I’m queering and cripping with every step. Every breath. Goodbye Madison Avenue. Oh oh! Here comes Madison Avenue trying to sell me a post-normative lifestyle. Look. There’s Aimee Mullins.
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There are lots of blind people my age who’ve even less reason to like themselves but I gave that nonsense away like the monk in a miseracordia who one day left his body during a boring sermon.
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The problem is…too many worship the body in its political and social alterity…imagining, or so it seems, the body is “it”. But that old rag is samsara. And I don’t want to accessorize until the day I die. Goodbye Aimee.
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Have you ever knitted a failed sweater?
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When you’re blind, every day, windblown darkness hits your cheek.
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Citizens can no longer be protected by nation-states and offered any assurance that they will be able to find affordable housing, education for their children, or medical assistance. And it is the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization who oversee regulatory functions outside the purview of democratic decision-making processes. It is these bureaucratic institutions that set the rules and arbitrate between the dominant economic powers, severely diminishing the power of governments to protect their citizens, and crippling the democratic public sphere in the process. We are now in the midst of ‘epidemics of overproduction’, and a massive explosion in the industrial reserve army of the dispossessed that now live in tent cities—or casas de carton—in the heart of many of our metropolitan centers. At this moment we are witnessing a re-feudalisation of capitalism, as it refuels itself with the more barbarous characteristics of its robber baron and McKinley-era past. We are not talking here about lemonade stand capitalism on steroids, but the most vicious form of deregulated exploitation of the poor that history has witnessed during the last century.
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And so we need to “crip” the “democratic public sphere” since it is crippling us.
Able-bodied hegemony needs its cripples but doesn’t know it.
But we the cripples, in turn, don’t need “sound bite Viagraizations” (as Peter McLaren would call it).
We need jobs. Autists need real employment. 80% of the blind remain on government relief.
We need anti-imperial, anti-capital dignity.
Please. No more Ted Talks with Aimee.
Planet of the Blind 