What call? Call me Ishmael. Call me early or late. Call me an unpleasant fact of nature, a lusus naturae or worse. Say I’m so unsuited to community I must be housed elsewhere—asylum, hospital, prison. Whatever you do, don’t say in the manner of Phil Ochs—there but for fortune goes you or I—Americans can’t stand fortune; can’t stand luck; people who are poor deserve their fate; the disabled are insufficiently competitive for life in the open. They are a burden on the rest of us, don’t you see? I made my fortune, let him make his own. I’m sorry she needs a wheelchair, a breathing tube, a service animal, talking computer, prosthesis; I’m sorry she has a temper because of PTSD or some other spurious invisible condition.
I say I’m sorry—that’s what we do in this country. I’m sorry for you.
“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote Julia Kristeva. OK. And that’s because belief is harder than ambition itself.
And that’s because belief is not as disectable as faith. With faith you get to ask a hundred questions, questions ever more complex, see hermenutics, Paul Ricouer, Martin Buber. See the linguistic turn in hermenutical philosophy. But the depressed person, who for the sake of argument is Ishmael, is the girl with the breathing tube, is the wheelchair butterfly—she’s forced into the camp of disbelief in a hundred singular ways. They are not subtle. Suppose you wanted belief—something casually spiritual, suitable for a depressed Sunday. You’ll find Anerican churches are protected from having to abide by the Americans with Disabilites Act. Diid you know this? Perhaps its better to be a radical, sullen atheist. At least you’re not begging for entrance.
Call me Ishmael.
“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
Melville’s whaling ship was a floating asylum. A sheltered workshop. It beckoned the abject, it created disabilities. There were reasonable accomodations on board. Ahab had holes grooved into the decks to fit his artifical leg. The masts were perches for schizophrenia.
The captain and crew were the ones who stopped begging for entrance; who chose brutal lives of delirium on the open sea. Whenever today I read of developmentally delayed men, locked in a warehouse in Iowa, forced to slaughter animals, scarcely paid, I think of Herman Melville. Without irony. Life without faith requires no irony.
America with your history of eugenics.
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York.
America with your young Doctor Mengeles.
With your broken VA.
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition.
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it.
Wih your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilites.
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy.
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy.
With your terror of reasonable accommodations.
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly.
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus.
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight.
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy.
Ameica you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear.
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?
Planet of the Blind 