When I was in college I had a pal who liked to play what I called “comparative pain”. His life had been hard with an abused childhood, small town poverty; then, a turn of fortune that he learned to hate–a scholarship to the local private college where, among very rich students he perceived his deficiencies all the more.
We used to sit up late and drink bourbon and argue about everything from the merits of T.S. Eliot’s verse to the lathered stupidities of fraternity boys who drove BMWs and spoke with diphthongs though they were from New Jersey and Long Island–they had the faux patrician accents one hears at private schools in these United States. We imagined the advent of this pretentious accent was a result of vanishing elocution classes for the rich–that in the time of Franklin Roosevelt one learned how to speak with true “back bench” verve. We decided this was another thing ruined by the 60’s. So young rich boys had to invent a patois on their own and of course they weren’t equal to the task. You can still hear this accent at America’s tonier colleges. It hasn’t gone away.
So we had fun in the manner of boys with weak super-egos, or, we had fun until we had too much bourbon when we’d invariably turn our attention to “who had it hardest” and that’s when I learned comparative pain is a poor contest. I claimed that having a disability I was wretched. And my pal would relate how his cruel older brother locked him in a closet and no one bothered to find him. We’d argue until bitterness overtook us and then we’d impeach each other’s character. We were both depressed, each convinced our problems were external.
Around that time I encountered a short poem by the American poet David Ignatow. I think it was Robert Bly who brought it to my attention. Bly was a frequent visitor to our college and as many know, he has always been an inspired talker. Not all poets possess that skill. The Ignatow poem reads:
I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment of my life.
Such lessons are not easy and where comparative pain is concerned I don’t think age offers serious educational advantages. It’s easier to forgo compassion and empathy when your own pain wraps you up. Irony always fades with self-involvement. Neither youth nor age wins out versus bitterness and reaction formation–Freud’s term for the internalization of bad stimuli. It’s too easy to be embittered when one is seriously depressed.
This is one reason why Jesus spoke in parables. Our grid-locked psyches need to be tricked into curiosity. You can substitute intrigue or mystery–but life is seldom what we imagine and in general I think this premise is a source of hope. I remember telling a very good psychiatrist about my fears. They were all future fears and dark. Suddenly she said: “Have these things happened to you before?” And I had to admit the answer was no–I was simply embellishing gravity according to the rankings of depression.
Last night I lay awake obsessing about comparative pain and the supernumerary co-efficients of disability and depression. I read a column at Truthdig by Chris Hedges concerning Tomas Young, an American veteran who has decided to end his life because his disability has overtaken him. I do not know how one person can judge another’s disability-pain-index, nor do I know Tomas Young. But I do know enough about pathos in rhetoric to be very suspicious of Hedges who has entitled his piece “The Crucifixion of Tomas Young” which ought to give any sensible reader the cerebral chilblains. Here is how Hedges’ article begins:
KANSAS CITY, Mo.—I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.” He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.
“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intends to die. “I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration. …”
Tomas Young wants to die because his disability has progressed strikingly over the past four years. He says to Hedges:
“If I were in the same condition I was in during the filming of ‘Body of War,’ in a manual chair, able to feed and dress myself and transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and I would not be having this discussion. I can’t even watch the movie anymore because it makes me sad to see how I was, compared to how I am. … Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was best to go out now rather than regress more.”
Hedges than says:
“Young will die for our sins. He will die for a war that should never have been fought. He will die for the lies of politicians. He will die for war profiteers. He will die for the careers of generals. He will die for a cheerleader press. He will die for a complacent public that made war possible. He bore all this upon his body. He was crucified.”
One of the things I learned about comparative pain all those years ago in a stuffy little dormitory room at Hobart College is that its entire rhetorical force depends upon pathos, which is to say, a raw emotional appeal as opposed to facts. It is not, for instance, a fact that increased paralysis connotes a life that will be devoid of favorable qualities. The facts are otherwise as disability activists convincingly demonstrate. Has anyone given Tomas Young some useful books on living as a quad? One wonders if he’s read Nancy Mairs’ incomparable memoir “Waist High in the World” or if he’s encountered the amazing artistic work of Neil Marcus. One also imagines the answer is no. What is clear is that Chris Hedges is using the language of religious sacrifice as an altogether easy analect–that is, he critiques the moral condition of the American people using Young’s condition as metaphor, a thing that is detestable though not unsurprising for many liberals are no more adept with disability culture than they are with nano-flowers. Let’s just say that Hedges’ use of Christian metaphors of sacrifice depends upon hideous sentimentality and the unexamined dialectic of valued bodies vs. devalued bodies, a position that’s essentially neo-Victorian and largely uncivilized.
I’ve long been opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and I belong to Poets Against War and have written broadly about the conditions of veterans. What Hedges has done here is to reaffirm the depressing narrative about the value of life and physical wholeness, and he’s done so by the most scurrilous means, affirming a wounded warriors depression, doing so without critical irony or knowledge, and using the language of sacrifice with altogether too much frisson.
Comparative pain is always worse than one supposes. And its always a bad bad script. In this case, when veterans are fighting the good fight for health care and psychiatric support, when they’re fighting for reasons to live, Hedges has done everyone a true disservice.
Technorati Tags: Disability Studies, New Tag, Chris Hedges, Truth Dig, Tomas Young, Medical Ethics, Bio-ethics, Wounded Warriors, Comparative Suffering
Planet of the Blind 