The painter doesn’t like his model so he adds an elaborate background, a proverbial, anal English park where the viewer’s eyes will eventually become lost. You know the story. Its the only analogy I can find for the opposition by GOP senators to the UN treaty on disability rights. Like the woman in the painting, people with disabilities have disappeared against a backdrop illuminated by fantasy and false detail.
That some Republicans hate the United Nations is scarcely news but its old news with a lingering bite. Our nation (which should be a global leader when it comes to scientific inquiry and human rights) has been bounced from UNESCO because we’ve abdicated our responsibility to support “everything from literacy to press freedom to heritage conservation to HIV/AIDS prevention.” (See link above) The United States has been in wholesale retreat from the UN’s humanitarian work for the past thirty years. It’s not a simple story—the erosion of America’s interest in the very organization it helped to create after the second world war is a considerable topic to be sure—but one can summarize the process by noting Congress has lost interest in multinationalism except when it supports our military. What’s emerged is a largely GOP lead sequence of paranoid visions, what some have called “black helicopter” stories—narratives foretelling how UN armies will descend on everyone from small handgun owners to parents who home school their children, for the international community really does want to ruin the lives of Americans.
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is again in the crosshairs on Capitol Hill, having failed to pass in December, 2012. Like so many things in contemporary Washington its been in the crosshairs a long time—deflection and misrule are slow in democracies, especially failing ones but one may suppose Americans with disabilities should be grateful for that. While rightward senators spin what can only be called Rococo disinformation (picture the garish curlicues and gilded lilies of a picture frame) and home schooling advocates argue the UN will dispatch para-military units to the house next door and drag crippled home schooled children to public schools—a canard and falsehood both about the treaty and our nation’s ability to govern itself—while all the lies abound, the broader embarrassment to our country just grows and grows. It doesn’t matter that Dick Morris and the Fox News pundits are lying about the disability treaty—what matters in the age of extremist politics is getting yourself re-elected if you come from a red state and you can lump disability rights in with women’s health, voting rights for people of color, gay rights—worker’s rights—lump it all in with a mounting backwards slide, why you’ve gotten away with something.
Senator Bob Corker is the latest prominent Republican to walk away from support of the CRPD, claiming the treaty abrogates the power of individual states to manage their affairs—a falsehood that goes unchallenged again and again in GOP circles. But its a falsehood spun from the paranoia of international helicopters, which makes it easy to sell.
I hate to say it, but I think the treaty will die in the Senate. And I think our banishment from UNESCO is just the start of America’s international decline. Any nation that fears human rights will undermine its own authority is a nation that’s begun to die. Any nation that eschews support for human rights, scientific research, global cooperation, human health—that nation has begun to die. The background in the painting is tricked out with ugly concealments and exaggerated, false diagrams. One of the ugliest deflections holds that we already have the Americans with Disabilities Act—we don’t need to sign no stinkin’ treaty. The logic there is of course inhumane for it assumes America’s disabled citizens don’t travel abroad and need rights, and it supposes the plight of children and the poor has nothing to do with us. Its this latter notion that troubles me the most—we who have left thousands of Iraqi children disabled should, of all nations, have the moral and political honesty to declare the cripples of Baghdad have a few rights.
Planet of the Blind 