Month: March 2015

Yesterday a friend of mine was told s(he) isn’t important at the university. As in “in the scheme of things”; as in “we don’t have a role for you in our department”. Sometimes academic “units” and those who run them like to use the language of stage-craft. “No role” means the chosen play has nothing in the script for the likes of you. What interests me about drama as obfuscation is how meagre its assertion is. It’s a dispassionate construction to be sure–no role, but also an employment of the supernatural for the script is beyond us, it has arrived from divine provenance like Spinoza’s birds. The atoms assorted themselves this way. Currently this fatalistic conceit is gaining ground at the university. We don’t have a role for you. Ronald Reagan: “mistakes were made”—passivity masks the intentionality. As the priest says to Herr K in Kafka’s novel The Trial: “It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” One day your unimportance is imperative. That’s just the way it is. It is required that you not be important anymore. A large letter tries in vain to push itself through the papyrus.

     

“The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation.”   Karl Marx

Now and then (but only occasionally) I see how disabled students and faculty at American universities “break through” by using the intelligible language of commodities. We organize a day of wheelchair basketball. A “crip hop” poetry slam.

These occurrences disrupt the abject traffic of request. What’s the antonym for humiliation?  

The antonym is “honor”. 

One of the principal reasons so many people with disabilities work in disability fields is that disability is objectified and therefore within able bodied culture it has no corresponding or inherent value. “Our objects in relation to each other” implies utility and a power wheelchair isn’t conversant with a Lexus.

Imagined without essential value,  universities make everything about disability a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation.

All disabled students and faculty understand this.

What’s not so well understood is the fierce attachment universities have to a rehabilitation model of disablement: take a number, sit down. Let me see your paper work. 

There is no corresponding commodity for disablement in the relations of objects.

Universities are de-stabilizing enterprises when it comes to conditional bodies.

It’s true of all conditional bodies—just ask Henry Louis Gates.

But the disabled body has an special set of weights attached. I call them “intelligibility dumbells” and only crippled people have them. They’re opaque. Hard to see.   
  
In a way they’re like scar tissue. Twenty years of requests and requesting will build you a carapace. 

One wonders how disabled students feel at Kent State University. The Justice Department has filed a law suit because students with emotional or psychological disabilities were denied fair housing owing to their need for service animals.  

I repeat: universities make everything about disability a request and therefore a humiliation. A crippled identity is a sub-caste in the ivory tower’s world of commodified exchanges.

What about Lesley University which refused to modify its food plan for students with celiac disease? Were the celiac people a lower caste? Apparently so: the DOJ had to“school them” on the issue.  

Then there’s the story of a woman student at Quinnipiac University who sought mental health care and was removed from campus. The university even kept her tuition. 

There is no corresponding commodity for disablement. Colleges and universities frequently fail outright to see the value of students and staff with disabilities. At the core, they represent the future. 

The dogs are in a good mood, early morning, tearing at a frayed rope. I play opera arias low on the hifi—Lucia di Lammermoor, Manon Lescaut—and the dogs stare hard into each other’s eyes—their optic nerves fizzing under conventional language. Is it Summer or Winter? What happens to the written legends of the lost islands? GRRRR, says the little dog—trains arrive and depart in my paws—I’ve a planet of birds deep in my throat. The big dog doesn’t care. The big one wears tall black rubber boots and tests the ice on the pond. Neither lets go.  

Oh Donizetti. There is no evidence you had a dog. But how can a man who doesn’t love expect to be received? 

Each day the university disables itself. Note, the university does not “crip” itself. Systematic conceptual alienation requires a ruling class. And no irony please.  

Let those with disabilities who labor in higher education not acidulate the drink. Thomas Paine wrote: “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” 

The disabled university is ubiquitous. I’ve traveled to hundreds of schools. Here are the things I’ve seen (and recently):

Segregation of disability. “Specialized” offices of disability services where the tainted students must appear like scofflaws. (The environment matters: at the University of Iowa the disability services center is in the basement of a dormitory. If it’s hard to find maybe people won’t use it. Oh. There’s no way out from the basement in case of a fire. Hmm. Let’s have a seven year committee. 

At Syracuse the disability services office is on the top of a building. At least they have windows up there.

The academy disables itself. Failed architectures and insufficiency of imagination always speak the tacit unspoken phrase: “your body is a problem.” 

Never will you hear the phrase “our bodies” for the aim of the disabling university is to commit and recommit the Benthamite claim that crippled bodies are a drain on resources. In this way the disabling academy repackages the reveries of Fascism.

