Year: 2011

 

“The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth.”

1.

Inasmuch as we are readers of the 21^st century living through “digital” encounters with the public square, it’s useful to revisit the circus. Mencken would ask no less of us. His contrariness should be our own. His delight in ruddy, unprincipled American bedlam is the stuff of Ringling Brothers: in Mencken’s hands the essay is a parade that comes to town, a parade that makes you rub your eyes.

What does Mencken like? He likes: “the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven.” But Mencken’s “mediaeval” taste “for the bizarre and indelicate, [his] congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties” was fed by Ringling’s “Army of 50 Clowns”. What an army that was! We ought to see them as Mencken did. Here is the circus speaking for itself in prose from an early 20^th century brochure: “During the Performances, the host of Clowns, representing all countries and all of whom are exponents of every phase of humor, will endeavor to edify, astonish, tickle and make merry with the spectators, by cutting up a wonderful series of madcap frolics and by their absurd and very ridiculous pantomimic acts and feats make everybody exceedingly glad they came to see them.”

As Mencken saw it, America offered the sort of clowning that would never tire a spectator.

2.

“We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic – and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds.”

I first encountered Mencken while I was still in high school. I got to him by way of the Marx Brothers whose antics as stowaways did me some good (see particularly, Harpo and Chico in the 1931 film “Monkey Business”—the scene in which they destroy the captain’s mustache while feigning a concern for aesthetics.)

The Marx brothers were without sentiment down there in the bilge of capitalism. Flushed from their hiding places they ran amok on the big ship, each driven by hormones and appetites. Every authority figure was a fraud. And the funniest joke of all — they had to sneak into France. No one sneaks into France. Only the pure of heart would have trouble getting in. Only the pure of heart would pretend to be Maurice Chevalier. The jokes are all so elegant, and they were always stealing dinner rolls. “If you like that, read Mencken,” my father said.

3.

…each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality…

 

I saw quickly that it would be incorrect to view Mencken as a writer of farce. In general “farce” depends on social stratification or class consciousness. Mencken took democracy at its word and his essayistic version of the army of 50 clowns asserts darkly, fatalistically perhaps, that no one can escape the ship of small “d” democratic relativism. Unlike the Marx Brothers we won’t be getting off the S. S. America in France. “You see,” Mencken seems to say, “in America everyone is equal, ideas are equal, all voices are equivalent.” What else is there to do? One simply watches the hordes trample common sense. Mencken records Enlightenment idealism being crushed underfoot by social Darwinists like William Jennings Bryan, the pietistic prosecuting attorney who sought to make the teaching of evolution illegal in the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial”; Bryan, three times a presidential candidate and a former secretary of state, who refused to denounce the Ku Klux Klan because they were a Christian organization. Indeed, Christian fundamentalism is in Mencken’s eyes a measure of America’s imagination—or lack of it. Describing the citizens of Dayton, Tennessee, the very people who would presumably serve on the “monkey trial’s” jury, Mencken writes: “Its people are simply unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland….” (1)

The civic boosters of Dayton, fundamentalists all, are the organizers of a Romanesque circus. Mencken aptly describes the American penchant for tribal salvation:

“I have been attending the permanent town meeting that goes on in Robinson's drug store, trying to find out what the town optimists have saved from the wreck. All I can find is a sort of mystical confidence that God will somehow come to the rescue to reward His old and faithful partisans as they deserve–that good will flow eventually out of what now seems to be heavily evil. More specifically, it is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah.

But will these refugees bring any money with them? Will they buy lots and build houses? Will they light the fires of the cold and silent blast furnace down the railroad tracks? On these points, I regret to report, optimism has to call in theology to aid it. Prayer can accomplish a lot. It can cure diabetes, find lost pocketbooks and retain husbands from beating their wives. But is prayer made any more officious by giving a circus first? Coming to this thought, Dayton begins to sweat.”

Ah you see, says Mencken, America can’t help itself. It is a perennial and participatory circus and by turns, democracy asserts that we should be insecure any time we imagine ourselves as mere spectators. Mencken sees American madness as a sinister parade where bible thumpers and politicians elbow and corkscrew their ways, hoping by extravagance to get ahead of the professional clowns. America’s “big top” glorification of God should reduce any reasonable man or woman to helpless laughter:

“Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn – stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition – Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American.”

America is the land of mirth: anti-intellectual, occult, credulous, and best of all, afraid of its own Puritanical boredom. But don’t worry. Mencken assures us there’s a parade for that.

4.

…it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste…

Unlike the expatriate novelists H.L. Mencken stays home in the 1920’s because he knew that American culture had raised Mark Twain’s “gilded age” to a higher order. Propped up by post-war wealth and crackpot ideas like Prohibition and the Comstock Laws, the nation’s small “d” democratic discourse became an undiluted comedy. “Undiluted” is the proper word in the era of the Volstead Act for Mencken took his comedy “neat” like any customer in a speakeasy. If the “roaring twenties” meant anything they meant dishonest and vulgar public excesses of every kind:

“Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.”

 

Laws to keep men sober and their daughters chaste! America! The land of parades for hangings, elections, and the retinues of bible thumpers; land of slap stick soap boxers! O America where the con men rescue virtue over and over! Surely mirth is necessary to wisdom! Mencken on do-gooders: “In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”

5.

The American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations is not merely a pursuit of charlatans–it’s an “ars poetica” for Mencken himself. (“I like it because it amuses me to my taste.”) We might call this the rhetoric of the pursuit-Americana—we might call it the “bearding of Democracy”. Mencken looks his readers in the eye much as Groucho made “asides” to the camera. As parades march in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio, Mencken points out the “ecclesiastical mountebankery, tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites…”

If religion isn’t your métier says Mencken, look to politics:

“Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic – a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook – the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness…”

Poor Doctor Cook whose claims to have reached the North Pole were thoroughly discredited and who was indicted for mail fraud—poor Dr. Cook becomes in Mencken’s hands a circus symbol fighting it out with “Gobbo” the hunch back for a spot in democracy’s parade. “Who was Harding, anyhow…”? In the sham battles of perfected democracy the spectators have been freed from intelligible issues to watch the tin cannons—to watch over and over. “Who,” Mencken says, “needs strong liquor when America’s civic comedy is so undiluted?”

As Mary Elizabeth Rodgers writes in her introduction to The Impossible H.L. Mencken: An Introduction to His Best Newspaper Stories: “No other entertainment gave him greater pleasure than reporting from the conventions; nor did anyone appreciate his efforts more than Mencken himself. One reporter, peering through Mencken's window late at night after one rally, recalled watching him at work alone in his hotel room, pounding out copy on a typewriter propped on a desk. He would type a few sentences, read them, slap his thigh, toss his head back, and roar with laughter. Then he would type some more lines, guffaw, and so on until the end of the article.”

6.

While the “Army of 50 Clowns” offers Mencken many targets for laughter, perhaps none is so often fixed to the point of his bayonet as Anthony Comstock. The founder of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, Comstock pushed successfully for state and federal laws that made it illegal to send obscene literature through the U.S. postal system. Designed to prevent women from acquiring information about contraception and abortion the laws were often used by civic authorities to prevent the publication of literature. Mencken wrote: "In Comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave sign of its formal departure from the old, and moral endeavor suggested a general overhauling and tightening of the screws…."

The Clown Army includes the “Boston Brahmins” who, by means of the “Watch and Ward Society” routinely prosecuted writers and confiscated books and magazines. In April, 1926 Mencken was arrested for selling issues of his magazine “The American Mercury” on the Boston Commons. The Watch and Ward Society was particularly offended by a short story depicting a prostitute who serviced her Catholic clients in a Methodist Cemetery and her Methodist customers in a Catholic burial ground. Though the charges against Mencken were dismissed, the struggle for literary freedom in America lasted well into the 1960’s. Mencken reminded readers that America’s “clowns in constant practice” are perfectly happy to tear up books. America’s clown parade is often “stupid, pointless, and injurious” but as Mencken tells us, the parade is quintessentially our own:

Man’s capacity for abstract thought, which most other mammals seem to lack, has undoubtedly given him his present mastery of the land surface of the earth — a mastery disputed only by several hundred species of microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his feeling of superiority, and under that feeling there is undoubtedly a certain measure of reality, at least within narrow limits. But what is too often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most of man’s thinking is stupid, pointless, and injurious to him. Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriving at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare. Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving at a notion as violently in comtempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation, or that of mental telepathy. Try to think of a congretation of educated rats gravely listening to such disgusting intellectual rubbish as was in the public bulls of Dr. Woodrow Wilson. Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptcocci. (5)

[From “Ad Imaginem Dei Creavit Illum”, Prejudices: Third Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), pp. 125-128.]

7.

Inasmuch as this is a personal essay I should say that by the age of 20 I was well addicted to Mencken. I found ample opportunity to laugh alone in the college library. Outside that library where war protests were underway and where the rhetoric of moral improvement was continuous, I saw that the loudest student “do gooders” were invariably anti-intellectual—that they were bounders of a sort. I was grateful to Mencken for raising the possibility that they were a particularly American “sort”. There was an unintelligent craze going on. The children of Babbitt were having ideas. “The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane.” Who would put Abbe Hoffman in charge of anything?

Yes, I saw that reading Mencken wouldn’t make you popular. I also saw that Mencken was no nihilist. A contrarian, he was also a humanist who celebrated the essay for its own benedictions and not as an engine of manifest desires. Art is “free independence” as Hegel put it. Certainly in Mencken’s view, the American essayist might not change the nation’s muddy parades but he should always (with sufficient courage) tell us where the clown armies are marching.

“On Being an American”

from Prejudices, Third Series (1922)

by H.L. Mencken

All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly – for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously – and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly – for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic – and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness – things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature – are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking. I cite an example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery – tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind-pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn – stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition – Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American.

Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic – a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook – the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness…

… Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.

But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.

That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality – and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy – here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!

 

 

S.K.

 

Sometimes I get invited to meet people whose stories are astonishing. The invitations come because I’m a writer. Then again, some invitations arrive because I happen to be blind. It’s rare to be invited somewhere because I’m both. But not long ago I was invited to become an “honorary wretch” by a group of non-speaking writers. I flew to Burlington, VT to meet the stars of a new documentary film “Wretches and Jabberers” and we typed together with our multiple talking computers in a downtown office building.

Imagine "touch typing" mostly with one finger, hunching over every word, each letter a singular labor. Soon those letters create a bigger picture like the tiles of a mosaic. Suddenly I was in "a happening"–a cognitive, inter-active jam session with four men and one woman, each with an electronic keyboard. Stories emerged about loneliness and about being misunderstood. (People with Autism can tell you things about childhood that will curl your hair.) But there were also many joys for this was a kind of autistic rock and roll session. And it was a reunion: all the writers met while being filmed by Oscar winning director Gerardine Wurzburg whose afore mentioned documentary “Wretches and Jabberers” has just opened nationwide.

TRACY (from Vermont, looking at HENNA from Finland):

“I am so happy to see all of you here. I can’t believe you are actually here Henna, more than I can say, let’s look to type about this miracle.”

CHAMMI (from Sri Lanka, makes loud noises, leaps out of his seat, then sits back down and writes):

“I’m yelling my joy. I have to do that!”

ANTTI (from Finland, looking at the group):

“Well listen, guys, didn’t we agree on this battle during the filming—we are here for this great thing.”

HENNA:

“I’ve been waiting for this meeting. It has been too long. It is nice we are here.”

CHAMMI:

“I have readied my battle gear.”

TRACY:

“Well, Antti, we are all here to forge our bond for new perspectives on intelligence…”

We were seated around a long table. We were a picture of neurodiversity with our talking gizmos. It was Stockhausen meets Autism.

I was the blind guy in the band. Quickly our conversation turned to how the general public conceives of non-speaking people as being largely defective, even uneducable. I remembered my own childhood and the struggles I had as a blind kid in public schools in the early 1960’s. I learned by sheer stubbornness, by listening, and by refusing to go away. That story is “legion” among people with disabilities. We’ve all resisted and survived efforts to remove us from the public square.

The public square is particularly confused about non-speaking people. There is a prevailing view that those who cannot speak are profoundly deficient—even mentally retarded. As disability studies scholar Ralph Savarese has pointed out: “A good deal of what has passed as scientific fact over the last sixty years, whether it is high retardation rates or an innate aversion to the social, turns out to be anything but fact.”

In 2006 Meredyth Goldberg Edelson published a ground breaking study showing just how baseless have been the claims of mental retardation in published articles from 1937-2003. Of the 215 articles reviewed, three-quarters of the claims derived from nonempirical sources, and half of these never referenced empirical data. Moreover, the data that did exist had been gathered twenty-five to forty-five years ago and often from unreliable measures.

A year later a team of scholars at the University of Montreal addressed this problem by using a different vehicle. Michelle Dawson, Isabelle Soulieres, Morton Gernsbacher, and Laurent Mottron substituted the Ravens Progressive Matrices test of fluid intelligence for the standard Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), and the incidence of mental retardation in the autistic sample was significantly lower.

Taking this study further, Thomas Zeffiro and Isabelle Soulières compared how quickly autistic and non-autistic groups completed the Ravens test, and discovered that autistic people were nearly forty percent faster than non-autistic people and with the same error rate. Mottron and Dawson have also written a study of what they call "perceptual acuities" in autism. Describing his research goals where autistics are concerned Mottron has remarked, "I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different." Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different".

It is this “difference” that “Wretches and Jabberers” discovers. In effect the film is a travelogue of neurodiversity as the camera follows the journey of two non-speaking men from Vermont who seek out other typing autistic people. Tracy Thresher and Larry Bissonnette flew from Burlington to Japan and Sri Lanka. Eventually their quest took them to Helsinki. It's a tour that swings from the delightful to the painstaking. Autism is demanding. In Colombo Larry struggles to walk barefoot in a Buddhist temple–a task that causes him enormous discomfort so that he has to flee. Add the ordinary cognitive dissonance of travel and the public demands of disability advocacy on an international stage and you’ve got an epic movie.

It was in a Helsinki café that Antti first came up with the dichotomy of “wretches and jabberers”. He typed it into his talking Nokia cell phone and all the autistic people at the table laughed. The term has a vagrant militancy about it: jabberers are the general public, people who talk without much thoughtfulness or soul—they’re the people who think that nonspeaking people have nothing, know nothing and hence lack all potential for epistemology. “Wretches” are the ones who struggle with their words and who are the inheritors of a long dark history of language acquisition and acceptance.

During our session in Vermont I took notes with a new talking IPad. I saw computers and keyboards by Dell, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and customized devices from several cutting edge assistive technology vendors. “AT” is its often called is not only changing the world for people with disabilities, it’s also creating new international communities.

The wretches talked of disability rights and there was a shared and palpable excitement about educating the public concerning autism. Larry Bissonnette who is a painter typed: “Lots of plush chairs pushing our words into the lighted ceiling.”

I couldn’t really see the ceiling but I imagined the words against the skylight. I thought of those words getting loose the way words should. The wretches have a lot of poetry in their pockets and they know how to throw it around which is of course why their movie must be seen.

 

 

Human Rights Watch has been covering the deportation of people with mental disabilities who are otherwise qualified to remain in the United States. For a fuller story and podcast on the subject visit the link below. Whether they are on the border or not, people with communication disabilities are far more likely to be abused by police, customs agents, school teachers, rest home orderlies, and even their families. In this way the unlawful treatment of people with mental disabilities by border agents is a reflection of a larger problem in the United States. As Human Rights Watch points out:

“Across the world, people with disabilities struggle for access to education, employment, housing and transport, for the right to express their sexuality and have children, to participate in political and social life and in the development of their communities. Individuals with physical and mental disabilities often face increased violence and discrimination as well.”

Just this week U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann has called for a reduction in disability benefits for veterans. Bachmann’s proposal comes as people with disabilities in her home state of Minnesota are fighting a proposed cut in Medicaid benefits that would have disastrous implications for PWDs there.

The proposed Medicaid cuts come from a consortium of seven health plans and hospitals which stand to gain if government programs are cut.

