Month: September 2013

I was “unfriended” by someone on Facebook last night because I dared to assert that using blindness as a metaphor for stupidity is insulting. This person was pissed off because a school district in Ohio is trying to eliminate books by Toni Morrison from school libraries–a fascist enterprise to be sure and one that’s contemptible as all fascist enterprises are. I completely understand  the woman’s rage. But when I read blind and ignorant in the same trope, I needed to say it: guess what? You can’t say that anymore. People with disabilities are real, we have dignity, we are part of the village, we sit at the table, and we’re not deficient. The woman who unfriended me is African-American. She is no doubt a kind and decent soul who’s as frustrated as we all are at the rising Mr. Rushmore sized faces of cruelty and intolerance we witness in this country every day. Yet even in our rage we must have emotional intelligence. Otherwise we do the work of late-stage Capitalism, which wants us to separate and undermine all opposition. Our job, here in diversity-ville is to presume competence. Who was lame? Theodor Adorno. Who was crippled? Frida Kahlo. Who was in the closet? James Baldwin. Who was deaf? Beethoven. Who had bi-polar depression? Abraham Lincoln. Who was crippled? Franklin Roosevelt. Who was deformed? Alexander Pope. I could go on and on. Some days I feel as though I have to.   

 

I was in a good dream all day with Corky: we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge just for the sake of walking. The sky was blue-going-to-green, that oceanic sky, the beckoning one. And we were racing fast along the promenade deck, remnant of the great ocean liners. Easy to imagine men in swallow tailed coats and women with wide hats approaching. Blindness, all mist for me, and the dear light, fresh and wonderfully unrevealing. For the blind light is a mystery–a literal one, less a problem of physics and more a matter of interpretation. Its dream light. The light of the Greek underworld. Any moment my grandmother was likely to appear from the green-blue haze amid the glittering rails and she would tell me of her Lutheran heaven. We were having a jogger’s reverie, Corky and I. We passed two slow runners. I wondered what my guide dog’s dream was like. 

 

Some favorite moments from the blog “Bad Cripple”.

 

1. Ableism a Water Shed Experience April 30, 2009.http://badcripple.blogspot.com

2. Purple Feather: Offensive in the Extreme April 11, 2011.http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2011/04/purple-feather-offensive-in-extreme.html

3. The MEdical Industrial Complex: Normalcy Rules! August 2, 2009.http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2009/08/medical-industrial-complex-normalcy.html

4. Mourning for Christina Symanski: Better Off Dead? December 9, 2011. http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2011/12/mourning-for-christina-symanski-better.html

5. Assisted Suicide and MEdical Technology: A Social Failure July 31, 2013. http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/07/assisted-suicide-and-medical-technology.html

I was walking in Central Park when it hit me. I had a dream dog. A dog of reverie. 

What is a dream dog? 

Reverie is a day dream, but soulful, an experience of wonder. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard popularized it as rich innocence: “Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life…. Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us…”  

 

I was beside the boathouse in the park when I saw it. Bachelard had it wrong! Its dogs who help us find this living childhood! Poets, maybe, sometimes. I’d grant Wordsworth or Blake their laurels. But a good childhood, one of imagination comes from feeling you belong among the trees, that you can walk aimlessly or on purpose. 

 

Corky and I sat and listened to the boaters. One woman said: “are there fish in here? I don’t like fish!” Her companion, another woman, laughed. It was a good laugh. 

There was a light breeze. It was made a rippling sound, as if invisible sails were all around us. 

 

A dream dog has the muscularity–the solidity of a good ego. She knows how to walk with courage and insight. She gives me the same. 

 

She knows the world unfolds around us. Dogs have always known this. They know it because “reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

 

We followed the shore of the pond. Walked up a hill. All our steps were refreshing. 

 

**

A dream dog helps me presume competence. I am the king of the next 100 yards. We come to a construction site on the upper West Side of Manhattan–one of those nearly medieval transverse plots that confuse the sighted and terrify the blind. Jackhammers and steam. And an odd sound, something like a xylophone. Corky enters the fray and turns, stops, looks around, and takes me off the sidewalk and along the edges of something–a string of pylons perhaps–all I see are blurred colors. She’s moving quickly. Then we’re back on the sidewalk and going on our way. 

