Recent articles and broadcasts have created the appearance of a “baggy monster”–a walking, robotic hostility to people with physical differences. From Public Radio International and NPR, from Truthdig to the Huffington Post, articles, oped pieces, and radio programs have lately suggested a number of astounding things about the disabled. First was the Chris Hedges “cheerleading” squad, overtly rooting for a wounded war veteran to kill himself as a political act. Then the poorly researched and pathos driven reporting on “This American Life” suggesting there’s an epidemic of people declaring themselves “disabled” as a means of collecting social security disability payments. Nowhere does the associated reporting done by NPR’s Joffee-Walt recognize that statistically one in five Americans has a disability–that the United Nations recognizes this figure to be accurate worldwide. Accordingly there are over 56 million Americans with disabilities, and over 650 million disabled people around the world. Since disability isn’t static, just as populations are not static, the numbers go up. Aging nations have more people with disabilities than youthful countries. Aging regions of the United States will necessarily have more people with disabilities than younger regions. NPR and PRI have reported increases in disability “claims” as being suggestive of fraud, a narrative that’s as old as disability and civics but what NPR doesn’t seem to know is that old story has remained unchanged over the past 100 years. NPR didn’t bother to reach out to disability studies scholars to learn about the very subject they imagined they were covering. Can one imagine writing or broadcasting about people of color or women without including public intellectuals or scholars or policy makers whose works and days are relevant to the subject? So NPR doesn’t know that the very first movies distributed in the United States featured the themes of beggars and thieves who feigned disability to cheat the credulous public. NPR doesn’t know that those films were cash cows for a population that never actually met people with disabilities because, owing to the “ugly laws” and institutionalization, there were no real people with disabilities in the village square. It’s easy to talk about people you don’t know. It’s the easiest thing of all. And this is what’s happening: able bodied citizens, both neo-liberal and conservative, are using people with disabilities as a kind of tabula rasa, writing narratives across the backs of people they hardly know. This is indeed one of the oldest stories of all, one that’s familiar to every person who comes from a historically marginalized group.
There are lives in the balance. Shaun Heasley’s story over at DisabilityScoop entitled “Despite Outcry, No Charges in Death of Man with Down Syndrome” recounts the death of Robert Ethan Saylor who died when police subdued him because he wanted to watch the film “Zero Dark Thirty” for a second time. Heasley writes:
“A grand jury determined Friday that no crime was committed in the case of Robert Ethan Saylor. He went to see the film “Zero Dark Thirty” at a Frederick, Md. movie theater in January and wanted to watch it again after the showing was over. Three off-duty sheriff’s deputies who were working security at the venue were alerted when Saylor would not exit. They ultimately restrained him and Saylor was dead just a few minutes later.
A medical examiner found that Saylor died of asphyxia and ruled it a homicide, but ultimately the grand jury determined that charges were not warranted and that the deputies acted in accordance with their training.”
What emerges is the vision of police and reporters who are untrained about the real and complex subject of disability. Meanwhile, in a nation that has all the money it needs, the poor and physically challenged are painted as deceivers to fuel a public debate about government excess. So we cheer for the veteran who says his life isn’t worth a plug nickel and who announces he will kill himself. We shrug when an innocent man with Down Syndrome is effectively murdered by police. We glibly blame the victims in a business environment which will do anything, and I mean anything, to avoid giving accommodations to employees. It’s as though the United States has come down with the Stockholm Syndrome. Or something very like it.
Planet of the Blind 