Month: July 2010

On the wall at the Ice Cream Cafe.  Orleans.  After mini-golf.  Saturday night.  July 24, 2010.

via lancemannion.typepad.com

Make mine a double Americano…

 

There are such mornings, gleaming with sun in the spider webs, clouds like dazed sheep, the neighbor’s houses like Fairy Tale castles, by Jove what felicities of miasma arise before us. We step into the morn, fresh as clean linoleum and admire the works of majesty, ineffable quotidian miracles. And such admiration causes us to sing. Thank you Tom Lehrer, Thank you. We have an anthem for our day and now we can go onward and outward in fulsome praise of all the wee things that fly or crawl.

 

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Though most know Tom Lehrer for his darkly lovely songs, many do not know that he invented the Jello shot. There are some gaps in cultural literacy that we hope to fill here at POTB.

 

S.K.    

Drove over to Yarmouth Port to visit the one-time home of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey and if I was clever enough the following notes would be presented alphabetically and in rhymed couplets as an homage to one of Gorey’s most famous books, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, kind of like this:

via lancemannion.typepad.com

We love this post by Lance Mannion about the home of Edward Gorey. We love knowing that the first book Gorey ever read was "Dracula" and that he worked while kneeling on the floor.

 

The photo above demonstrates that Iowa Senator Tom Harkin knows when to wear shirt sleeves and that I do not.

Senator Harkin’s abiding interest in helping people with disabilities is indeed legendary and it was an honor to have the opportunity to shake his hand. Indeed, it was an honor to hear him deliver remarks on the historical significance of the ADA, and of the ADA Restoration Act of 2008. Perhaps the most important thing the Senator shared with his Iowa City listeners was the absolute importance of continuing the fight for equitable health care and social services.

Amen to that.

 

S.K.   

The number of soldiers forced to leave the Army solely because of a mental disorder has increased by 64 percent from 2005 to 2009 and accounts for one in nine medical discharges, according to Army statistics.

See full article: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/24/one-soldier-in-9-exits-army-for-mental-disorder/

You don’t need to be a student of disability studies to know that people returning from war zones with serious psychiatric disabilities face the general public’s incomprehension of of invisible disabilities. In turn, soldiers with traumatic brain injuries or post traumatic stress disorders or severe depression can be denied the help they need just at the very moment they are transitioning into civilian society with all its attendant stress. Moving, find a job, reuniting with family are all “major stressors” –now factor in having a disability that people don’t understand.

One of the best short stories on this subject is Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”. Krebs comes home from WW I and all the folks in his little Oklahoma town wonder why he isn’t a social guy anymore–why he can’t get out of bed–why he takes no interest in girls. Where has Krebs been? He’s been in Beleau Woods watching human faces explode. The baseball scores don’t seem to mean as much anymore.

The neo-cons prattle about how service men and women are faking psychiatric injuries. I have a fine solution for them: they should enlist.

 

S.K. 

Later today I will be speaking in downtown Iowa City at an ADA 20th Anniversary Celebration which will feature Senator Tom Harkin (who co-sponsored the ADA in the Senate) as well as Iowa Governor Chet Culver. Several others will also be speaking including my friend Georgina Dodge, the University of Iowa’s new Vice President for Diversity.

We all know that the ADA has made a great difference in the lives of people with disabilities. Whether the subject is the accessibility of public facilities, the availability of reasonable accommodations in school or the work place, or the remedies offered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice, the past 20 years offer ample evidence that the lives of PWDs have been positively affected by the adoption of civil rights legislation. I intend to celebrate these two decades today even as I continue to remain aware that disability is still a cultural problem that threatens to grow much worse in these dark economic times. But today I will celebrate. I will tip my cap (a figurative cap) to the allies of people with disabilities–important friends who have never once forgotten the harsh social realities that those of us with physical or mental impairments inevitably face every day.

Thank you Senator Harkin. Now we must fight to ensure that critical public health programs and social services remain intact in the coming years.

 

S.K.

The article below is from the NY Times, and excerpted by Inclusion Daily Express.

 

Cuts To Community Supports Put Seniors And People With Disabilities At Risk Of Institutionalization
(New York Times)
July 21, 2010
HILLSBORO, OREGON– [Excerpt] As states face severe budget shortfalls, many have cut home-care services for the elderly or the disabled, programs that have been shown to save states money in the long run because they keep people out of nursing homes.