We at POTB like what Steve Larson, co-chair of the Minnesota Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities had to say: "They have never wanted to provide coverage. But now it seems doing business with public programs is a revenue generator."

Discriminatory practices can be good business. Follow the money. We can put more people in prisons and of course we can deport them. We certainly don’t have to understand them as citizens with human rights.

Eh, Ms. Bachmann?

 

“People with mental disabilities face unlawful deportation in the US immigration system. Luis has schizophrenia and he didn’t have access to his medication while he was in detention. Hear his story.”

 

Visit: http://www.hrw.org/en/audio/2010/07/23/deportation-and-disability-us

 

 

S.K.

Sniff. Appaaaaarently Mr. Maher (who is the contrarian’s contrarian, a perfervid prognosticator of Damocletian disinformation) is amused as Tiberius at the wealth of the National Football League. Mr. Maher, is, as any sensible homo-sapien knows a Fortunato of Fanfare—a spurious slinger of salacious syllogisms, an Adamite, a neo-Bohemian nattering nudist. Cleaaaaaarly, Mr. Maaaher fails to understand the glory of free markets, the beneficence and bounty of market shares, the hypno-delirium of money that stays money because the magna-individuation of corporate interests retains its own Benthamite autonomy—which “is” by the way “why” the NFL keeps its taxidermed former commissioner Pete Rozelle in a glass case. Rumor has it that Mike Ditka will be joining Mr. Rozelle in short oooorder.

Next on Firing Line we will discuss Laaady Gaga’s follicular semiotics…

Cue up the Goldberg Variations….

See:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-football-sociali_b_815673.html

 

 

By Laura Chapin

Posted: January 7, 2011

LAKEWOOD, COLO.–Antonin Scalia is now officially the Archie Bunker of the Supreme Court. I can hear it now: "If broads had wanted Constitutional protection, they shoulda asked for it!"

In an interview with the online publication California Lawyer this past week, Scalia declared that the 14th Amendment doesn’t protect women (or gays) from discrimination…

 

See full article: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/laura-chapin/2011/01/07/antonin-scalia-the-archie-bunker-of-the-supreme-court_print.html

 

 

Yesterday I went to Tampa, FL to see the Universoul Circus in the company of writer Nancy Barber. Nancy knows a good deal about the circus and she’s a devoted fan of Universoul, which you may guess from its name is an all Black circus. There we were, under the Big Top, sitting in the disability seats just twenty feet from the edge of the ring. (I actually got hit with elephant snot, yes, a first in this go around at life….) 

 

Universoul is the Hi-Hop Big Top and if you ever get a chance to see it you must instantly phone in sick at the Widget Company and grab your friends and lots of kids and go.

 

I did get up and leave when they had the tiger act. We were sitting only a few feet away and my guide dog Nira stuck her head up and began sniffing wildly. Then a near tiger farted, a thing that caused Nira to to feel deeply commissioned as we say in academia. Sensing that we could become a disagreeable headline man and dog went outside the tent for a little while.

 

I must now head to my works and days and cannot hold forth about the wonders of this altogether marvelous circus but I will say that the Universoul Circus brings humane and human values back to the Big Top and it’s a jiggy show!

 

S.K. 

 

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

Even though my father was Italian, I grew up learning French. I went to a French language nursery school as a child, took French in high school and college, lived and taught in France for a year before graduate school. I’m not exactly sure how this happened, how I grew up half Italian with no knowledge of the language aside from random phrases my father shouted: avanti as we pulled out of the garage in the morning, basta to end arguments.

I know that he often felt discriminated against as a young man because he was Italian, and even when I knew him, was hesitant to admit his background. Although he belonged to Cincinnati’s Italian Club, if a stranger asked him about his name or heritage, he always said, I am American. No wavering.

So maybe that was part of it, maybe I developed some negative associations with being and speaking Italian from my father’s coping strategies post World War II. Whatever the case, I never had an interest in Italy. Although I’ve traveled through Europe, to West Africa, to South Korea, I never even entertained the idea of spending time in Italy.

And then my father died. And like that, a part of myself went missing, a part that I will never get back. A broken link to the past, maybe, to this person who represented my birth and childhood, my hair, my blood, my hands. I’ve now spent three years scolding myself for not asking my father more questions about his childhood, why his father moved to the States, for not insisting he teach me Italian.

And then, several months ago, I received an email from a second cousin in Italy. He had found my website and upon showing it to his mother, my father’s contemporary, she said, I immediately recognized your face as part of our family. Suddenly, a link was reestablished. We started emailing back and forth, and then another cousin joined in as well. Everyone’s English is perfect, of course, even though their emails always include an apology for any mistakes. And here I am, still not speaking Italian, still not able to communicate in my family’s language.

So now, I’m planning a trip to Italy in May, in part to visit my family. Every day, I learn a little more Italian—from index cards I use to quiz myself, BBC interactive classes, downloaded tapes. I know I won’t be fluent by May, but hopefully I can say a few things to my family, order in restaurants, maneuver the country a little bit. And I’ve started reading—historical information, travel books, memoirs. I really don’t know anything about the country, much to my shame and embarrassment. I’m starting at the very bottom, the most basic. But with each letter of the alphabet, each practiced rolled r, I feel like I’m getting a little closer to my father, our shared history, my own past.

 

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino lives in Marquette, Michigan. She is a frequenter contributor to POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

 

 

See full press release at link below.

OMEGA and Daniel Craig team up to support eye care mission

Actor News – 29-01-11
Omega has announced that it will work in cooperation with actor and brand ambassador Daniel Craig to support ORBIS International and its Flying Eye Hospital in the fight against preventable blindness. A special watch – the Hour Vision Blue – has been created to celebrate the partnership, and OMEGA has guaranteed that at least one million U.S. dollars from its sale will be donated to ORBIS, an organization which delivers eye care to some of the world’s most remote and developing regions.

 

**

 

Preventable blindness is a funny term. It’s almost metaphysical. But helping people at risk of losing their sight retain their vision is an incredibly laudable enteprise and that Omega  and James Bond are supporting ORBIS International is unambiguously good news.

 

S.K.

 

 

The painting is well known. Jules Bastien-Lepage painted this study of a blind boy, ill clothed, sleeping in an alley sometime around 1868. The boy is pictured holding a crude cane and he’s accompanied by a sheep dog who is also asleep. The dog is not a guide dog but you can bet that if someone tried to steal the boy’s meager earnings he would bark. Night is still with the boy and he’s hard asleep. Only the painter knows that morning has come. In this way the painting is voyeuristic. The boy’s mouth is half open as he sleeps.

 

Soon the sun will emerge from behind the houses. And soon the boy will wake up and resume his repetitive cries. Meanwhile Bastien-Lepage means for us to stare.

But I am interested in the boy’s dreams.

In sleep he is fetching water. There is a blue light radiating from the village well. He knows the word for blue and in sleep he understands what it is. Blue is the precursor to seeing.

In his dream he feels he is very much alive. The leaves whisper from their dark places in the medieval city.

 

S.K.

 

 

 

In 2003 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced its “international classification of functioning, disability and health” and to mark the occasion they invited photographers from around the world to enter a contest called “images of health and disability”. As WHO put it:

“The aim was to raise questions about what health really is, and awareness of how everybody in the course of their life experiences some kind and degree of health decrement or disability.”

The photo above by Janiel Aneculaesel was one of the winners under the category of aging.

As WHO explained the ICFDH the classification was intended to contextualize and organize physical life and its gradients into a forum for understanding human rights:

“The ICF puts the notions of ‘health’ and ‘disability’ in a new light. It acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some degree of disability. Disability is not something that only happens to a minority of humanity. The ICF thus ‘mainstreams’ the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience. By shifting the focus from cause to impact it places all health conditions on an equal footing allowing them to be compared using a common metric – the ruler of health and disability. Furthermore ICF takes into account the social aspects of disability and does not see disability only as a ‘medical’ or ‘biological’ dysfunction. By including Contextual Factors, in which environmental factors are listed ICF allows to records the impact of the environment on the person’s functioning.”

The “ruler of health and disability” is further described as a “classification intended for a wide range of uses in different sectors. It is a classification of health and health-related domains — domains that help us to describe changes in body function and structure, what a person with a health condition can do in a standard environment (their level of capacity), as well as what they actually do in their usual environment (their level of performance). These domains are classified from body, individual and societal perspectives by means of two lists: a list of body functions and structure, and a list of domains of activity and participation. In ICF, the term functioning refers to all body functions, activities and participation, while disability is similarly an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions. ICF also lists environmental factors that interact with all these components.”

One is of course reminded of Arthur Okun’s “misery index” for the pairing of health factors with environmental conditions has a kind of indexed elegance. Okun of course calculated how much inflation the body politic would tolerate against rates of unemployment. He found that the body politic will tolerate modest rates of inflation if jobs follow.

Changes in body function and structure vs. standard environment includes something more complex than Okun’s economic calculation for the ghost in the machine is the social construction of normalcy or what the disability studies scholar Robert McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness”. Able-bodiedness is an agent of industrialized societies and it remains central to the lived experiences of people with disabilities because the value of a healthy body is socially indexed in all societies.

I like the term “compulso-misery” when thinking of the hegemonic shaping of embodied value. If you’ve spent as much time as I have visiting agencies that purport to provide benefits or services to people with disabilities you’ll sense that compulso-misery is certainly not histrionic. Indeed, how much misery you can be induced to endure is a matter of culture, social influence or embodied value, financial conditions, the structural hierarchies of medicine, the military, corporate values, international relations, and narratives of heroism. These dynamics fall under “environmental factors” under the ruler of health and disability but they cannot be confronted without the kind of cultural analyses available in disability studies. In order to understand ageism as a co-efficient of disability we need to understand the cultural shift from the valuation of the old to their extreme devaluation. This symbolic and reductive transformation was not (is not) inevitable in human societies but the ways and means of compulsory able-bodiedness are inherently driven by the signatures of representational physical decline. “This could happen to you!” “Don’t let it happen, study hard!”

In America if you are over 65 and you lose your eyesight there are no programs available to assist you in purchasing assistive technology. You might do well to have a talking computer or a closed circuit TV magnifier but under the system of compulso-misery you are no longer of working age and therefore government programs that help younger people to become “rehabilitated” do not apply to you. Age has limited value. Age and disability have even less value. As I mentioned above these are not inevitable ideas. They are driven by economic and actuarial indexes and are linked to an industrial model of activity and physical value. Robert McRuer argues cogently that neo-liberalism is in this way no better than neo-conservatism and you will get no disagreement from me.

The assignation of value is the critical question for understanding disability. Pejorative value is destructive and unethical. Nazi medicine comes easily to mind. But even the conditions of nursing homes or the current rush to eliminate pensions are a part of the story. How a society envisions bodily value can only be understood by means of understanding human rights as they are relative to national practices that promote well being. Understood from within the world of medicine we could say that the cure vs. no cure debate surrounding individual disability identity can be better appreciated when physicians and health practitioners imagine “the whole patient” –which is to say that no one needs to be cured in order to have his or her full human value. This is perhaps a simple statement, but go looking for examples of this in many medical schools or hospitals and you will come up largely empty. (Largely empty is almost redundant but it’s the right figure.)

At the University of Iowa’s Institute for Vision Research where I hold a dual faculty appointment studying issues of disability, culture, and medicine, we like to think of people with vision loss as being entirely free of cultural devaluation—this is according to the best practices in patient care and to the related understanding that people who are blind or who have low vision are not second rate citizens no matter what society might tell them. Even so we must contend with issues of ageism in the larger social matrix; with disability as a de-legitimized symbolic “sign” vs. compulsory able-bodiedness. When you tell an older person that they can no longer drive they are instantly reduced and devalued in a culture that regards driving as a
matter both of freedom and o
f daily necessity. In the United States the automobile is more important than a passport as a marker of citizenship. That the elderly are terrified, that they weep in the face of losing their driving privileges is as much a social issue as it is a medical one. A society with good public transportation reduces the devaluation of bodily change. Compulso-misery, indeed.

Issues of value and embodiment are central to where we must work and live.

 

S.K.