Month: October 2012

5:20 in the morning; heading out the door to catch a train to NY City. I think I have everything. Where’s the octopus? Where’s the anvil? Where’s my yellow sunsuit from childhood? Where are my uncle’s false teeth? Oh. Gotta go!

 

Dear Sir:

 

There appears to be some confusion in the world of publicans about working dogs. Almost weekly I see a story about some pwd (person with a disability) who has been banned from a restaurant because he or she has a service dog. One would think that 20 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act these incidents would be consigned to history, but based on the prevalence of ugly news stories this isn’t the case. 

 

Guides dogs were the first service animals, and for more than forty years they were the only ones. They offered a success story, one with real answers for their blind partners. Now, the training of dogs to assist people with other kinds of disabilities is common. Service dogs and animals are, in the strictest sense, animals trained specifically to help those with disabilities manage one or more functions of life that are otherwise impossible.     

 

In fact, that’s what disability is–a function disjunction, no more, no less. Forget the myths about disablement, the old fashioned idea that physical or mental impairments are symbolic, representing deeper deficiencies–disability is nothing more than an obstacle or series of obstacles. The Americans with Disabilities Act makes it clear that the definition is centered on the elements of life function: “The term “disability” means, with respect to an individual (A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.”

 

Under the ADA major life activities include, “but are not limited to, caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.”

 

Major bodily functions also means: “functions of the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder, neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, and reproductive functions.”

 

The range of disability is broad, not because bureaucrats have expansive imaginations but because the ways of having a disability are almost uncountable. In turn, when thinking of service animals, I’m reminded of a slogan from our current digital age: “there’s a dog for that”. (Of course there are other kinds of service animals–monkeys, and miniature horses most notably.) 

 

Just as the public has trouble absorbing the scope and variety of disability, it also has difficulty understanding what a service animal is. 

 

Nowadays dogs are trained to help wheelchair users who are both paraplegic and quadriplegic–picking up objects, opening cupboards, handing money to cashiers, helping to balance their owners, just to name a few of their capacities. Dogs can be trained to detect the onset of seizures or help hearing impaired people detect audible signals. Some dogs help their diabetic owners by detecting changes in their blood sugar. And all of these skills reflect the amazing capacities of dogs and the pioneering vision of the guide dog movement.

 

But what exactly is a service animal? The most important thing for the public to understand is that it is not a pet. According to a pamphlet from the New York State Attorney General’s Office: “the ADA defines a service animal as any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to provide assistance to an individual with a disability. If they meet this definition, animals are considered service animals under the ADA regardless of whether they have been licensed or certified by a state or local government.” 

 

A service animal doesn’t have to have a license. Nor does its owner have to carry official papers certifying the animal’s authenticity. The simplest way to tell if an animal is a working animal is by its professionalism.

When I was thirty eight I decided it was high time I should marry a dog. I didn’t have a dog in mind, I was merely in the planning stage like an old time farmer imagining a mail order bride.

I was lonely and poor, having lost my job as an adjunct professor at a small college. I felt like the bald customer in a barber shop: people stopped talking when they saw me. Colleagues who I’d once believed to be friendly shied away. I’d lost my job in the spring and then it was autumn and even with legally blind and mediocre eyes I saw the trees flare into gold and I walked about with a cd player and listened to Viennese love songs, songs like cream puffs, and I decided it was time to get married. I would marry a dog. I would marry a dog though all I owned was a suitcase tied with a rope.

–from What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir

By Stephen Kuusisto

Forthcoming from Simon and Schuster

The story below concerns a veteran who was hassled by a restaurant owner because of her service dog. The story if a familiar one: a publican with no awareness about the ADA and who also has poor public relations skills. 

 

http://www.wmctv.com/story/19886812/questioning-service-dog-causes-problems-for-local-restaurant

Investigators Learn More About Nazi Atrocities At Austrian Hospital
(Associated Press)
October 22, 2012

HALL, AUSTRIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Forensic crews scraping away dirt from the remains of the Nazi-era psychiatric patients were puzzled: The skeletal fingers were entwined in rosary beads. Why, the experts wondered, would the Nazis — who considered these people less than human — respect them enough to let them take their religious symbols to their graves?

It turns out they didn’t.

A year after the first of 221 sets of remains were exhumed at a former Austrian hospital cemetery, investigators now believe the beads were likely nothing more than a cynical smokescreen, placed to mislead relatives attending the burials into thinking that the last stage of their loved ones’ lives was as dignified as their funerals.

But skeletons don’t lie. Forensic work shows that more than half of the victims had broken ribs and other bone fractures from blows likely dealt by hospital personnel. Many died from illnesses such as pneumonia, apparently caused by a combination of physical injuries, a lack of food and being immobilized for weeks at a time.

Neither do medical records, which show that medical personnel cursed their patients as “imbeciles,” “idiots” and “useless eaters.”

Indeed, there is now little doubt that for many of the dead — mentally and physically disabled people considered by the Nazis to be human garbage — their final months were hell on Earth.

Entire article:
Austria probes gruesome fate of Nazi-era disabled
http://tinyurl.com/ide1022123a
Related:
Accused Nazi Euthanasia Doctor Dies — January 4, 2006 (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/archives/06/01/04/010406aueuthkids.htm
Hitler’s Unwanted Children by Sally M. Rogow
http://tinyurl.com/ide1022123c

I don’t know about you. You may not care a whit about poems. That’s okay. No matter what the poets say, it’s possible to live well without poetry. In my personal view, to the extent that such a thing is possible, I think the arts help us live good lives–a Platonic idea to be sure and one that I’ve never felt the need to give up. Poetry opens pathways to potentially new ways of knowing. 

Unless it doesn’t. 

A poet who I admire writes:

“You’ll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.”

(The poet in this case is Charles Simic.)

Alas for the able bodied poets, who cannot see disability outside of its outworn Victorian metaphors, a blind person can watch a silent movie. Blind people have friends who describe what’s going on. Blind people know all about Charlie Chaplin.

Ableist poetry is still all around us. 

The human story is a grey complexity of fishing line and thumb tacks. But blindness is never abjection in the way Simic has used it. Don’t you believe it. 

Here. I’m catching a fish from my neighbor’s soul.

 

 

 

 

 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

A momentous event: I have purchased my first Playboy magazine, my first pornography of any kind. I put it on my credit card at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport. Don Peteroy, a dear friend of my dear friend Tara, won Playboy’s annual college fiction contest, and his winning short story was published in October’s magazine. I had been working up the courage all month to actually purchase the damn thing—I’m a firm believer that writers need to support one another, and Don is an amazing writer, and well, it just felt like something I should do.

 

But not in small-town Marquette. I couldn’t overcome the thought of running into someone I knew while buying it—or worse, having to hand my money to one of Zac’s students, many of whom seem to work as cashiers. I’m a feminist for god’s sake—how was I going to explain that?

 

So I was in Cincinnati last Sunday having lunch with Tara, who whipped out her copy in the middle of a restaurant while children chattered away all around us, and who laughed about showing Don’s story to her Rabbi. And no one batted an eye. Feminist police didn’t descend to confiscate my feminist card or anything.

 

Tara dropped me off at the airport for my flight home to Marquette and I realized if I didn’t buy the Playboy then, I would never buy it. So I did. And I carried it through three airports. And read it. In public.

 

And here’s what I learned: no one seems to get riled up about Playboy anymore. It didn’t even seem to me particularly controversial, or sexy, or provocative. Besides Don’s amazing short story, the October issue contains an interview with Stephen Hawking—Stephen Hawking for god’s sake!—and a column by James Franco, and some pretty intellectual and interesting articles. Of course, interspersed with Hawking’s discussion of black holes are photographs of naked women, which is pretty weird. Weirder yet is that the women’s bodies are so highly airbrushed they don’t even appear to be bodies.

 

And weirder still is the fact that I didn’t blink a feminist eyelash. Is it because I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing women’s bodies sell so many things that I wasn’t surprised to see them selling sex, or selling a magazine? Because their airbrushed bodies are so foreign to any naked bodies I have ever seen? That I expected more—more violence perhaps? I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m still surprised by how little outrage I could muster—and how un-sexy I found the whole magazine.

 

Of course, I won’t be buying Playboy regularly—unless Don keeps winning their college fiction contest. I couldn’t even keep the magazine in my house—I’ve already mailed it to another friend to read. But I’ve surprised myself. Have I lost my feminist sensibility? Become complacent? Does it take more to shock me these days than a woman’s naked body interspersed with articles I actually want to read? Maybe Playboy has lost whatever edge it once had. Maybe I imagined the magazine to be a bigger deal that it ever was. In any case, I feel like I’ve reached some sort of strange milestone: I bought pornography. Then actually read the articles.

Last night, trying to fall asleep, I started reading Christopher Hitchens memoir “Hitch 22” by means of my iPad with its “VoiceOver” speech synthesis software. Like many an English writer before him (all acknowledged) Hitchens undertakes a chapter on the horrors of boarding school replete with beatings, buggery and brutality. For my money he’s not as good on the subject as his hero George Orwell, but who could be? What interested me was a burst of neo-liberal nostalgia wherein “the Hitch” opines sniffingly that today’s incarnation of his school boasts custom cuisine for vegetarian students, and a host of programs for children with learning disabilities, and accordingly, a certain rigor may have been lost.  

One problem when one is reading with the iPad is that you can’t throw it across the room. I most certainly would have thrown the hardback edition had I been reading one. But had I been reading one, I wouldn’t be blind. Rigor, Mr. Hitchens? Could you have conceived of the possibility that the students with disabilities now inhabiting your Ur-Scholastica, might be the hardest working ones? 

 

Forget your gramophone or the squeak of the door, dogs know the circumstances of emptiness. They understand the moon’s lost gloves and a spoon dropped in snow are equal, both make a circumspect music. What is marvelous is that dogs also possess the notes of silence–and who can describe them? Blood oranges in a dream roll off a table. I raise my head. Stare.