Body, Body, Who's Got the Body? Or Another Kind of Modest Proposal

I suppose my ancestral speaker is old Dean Swift who sold those Irish babies to hungry Londoners for in this instance I feel the intemperate and hob-goblined urge to sell flesh.

This is not what you would suppose. There’s nothing lurid about the thing. I want to sell flesh as an Apollonian artifact, something of the clinic about it, the smell of the hospital in everyone’s nostrils. I want to sell the cripples back to the doctors; the doctors back to their aged parents; the hospital administrators back to the insurance companies; the insurance executives to their respective brand of ethicist. But above all I want to sell flesh.

Now you will say (for indeed you must always be saying–that’s the rule and advantage of literary consciousness, you get to talk back to the squiggles) “Mr. Kuusisto, what precisely are you driving at?” And I will reply that people with disabilities are in deep trouble these days. The trouble may vary from land to land but they’re in trouble all over the place.

Its time to start selling some flesh.

There’s nothing of Shylock about this. There’s not a whiff of advantage to the seller.

Consider the doctors in Seattle who performed the famous “Ashley Treatment” and who essentially rendered a profoundly disabled child “forever tiny” so that her parents would not have to care for a developmentally disabled “large person”.

Much has been written about “The Ashley Treatment” (including posts here at POTB) but I’ll say again for the umpteenth time that the procedure that was performed on a real girl, a procedure that involved removing her uterus and breast buds and the application of hormones is essentially a medical experiment rather than a proven practice and accordingly it violates the first rule of medicine which is, of course, “to do no harm”.

The Seattle physicians believed (and still believe) that the girl in question was so developmentally damaged that this procedure would never be a factor in her mental life. The very mode of thinking gives me the chills. The reduction of a living human being to what I will here call the “anti-cure” represents the worst features of what disability studies scholars have called “the medical model of disability”. The disabled are, in this instance, thought of as defective normal people who need a medical cure in order to lead whole and productive lives in a wondrous world of normal people. In turn, the patient, any patient, but especially a patient with a disability is conceived of as a defective healthy person. Ashley’s “anti-cure” is the convoluted pathos of this model–incurable means something even more sinister for it creates a reified abstraction of the disabled human–we shall freeze the incurable girl into something forever tiny–hence she shall have no relevance to the medical model’s stasis and anti-stasis. The disabled child is now an artifact.  

The Seattle physicians continue to argue their position. They made a small, defective person forever small as a means of assistance to the girl’s parents.

I want to sell the physicians. Who will buy them? You sir! Yes! You with the French novel! These men and women can be yours! Yes! You can lecture them on commodity fetishism! Step right up!

**

The current condition of people with disabilities in respect to American health care is dismal. The lobbying against health care reform is in part a matter of rear guard defense by the insurance industry which renders disability “a pre-existing condition” or induces “total disability” as a cap when paying out for patient care. In either case people with disabilities are forced to rely in disproportionate numbers on Medicare and Medicaid. Or worse: the V.A.

I want to sell the insurance lobbyists and the insurance executives. Who will buy them? Oh yeah. They’ve already been bought.

Of course I’m being wilfully simplistic. No one would buy an insurance lobbyist or executive for eating. But experimentation remains a possibility. I think it would be instructive for instance to shrink some of them. Once they are around three and a half feet tall we can turn them loose on a desert island and have a reality TV show called “Hey! You’ve Got Rickets!” Wouldn’t that be fun?

Just some random thoughts tonight while America rejects health care reform and signals its desire to go down the drain.

Without effective government sponsored health care reform the rest of us will be on that reality show. Won’t that be fun?

S.K.     

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto