soooo obviously un-American. He was drinking foreign beer!”

“He looks almost as bad as he smells.”

“Did he have pants on when they pulled him over?”

“Dancing bears don’t wear pants in this country you moron.”

“I told you the dancing bear was French.”

 

Meanwhile, out behind the local high school there’s a toxic dump left over from the late 19th century when there was a boot blacking factory that later became a battery acid factory and now as they dig a fiber optic cable trench the pcbs are leaching into the drinking water but the Picayune isn’t following that story for indeed as the dying newspaper’s editors well know, you’ll never find a dancing bear among pcbs. No one reads that stuff.

 

S.K.

I am an amateur. No one is less informed about medicine than I. Oh I don’t mean that I can’t pronounce chemical names or explain how DNA and RNA are room mates. Any boob can do that. Yep, DNA has these interesting hydrogen-carbon bonds. Crick and Watson ain’t got nothin’ on this baby. 

The thing I can’t figger out is how the insurance companies and their sympathizing  cadre of duck walking doctors at the AMA (American Medical Association) continue to be opposed to health care reform in these United States. But even if I can decipher that, I can’t fully comprehend how they get to politicians. Do the lobbies simply stuff money in the pockets of senators and representatives? Is it that simple?

Money plus fear creates strict obedience on capitol hill.

The insurance companies want no reform. This makes sense. They’re making money at record levels and the system of letting the uninsured bob or drown at the doors of emergency rooms doesn’t affect them–after all, the poor are served as unfunded mandates, which means that the states have to pay for their care–which means that currently almost no one is paying reliably for this.

In short people in politics or in the corporate offices of the health insurance industry or in the halls of the AMA get good Christmas bonuses for letting the poor die.

Is this a holy thing to see?  William Blake wrote:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are fill’d with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,
And where-e’er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

 

It is of course Blake’s last stanza that explains the AMA. The sun is shining in their gated communities.  

The AMA and the health insurance lobbyists are comfortable with two Americas. They are eating well in perfect sunshine and their children lack for nothing and like the young Siddhartha they see no poverty at all.

Indeed the AMA thinks poverty is someone else’s problem.

 

S.K.

 

I find I want to write an essay. First I need a prologue. I cut open a pomegranate with a hunting knife.

& myth is no match for genuine seeds.

Still I thank Persephone as I eat. (Old stories offer partial enchantments.)

How many impure processes are there? 

There’s dying of course.

Aesthetics.

Gardening.

Reason.

**

Yet the essay functions as a stone door.

It stands for partial knowledge.

Displays permanence.

Invites visitors, particularly at night. 

**

Like music the essay must reveal the personal past.

It must deliver thousands of trivial expressions the way water carries seeds.

The evening itself is pleasing to us.

**

My final American destiny is to misunderstand the labyrinths.

The shopkeeper knows more than I about this nation.

I’m just a stone carver & a polemical one at that.

I should write in the cemetery.

The essay has gone somber on me.

All I can do is to try and be mannerly. 

**

Thinking of Heraclitus: 

Old man nibbled leaves
Got by on wits and viscera

**

The other side of the tapestry: praise something.

Early today I walked in and out of three gentle shadows.

I was allowed, briefly, to imitate the Fates.

**

We are using up these precious years, little ones.

 

S.K.  

 

There’s a welcome post at Change.org’s Autism site.

Meg Evans writes about a recent legislative victory for families with disabled parents in the State of Maryland.  

Evans writes:

“Governor Martin O’Malley has signed new legislation, following its approval by the state House and Senate, to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities in Maryland family law proceedings by ensuring that an individual’s mental or physical disability cannot, in itself, be sufficient grounds for denying custody of a child to that individual.”

The victory above would seem self-evident but alas, all too often people with disabilities are denied the rights described above.

There is still a ghost in these United States–a Victorian figure replete with Dickensian chains and dark robes. Its the ghost of Eugenics and it haunts 21st century America as surely as the ghost of Christmas past.

Accordingly the news described above is no small matter. This represents a strong “shot across the bow” that families with disabilities are “real families” pure and simple.

I take heart from stories like these.

 

 

S.K.

 

The following article from The Guardian comes to us via Inclusion Daily Express.

S.K. 

 

Susan Boyle Is Great For The Learning Disability Cause
(The Guardian)
June 8, 2009
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND– [Excerpt] As someone with a learning [intellectual] disability, it’s been great to see Susan Boyle getting so far on a talent show. You rarely see people with a learning disability in the media, and in the last few weeks Boyle has rarely been out of it.

But, like anyone who is put in the media spotlight, she has found it hard to deal with her new fame and growing media attention.

The main problem is that the general public don’t understand what a learning disability is and how it affects a person’s life. And that includes the producers of Britain’s Got Talent.

Some people have suggested that people who have a learning disability, such as Susan Boyle, should be stopped from going on Britain’s Got Talent. This would mean denying 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the UK the chance to take part and have the same opportunities as everyone else. This makes no sense and is discriminatory.

Entire article:
Susan Boyle is great for the learning disability cause
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0608a.htm
Related:
Kelly Clarkson: ‘People Have Been Vicious About Susan Boyle’ (Entertainment Wise)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0608b.htm

First: become the characters you are writing about.

This morning I am Roskolnikov, capable of cruelty but still able to fall in love with women and with Jesus. I am Russian at this hour. I drink my tea from a glass and carry a Finnish knife in my boot. I thank the scribes of Patmos for the New Testament because it says  Christ will forgive me. Where’s my damned landlady?  I have only fifteen minutes if I’m going to kill her.

Oops.   

Time’s up.