Since the start of the recession, at least 25 states and the District of Columbia have curtailed programs that include meal deliveries, housekeeping aid and assistance for family caregivers, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization. That threatens to reverse a long-term trend of enabling people to stay in their homes longer.

For Afton England, who lives in a trailer home here, the news came in a letter last week: Oregon, facing a $577 million deficit, was cutting home aides to more than 4,500 low-income residents, including her. Ms. England, 65, has diabetes, spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease, arthritis and other health problems that prevent her from walking or standing for more than a few minutes at a time.

Through a state program, she has received 45 hours of assistance a month to help her bathe, prepare meals, clean her house and shop. The program had helped make Oregon a model for helping older and disabled people remain in their homes.

But state legislators say home care is a service the state can no longer afford. Cuts affecting an additional 10,500 people are scheduled for Oct. 1.

Entire article:
Cuts in Home Care Put Elderly and Disabled at Risk
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/us/21aging.html
Related:
Cuts to home care services devastating for people (Associated Press)
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0721c.htm
In-home caregivers, clients get more time (Statesman-Journal)
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0721b.htm
Oregon legislative leaders announce plan to restore some cuts to senior, disability programs (Oregonian)
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0721a.htm

I am hardly the first to opine on the Baby Reaganites who have matriculated into the media and who now smirk and shrug their ways before the cameras. I was reminded of the matter this morning while drinking coffee and watching Baby Reaganites Par Excellence on the morning news. The B.R. squad is working hard to convey the view that the Democrats are the makers of our nation’s disastrous deficits and that by turns, any effort to help the poor and the dying middle classes represents a flagrant and irresponsible extension of our national debt.

Yesterday while riding a bus in Iowa City I overheard a graduate student explain to a fellow rider that the Obama administration will, by the time it finishes its first term have created the largest increase in our national debt in history. I couldn’t stand it. I turned around and told him that this was absolutely untrue and added that the greatest increase in our nation’s national debt has occurred under Ronald Reagan’s watch, with W. Bush in second place.

OF course facts are stupid things. What’s the point? The point of course is that real working class people are starving right now. And our social services network has collapsed. People with serious disabilities are facing the very real prospect of being thrown into the streets. The heartlessness of the GOP is unparalleled in modern history. But you wouldn’t know this by watching the Baby Reaganites on TV. Their rotor-beanie are powered by Quinnnipiac Polls and whoever paid for their lunches.

We at POTB are fans of Will Bunch’s book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future 

Here’s a little video segment of Mr. Bunch:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m21XM8ZOMICNOS

 

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I was a graduate student in Iowa during Reagan’s first term. I remember his heartlessness toward the family farmers who were going “under” during the early 80’s recession. Reagan observed that inefficiency had to be weeded out, etc. etc. The Gipper was nothing more than a corporate shill for General Electric. Even the Tin Man had a kinder heart than Reagan. He wasn’t my grandfather I can tell you that.

 

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Yet the veneration of the old phoney grows in our media. As Huck Finn would say, its enough to give me the fantods.

 

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Nearly 14% of children in the state of Iowa are living below the poverty level.  How’s that legacy Mr. Reagan? 

 

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It is estimated that 51% of Americans will live in poverty at some point before the age of 65.

 

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Take a look at Derrick Braziel’s piece on Rand Paul’s insensitivity to the poor entitled: Rand Paul to the Poor: Cheer Up, It’s Not So Bad!

 

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From Nader.org:

 

Here is the briefest of lists to illustrate — under Reagan there was a record near-tripling of the national debt to $2.7 trillion, record annual budget deficits, record trade deficits, record transforming of America into a debtor nation, record giveaway of public land resources, record decline in low income public housing starts, record homelessness, record Pentagon waste, fraud and abuse, record corporate crimes, record corporate mergers and acquisitions, record skyrocketing corporate executive salaries along with stagnant or declining real wages for workers, record salary hikes for top government officials, record-long freezing of the federal minimum wage, record export of jobs overseas, record selling of America cheaply to foreign investors.
Continuing … record complexity in federal tax and pension laws and in the forms people have to fill out, record cuts in food stamps, medicaid and the ‘social safety net, record ten year poverty rates, record deregulation of banks, record government bailouts for crooked or speculative banks, record number of bank failures, fifty year record number of farm foreclosures and bankruptcies, record amounts of hard drugs imported, record brazenness in pushing through Congress the abolition of the $ 1 20 per month minimum social security for 3 million Americans (later repealed under a wave of elderly protest), record denials of Social Security disability payments and record number of federal judges condemning these denials.
Continuing … record low in issuing of OSHA lob safety standards, record low in issuing NHTSA auto safety and fuel efficiency standards, record debacle in mismanaging the nation’s nuclear weapons’ plants and radioactive contamination, record denigration of federal solar and energy conservation programs since they got underway in early Seventies, record share of the taxpayer’s dollar going lust to pay interest on the national debt, record reliance of a debt-burdened government on foreign financiers, record resignations of shady, high government appointees (the sleaze phenomenon), record number of government civilian employees, record reduction planned for continual meat and poultry inspections, record low in significant antitrust law enforcement, record number of attempts by Reagan to destroy the legal services for the poor program, record tax bonanzas for six years given to major corporations.
Continuing record government secrecy, record insensitivity to civil liberties and enforcement of the civil rights laws, record prices for government publications and information thereby undermining public’s right to know, record hypocrisy between what a President says regarding the rights of government whistleblowers and ethics in government, compared to his vetoes and ‘look the other way’ behavior.
Continuing… record postwar high in the number of children living in poverty, record declining rate of student loan availability, record funding of chemical and biological warfare programs (since Nixon stopped them 28 years ago) and… oh, yes, a record number of speeches and statements against federal deficit spending.
Reagan has told us how he brought down inflation. But the record shows that the world oil glut, The Federal Reserve’s high interest rate policy and the worst postwar recession (1981- early 1983) produced that result, not Reagan.
Reagan says that his administration was responsible for creating over 1 7 million jobs. That is a strange thing for a supposed free enterpriser like Reagan to claim. Maybe he is referring to his massive
prime-the-pump red-ink spending. In any event, there was a record number of lower-paying jobs created in industry and commerce thereby requiring more members of the family to look for paying work.

 

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More members of the family who can live in poverty…

 

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Whatever happened to the funny version of Stephen Kuusisto? There are conflicting reports about his sense of humor. Some say they’ve seen it while camping in Maine. Others think they saw it on the subway in Manhattan. Wherever his humor has gone, we might reflect on his favorite graffito of all time. It was from the Nixon years. It was written on the wall of a bathroom stall. It said: “If you voted for Nixon in ’68 you cant’ shit here. Your asshole’s in Washington.”

 

S.K.

A man in Jamaica once climbed a tree and brought me a fresh coconut. Later in a casual conversation I told him the Devil does not exist and he was upset by the thought. He needed that Devil. I was just an academic with a coconut.

Moral: Don’t dismiss other people’s Devils.

Secondary Moral: Get away from such people as quickly as you can.

 

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Like the cab driver in New York City who thought I was the victim of voodoo because of my blindness. I didn’t pay him. I explained that he probably didn’t want my money since I’m a victim of voodoo.

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I know a blind fellow who once bit a cab driver in New York. The driver was refusing to take him because of his guide dog. The driver said the dog might bite. “I bite,” said my friend. “The dog is perfectly benign.”

 

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I played chess with a Frenchman once. This was in Helsinki. He was smug. He thought he was infinitely better than I was. I beat him and accordingly he knocked the chess board on the floor.  Then I really pissed him off. I said: “How cliche!”

 

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The beginning of religion isn’t about the ineffable search for meaning. It’s about hating the neighbors. As the religion evolves it’s about getting dressed up to hate your neighbors.

 

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Yeats wrote: “Neither Christ, nor Buddha, nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process.”

 

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Theory

 

The world is blind, dear Heidegger,

The world “worlds” with outstretched hands.

 

Let’s say a man is nothing but sack cloth and ash,

Say the sun is a knife grinder, the moon a nurse maid…

The world is blind. We walk like ants

On this turning mineral blank…

 

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In the early dusk

In the unforeseen and shy happiness

Of walking and seeing houses

I am circuited

By algebra and myth,

A man of the Enlightenment,

A figure slightly bent

Who loves a dusty bottle

And Johnson’s dictionary

And the odd words of his children.

Don’t confuse me with the formalists,

I once returned

A tear gas canister

To the arms of an unsuspecting policeman.

It was in Washington, DC,

When Nixon was sleepless

Beside the “hi-fi”…

 

S.K.

Alright, my limericks aren’t so hot. I’m probably too Episcopalian for the limerick. But I can make ’em cry to “Molly Darling” and sing along to “Row the Boat Ashore”.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry