Some days I wake to a memory of first books, by which I mean the first books I read in earnest and under the gun of a university education. By the time I was a sophomore there were two books that were heavily prescribed: Plato’s “Republic” and Eric Auerbach’s “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature”. The latter was the anodyne to the former, offering what Monty Python might have called “Plato’s good bits” but for all of Auerbach’s deterministic foregrounding of Platonic representation of “the real” –all of it as elegant as can be, I sensed the systemic cruelty in Plato and by turns I saw the academic wave of the hand, the moue of easy dismissal when students brought it up. These lines by Bertrand Russell were then, and now, important reminders of the cultural fallout as it were:
“That Plato’s Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history. Let us consider a few points in this totalitarian tract. The main purpose of education, to which everything else is subordinated, is to produce courage in battle. To this end, there is to be a rigid censorship of the stories told by mothers and nurses to young children; there is to be no reading of Homer, because that degraded versifier makes heroes lament and gods laugh; the drama is to be forbidden, because it contains villains and women; music is to be only of certain kinds, which, in modern terms, would be “Rule Britannia” and “The British Grenadiers.” The government is to be in the hands of a small oligarchy, who are to practice trickery and lying–trickery in manipulating the drawing of lots for eugenic purposes, and elaborate lying to persuade the population that there are biological differences between the upper and lower classes. Finally, there is to be a large-scale infanticide when children are born otherwise than as a result of governmental swindling in the drawing of lots.”
So I find myself reading and reminiscing just as Congress wants to legalize propaganda and the Obama administration is seeking to curtail press freedoms and the rhetoric of the Ryan budget is aimed at eliminating the poor fro health services and social security disability assistance.
Planet of the Blind 
in the injury vs. dsibaility post, the only way abled people can imagine dsibaility, is by termporarily experiencing a physical experience they consider essential to that dsibaility. In blindness (and maybe also deafness), this is usually achieved through faking, ie. someone closes their eyes and assumes that’s what blindness is like. They don’t learn alternative techniques that utilize their other senses. They just lack eyesight (for a very short while), and imagine they know what it’s like to be blind. They don’t.
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Perhaps it’s time for a new Jonathan Swift to emerge?
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