The landlady wasn’t in her usual place. Generally she sits in the glorified closet beside the entry and chews cardamom  seeds and gives the evil eye to children on the street. I’ll have to kill her tomorrow. Now I have to go to a lecture on French philosophy. I need a drink.

On the way to the bar I become woozy with sentimentality. I love the awnings over the small shops and the sad paint of my city. I love the brave urbanized Russian grass. I must sit. Alas I am out of tobacco. I now love strangers.

Step Two  

Stop being the characters you are writing about.

This is a Jekyll and Hyde thing. (Yes, that story really “is” about finishing your novel.)

Now you are free to be even more unpredictable.

Sobriety is not sobriety.

The one who never drinks understands Roskolnikov feels the tenderness of God when he sees the pink roof of a dog’s mouth.

In the next class we will discuss why poetry is better than the newspaper.

 

S.K.

Los Angeles

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

Often, now, on important days related to World War II like this weekend’s D-Day, a local Utica journalist contacts my Uncle Lindy to ask him about fighting in a tank division during the war. Usually, Uncle Lindy tells the journalist he lied about his age to join the army early, about the sounds he heard while landing on the D-Day beaches, about what it was like to pass German soldiers while on patrol at night and just nod his head in their direction, no shots fired by either side. The story journalists like the best is about a concentration camp survivor Uncle Lindy met after helping to liberate his camp. Lindy gave him a cigarette and always remembered his face. Years later, in upstate New York, that same man walked into the grocery store Lindy owned with his brothers. The two recognized each other immediately, cried and hugged, and became the best of friends for the remaining decades of the camp survivor’s life.

But when I think of D-Day, part of an honorable war, I think about how Uncle Lindy kept his war stories secret for forty years. He returned from the army after war’s end, after seeing his friends killed right next to him as a 17, 18, 19 year-old man, and opened a grocery store, got married, raised a family. For decades and decades, he didn’t tell his wife or closest friends about everything he had seen.

Maybe ten years ago, he visited my father, his brother-in-law, and brought some of his war memorabilia to share. In my father’s living room, he unrolled an enormous Nazi flag that he had taken from the side of a school in Germany, showed us Nazi medals he had taken from the bodies of dead soldiers, kept wrapped in bolts of cloth. My father, who had known Lindy for the better part of fifty years, had never seen these items before, had never before heard Lindy’s war stories. Even now, when he talks about the war that ended more than sixty years ago, Lindy will sit at the kitchen table and cry. Even now, even sixty years later, what he witnessed and remembers still brings him to tears. And this was an honorable war.

When I thought about D-Day this weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of all the soldiers returning from Iraq who have seen worse than Lindy could have imagined, who have worse injuries, who will live the rest of their lives with disabilities our medical systems and public spaces aren’t equipped to support, who will live the rest of their lives with psychological trauma, with terrible, terrible memories.

And this, to me, is the biggest tragedy of the Bush administration: that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi civilians—hundreds of thousands of people have been irrevocably changed by what they’ve seen and done and heard as a result of a war many people now understand as needless, unwarranted. The opposite of honorable. I can’t even begin to imagine how many years this trauma will reverberate in families of American soldiers, in families of Iraqis.

So on this D-Day, I grieved for my Uncle Lindy, for all that he’s suffered these sixty-odd years, but also for all who have fought in our current wars, whose lives are only beginning to be shaped by what they’ve seen.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

 

People recall exactly where they were when history touches their lives. In 1945 my father heard the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the Armed Forces Radio Network. He was in the U.S. Army Air Corps and stationed on Guam. His job was to send coded messages to American submarines. “F.D.R. dead” he tapped and the first reply came back: “Say it ain’t so.”

Of course these stories are legion. Where were you when France was liberated, or when President Kennedy was assassinated? What were you doing on 9-11, or when you heard that Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa? Not only do we tell these stories, we need to tell them: it’s a building block of culture to share feelings that arise from the collisions of public and private experiences.

This need for suffused stories is in fact what poems are about though poets will argue about the ways and means. Robert Frost wrote intricate, metrical verse about rural Americans and accordingly his poems are stylized reinterpretations of what common folk might have said alone on their farms when the 20^th century was still new. In turn William Carlos Williams sought to create poetry that was freed from the classroom and sounded like the spoken language of common people. Still, whatever the approach, poetry finds the marriage between public and private, and while it is seldom reliable in the ways of journalism it tells us how the affairs of history become particulate and personal.

Now that we are some five months into the Obama administration it may be easy for some to allow themselves to forget the willful and dark effects of the prior presidency on what we might call the public’s morale. But for my part I will never forget those hopeless years because my solace in those days came in part from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn–mud from a muddy spring,

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,

A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field,

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield,

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,

Religion Christless, Godless–a book seal’d,

A Senate–Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d,

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Shelley’s poem, written in a time of national exhaustion and extreme political corruption spoke to my subjective feelings about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and the associated adoption of legalized spying on American citizens by a senate that neither saw nor felt nor cared what it was doing to our nation.

The poem continues to speak for my horror at the spectacle of the Christian fundamentalists who cry for the blood of abortion doctors or who call for the elimination of social programs that help the poor. One can still hear them daily. And one can hear the corporate media spinning right wing opposition to President Obama’s health care proposals and economic policies as if the United States isn’t really experiencing the greatest wave of unemployment and human suffering since the great depression; as if health care for our citizens should be a privilege and not a right; as if the bible should never be open to the New Testament but only the old—say a book like Leviticus.

And so Shelley’s poem is my poem in mind on many days. It reminds me of our recent national despair and of our present peril.

S.K.