I read a post last night on a rather unskillful group blog entitled “In Defense of Ableism”. Its author argues being physically whole is simply better than being disabled and therefore able bodied people oughtn’t worry about tropes or phrases betokening disability as a miserable state of affairs. I love how non-disabled people imagine they know all about the cripples much as I enjoy pink men who declare their familiarity with the circumstances of racial differences on Fox News. I’m sincere about this—when pink men wade into the dank waters of aggregate imperial assumptions and intolerances and wave their $5 Disney souvenir magic wands I see the retreating vanguard of privilege soaking its collective knickers. The “Pinkies” (for so I call them) never inquire as to what it is they’re defending.
The Monty Python once had a skit depicting soldiers in WWI. They were in a trench with terrifying explosions all around and their single concern was the protection of a tall grandfather clock that had been inexplicably entrusted to their care. So it is with the aforementioned defense of ableism, not merely because the privilege of the argument is misplaced (though it certainly is) but because physical wholeness is not a useful paradigm for understanding the human condition. I would not want to defend physical perfection as the sine qua non of ethics for the same reason I avoid patent falsehoods in general. If physical ability is thought to be the signature of the human book that book is stitched too thin to be important. Its a comic book argument, puerile and complacent. Worse: its draped in neo-Victorian wool (smelling of camphor and anti-Macassar) and when spoken it assumes the weary tones of adults who must, alas, tell their children its a hard life and (insert here—art, liberation theology, post-colonialism) won’t help you live. The post might just as well have been titled: “In Defense of Infantilization” but of course such titles presuppose comic irony which is in short supply in the Ableism Defense Department.
Taxonomies of physical value are the stuff of eugenics and function in America as justifications in support of the prison industrial complex. The Los Angeles County jail is the largest psychiatric facility in the United States. This state of affairs is only possible or tolerated by means of ableist assumptions. Its a very hard life children. The philosophers have said so. It really is too bad. Maybe if you’re really really good the warden will give you a grandfather clock.
Planet of the Blind 