Last night I “tuned out” the New Year’s hype as I always do. I read Charles Dickens. I was occupied with Bleak House and if you’re a reader you’ll get the humor—“occupied” is a hopeless understatement. One is never done with Bleak House. Its about a multi-generational lawsuit that promises to end when pigs fly and steals lives both young and old. It was the perfect thing to read as 2014 ended for Bleak House is the greatest soap opera ever written—by definition a soap opera must be endless and rife with past miseries and a cast of opportunistic cynics who trade on dysfunction. Again, its the apparent endlessless of the controlling incitement of plot that lands a novel in soap opera land. And so I read from it as another chapter in our soap flake sponsored American narrative ended. We’re caught up in the miseries of our past: racial profiling by police forces; violence against black children, adults; against women and citizens with disabilities—all these realities are products of unresolved hostilities that steep in the unhappy coverts of America.
Dickens understood unhappy coverts—the mansions and board rooms where decisions affecting the poor are debated and enacted. The men in coverts (they are mostly men but there are some women) don’t like the ugliness of poverty which means your covert must be impregnable. Bleak House is a soap opera about the collective terror of human monstrosity. Money, Dickens says, promises to lift us up, or, in turn, hide us from the terrible streets where the poor, the dazed, and the deformed live.
Across the Atlantic in these United Sttes ugliness and disability were fused in laws designed to protect ordinary citizens from encountering cripples on the streets. Example:
“No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowedin or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view.”
2014 was the year when Americans struggled with improper persons allowed in public.
If you don’t look right, you don’t look right. The wealthy build more coverts. But you see, those of us who are black or blind or are otherwise troubling in a hundred protean ways have the right to stand, walk, jump, laugh, or shout in the village square. This is an inalienable right. It’s a global right. Back to the soap. The covert-istas want to have clean streets.
In Bleak House the only morally addmirable character Esther Somersen becomes disfigured from smallpox—she becomes ugly and blind, thereby assuring she won’t go outside again. She’s forced to stay in the covert where the avaricious and greedy hide.
Planet of the Blind 