 

Dream dog. We step out into the emptiness between stars. I think less of the dangers and more about that xylophone–what was that thing? What sounds like Lionel Hampton in the midst of a New York construction site? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walking with Nira, her harness jingling, I think sometimes  about Abraham Lincoln and his love for dogs. LIncoln was a loner who, essentially, had to teach himself how to be among people–the kind of person who’s a self-trained extrovert but who really does best when alone. Dogs are good for people like Lincoln. In a very real sense, where introverts are concerned, all dogs are guide dogs. But what makes the bond between a solitary person and a dog? I think it comes from steadfastness, a brand of loyalty that isn’t circumstantial. What loners fear is the perfidy of mankind. A dog allays this sense that the world is deceitful. In Lincoln’s case he learned trust from a dog named “Honey”. In his book The Pawprints of History Stanley Coren writes of Lincoln’s near death experience in childhood:

 

The eleven-year-old Lincoln still had a child’s thirst for exploration, and he would often return to the caves to engage in “adventures and quests.” Honey would accompany him on these journeys. One afternoon Lincoln thought that he heard water flowing in one of the caves, and he remembered a story where a great treasure was hidden in a cave on the shore of an underground river. This excited the young boy, and he recklessly began to climb down toward where he thought the water was flowing. Suddenly he lost his footing and slipped on some damp rocks, rolling downward quite a long way. His torch went out, and he was badly bruised and completely disoriented in the total darkness of the cave. Meanwhile, many feet above him, Honey began to bark frantically. Lincoln desperately tried to orient himself toward the noise of the dog, but it was difficult, since sounds tended to bounce around in the cave. In addition, as he groped around in the dark, he could not find any path or obvious handholds that might provide a way up the steep incline.

Above him, Honey was becoming more excited. Her barking was turning into a broken howl, and she was now rushing out of the mouth of the cave and then returning to the edge of the abyss where she had seen her master fall. This cave was well off the beaten track, but a seldom-used wagon trail passed around a hundred yards from the opening. The person who could someday save the United States from dissolution and would free the blacks from their slavery, however, was lying in pain and confusion in a deep hole in the ground, and his only contact was a loving dog who was loudly sounding the alarm. In one of those fortunate chance occurrences, a farmer and his two sons were passing by. They heard the panicky barks of the dog, and the farmer sent both boys with their rifles to see if perhaps a dog had cornered a bear nearby. When they got to the cave, the boys tentatively entered it. One tried to calm the frantic dog, asking, “What have you got cornered in there, girl?”

A faint voice came up from the dark hole and said, “I ain’t cornered, I’m stuck!”

It took the better part of an hour, and the assistance of ropes and the farmer’s mule, to pull Abraham Lincoln out of his potentially lethal trap, thus allowing the history of America to proceed as we know it. When Sarah later learned what had happened to Abraham, she was upset and frightened. She made him promise not to explore the caves again, and then said, “You owe that dog an obligation. The Indians say that if someone saves your life you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. You saved her life once, and she has returned the favor to you. Now both of you are bound together in a sacred commitment.”

 

**

 

The sacred commitment that Lincoln’s stepmother described is interesting because it implies a lifelong daily engagement. Not all our moments call for extraordinary heroism. In fact one may argue such moments happen only rarely. But a sacramental commitment is rooted in faith and what one may well call gentle optimism. Its a way of life. We love stories about heroic dogs but often forget that the significance of such stories is reflected inside us. In the midst of trauma human beings discover over and over how a dog can sustain us. Where invisible disabilities are concerned dogs can help us stay in the world in emotional terms–witness the extraordinary role dogs are now playing by helping wounded veterans who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

 

**

So I think about Lincoln who we now believe endured bi-polar depression. I think of how dogs helped him navigate the world. Dogs enter us and live in our psyches. Together we will believe in things; good things; the future. 

And we will go places.  

 

Photo of Vladimir Putin “smiling”. 

 

Whenever I see a picture of Vladimir Putin I see a man who has eaten more than his share of canaries. Even a visually impaired person knows a cruel face. In my experience the most dangerous faces are possessed of half-toned smiles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote: “Others will love what we have loved,/And we shall teach them how.” Putin’s face suggests a smug untouchability, and unteachability–and so his smugness is magnified, more terrible for its presentiments and predicate intolerance. 

By Andrea Scarpino

 

The thing about Syria is power. How a government uses power. How its citizens understand their government’s power. How its citizens understand their own power. As in physical strength and force. As in the right or authority that is given or delegated to a person or body. 

 

The thing about Syria is that chemical weapons are terrible, terrible things. So is torture. So is civil war. So is the killing of 100,000 people. 

 

The thing about Syria is that bombing is always indiscriminate. Always hits more than its intended target. 

 

The thing about Syria is that its president is a physician by training, an ophthalmologist who studied in Damascus and London. As in a person qualified to practice medicine. As in healer.   

 

The thing about Syria is that the US president hasn’t been clear about his message. That his indecisiveness can be seen as weakness or thoughtfulness, an inability to act or a willingness to consider new information. 

 

The thing about Syria is that it demonstrates the trouble with US foreign policy. “With great privilege comes great responsibility,” we like to say. But how do we define the shape of that responsibility, what responsibility looks like? 

 

The thing about Syria is trust. That Syria doesn’t trust the US. That the US doesn’t trust Syria or its allies. That most of my friends don’t trust when the US wants to bomb another country, no matter the rationale. That most of my friends don’t trust our government not to lead us into war. 

 

The thing about Syria is that civilians are always targeted. Civilians always die. 

 

The thing about Syria is power, how we give or delegate power to a person or body. How that person or body uses what we have given it. When and how and why we try to take it back. 

 

 

I had insomnia last night. I lay in the dark listening to the snoring of our dogs and then some distant thunder. Not even a hefty tome on Marxism and pedagogy could put me to sleep.

I thought about Barack Obama and what it says about our nation’s standing in the world when Vladimir Putin gives the President a chance to save face. I tried to think of an analogy–something involving Typhoid Mary–but fell asleep.

Oy!

 

I have received several emails about the recent decision in Iowa granting blind people the right to buy guns. Predictably my liberal friends don’t know what to make of this story though their instincts tell them that blind people and guns don’t go together. Comments on Facebook are either giggly or snarky. Me? The whole thing puts me in mind of the “most interesting man in the world”–”I don’t always shoot guns when I’m blind, but when I do, I do it in Iowa. Stay loaded, my friends.” 

via www.planet-of-the-blind.com

The Rachel Maddow show was giggly and snarky about this story today.

I have received several emails about the recent decision in Iowa granting blind people the right to buy guns. Predictably my liberal friends don’t know what to make of this story though their instincts tell them that blind people and guns don’t go together. Comments on Facebook are either giggly or snarky. Me? The whole thing puts me in mind of the “most interesting man in the world”–”I don’t always shoot guns when I’m blind, but when I do, I do it in Iowa. Stay loaded, my friends.” 

 

The problem with the neo-liberal reaction to the story is that able bodied people imagine blind people have no friends. I wrote about this in my memoir Planet of the Blind and recounted the story of my friend Dave who went to a department store to buy a color television. The salesman wanted to sell him a cheap black and white job–insisting the sound would be the same but the unit would be cheaper. Dave pointed at the biggest color set in the place and said he’d take it. “But why?” the salesman pleaded. “Because,” said Dave, “blind people have families that like color.” 

 

Blindness is a metaphor for most people and not literal. As metaphor it means existential isolation, lack of knowledge, obtuseness, even stupidity. This is the case whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Mother Jones uses blindness frequently to denote political or intellectual deficiencies. This is so commonplace in popular culture and journalism that my friend Beth Haller, a professor who specializes in disability and the media has a website called Media dis&dat which is indispensable reading if you care about embodiment and cultural representation. 

 

So able bodied people imagine that blind folks have no friends, which means they have no sighted friends–blindness as metaphor means in the case of the gun story that they go into the woods without anyone by their sides and shoot guns wildly. This is of course ridiculous but as they say in the vernacular “it is what it is”. 

 

Blind people also can buy automobiles, bicycles, and speed boats. I’ve purchased all three. I don’t yet own a gun, but then again, I might one day. This is hard to imagine. But not impossible. 

 

Another thing sighted people tend to assume about blindness is that blind people see absolutely nothing. Nowadays 90% of the blind have residual vision. Maybe its not good enough to hit a fast ball but its good enough to shoot a turkey in the company of a sighted companion. 

 

When you put the semiotics of guns and blindness together you get liberal panic of a high order. Its not worth getting your shorts in a bunch, folks. You know what’s really scary about blindness? The public’s ideas about it. 

 

My own view about gun ownership is this: no one should be allowed to buy a gun until he or she can recite the entire Declaration of Independence in two languages.