When the GOP torpedoed ratification of the UN Charter on the rights of people with disabilities last spring it was easy to evince disgust for their arguments as they were tricked out with the paranoia of Rick Santorum. Briefly (incredibly) Santorum argued that by affirming the rights of people with disabilities around the world, rights which include access to public education, the United States would relinquish the rights of parents to home school their disabled children. Forget for a moment there’s nothing about a UN treaty that in any way affects the rights of Americans to home school children or to twirl spaghetti counter-clockwise. Santorum knows his people: they’re the ones who believe if a butterfly wiggles its wings in (insert foreign place name here) then without delay black helicopters will arrive and troops will leap out and take their automatic weapons. Weapons are the controlling signifiers behind all right wing suspicions about the UN and it was rather quaint, nay cunning, to see Santorum substitute books in the parlor for Uzis. But semiotic subterfuge ruled the day. All of this is old news to people with disabilities and their supporters but its worth noting that in right wing circles imperialism is internalization–ignorance and want are acceptable everywhere in the world as long as we can hide in our homes or domestic compounds. The great folk singer Christine Lavin has a song about people who are “prisoners of their hairdos” and we might easily write a similar ditty about prisoners of ingrown imperialism though it won’t be catchy.
Ingrown imperialism (the paranoiac backwash of human rights violations as a matter of American foreign policy) has always flourished in the US. The poet Allen Ginsburg brilliantly parodied its stream of consciousness in his poem “America”:
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
Of course Ginsburg’s rhetorical question is metonymic–almost helpless with its squeak of common sense. Ingrown imperialism always demands the suborning of rationality because there are terrifying foreigners in the hedges.
From a disability rights perspective my poor brothers and sisters around the globe who are blind, deaf, paralyzed, disfigured, learning impaired, or who have HIV–just to name the most common conditions–are denied access to public spaces, books, homes, medicines, and prosthetics. Against this worldwide calamity stands the rightward bench of the GOP saying (with apologies to Ginsburg):
America the cripples are coming in their special cripple spaceships,
The cripples them want to steal our Fox News, steal our bullets and bibles,
Ruin our high school proms…
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Planet of the Blind 