Do not make the mistake of subsituting “outlier” bodies for “disabled bodies” for universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to attract superior athletes whose physiques are more uncommon to the experiences of general humanity than any person with a learning disability. Even though athletic bodies are invariably the greatest embodied resource drain in American higher education you won’t hear objections from administrators. But you will hear grousing about the crippled students and the resources they hoover up. Here are things I’ve actually heard on campuses:

Disability is an unfunded mandate. (For disability substitute disabled students.)
If we admit too many learning disabled students our academic ranking will decline. 
It costs too much to have an ADA Coordinator. Can’t the Title IX person handle this?
I think these LD students are looking for an easy way to take the test.
I don’t have to teach differently because there’s a disabled student in my class.
Do we really have to put accessible bathrooms in the library? 
These people are often mentally ill—they might be dangerous.
College wouldn’t cost so much if we didn’t have to have “these services”.
If they can’t keep up they shouldn’t be here. 

Note these utterances are contemporay and not recollections from twenty five years ago. 

When the university disables itself it is engaging in social fraud. Illusions are OK in Romantic poetry or marketing classes but they’re destructive where the body politic is concerned. Let’s do some simple arithmetic. 

There are 60 million disabled people in the United States. That’s one fifth of the general population. Taken alone the statistic isn’t generative—that is, it doesn’t suggest much. One may say: “Well, that means there are 260 million people who don’t have disabilities.” (This is the general subconscious reaction by able bodied exceptionalists.) 

But each disabled person has relatives and friends. Even a sophomore marketing student will grasp the implications of this. 

Some years ago my wife and I ran a series of workshops for employees at Sandals and Beaches vacation resorts in Jamaica. We said you should never view a disabled person as a singularity. We pointed out disabled people have discretionary spending. They may choose to take vacations. When they do they’ll bring friends. The point was, and is: there are no outlier disabled bodies.  

Higher education continues to imagine disability as liability. Students, staff, and faculty with disabilities experience this in hundreds of ways but the most singular effect is the “us vs. you” motif of grudging and systematic alienation. Disability is not a sub-set of culture. If 1/5 of America is disabled and that fifth has relatives and friends then 3/5 of America is touched by disability and the final fifth is probable.

The academy disables itself. 

Us is all of us. We don’t need specialized offices and special tickets. Dare I say it? That stuff belongs in the last century. 

I have loved you with my whole heart. 

I have touched your eye lashes with my finger.

Rubbed the cracked pads of your yeasty paws. 

Have said everything would get better. 

Have lain down beside you on hot limestone, insects drowsing around us. 

Have followed you to the door as you barked. 

Have seen with you through the rain and stillness. 

Have felt the sweetness in your shoulders. 

Have wanted to wake you out of love. 

Have imagined the world of dog democracy.

Have seen how your eyes do not overlook anyone’s happiness. 

Have seen how you’re more elastic than any rubber band. 

Have seen how you leave claw marks instead of poems on our door.

Know you hear stars fall with a bell clap.

Oh my dog you who live in the water shine museum where no light ever disappears.

Some colleagues at Syracuse University recently characterized me as a bully—a nomination as false as it is offensive. Calling an outspoken or forceful disabled person a “bully” is like naming a person of color “uppity” or a woman the “b” word. But this is how discrimination works—first by lingo, then by the politics of spoiled identity. “He’s too hot to handle.” “She’s unreliable.” “He’s disruptive.” This should be clear enough. But what do I mean by “preoccupation”?

Preoccupation equals privilege and protection—the “P” words are practical. Able bodied people are diverse and range widely in their temperaments and capacities. But we don’t say able bodied people are “uppity” since they occupy their proper station in our nation’s embodied politics. Now they might need accommodations: beauty aids, Calvin Klein, or, as used to be the case, elocution lessons, but such things are reasonable. What is unreasonable, what’s tacitly enjoined, is imagining—conceiving of—the corrollary interplay between inaccessible environments and the embodied privilege of ableism. Thus preoccupation is both justification for inaccessibility and obfuscation.  It appears in various idiomatic expressions: “doesn’t someone else handle this?”; “I knew a crippled person once and she didn’t have these problems.”; “We put a Braille sign on the bathroom door—what more do you want?”.  The latter is so commonplace I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard it. “What more do you want?” 

I remember a colleague, a professor of art, who once told a student he wanted a trip to Paris in response to the anticipated question about an assignment—“what do you want”—and yes, let’s throw Joni Mitchell in too—to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive. Preoccupation is all about the fetters. Idiomatically: “Let’s not think about this today.” “Look Mr. Wheelchair. We got you into the building. Now you want to use the bathroom?”

It takes a lot of muscle to be preoccupied in this way. Freud called it “reaction formation”—a psychological defense mechanism wherein anxiety is masked by compensatory exaggeration. The overly solicitous person is actually cruel; the fuddy duddy is really a sadist. Ableism takes energy. But it’s easy on the idioms.

One useful way to think of able bodied preoccupation is to understand it as a social lie. The poet Kenneth Rexroth put it this way:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done.” 

There is something wrong with you my Dear. Since there’s nothing overtly classifiable about your defect we will sell you night repair cream; whitening toothpaste; lifts for your shoes; depilatories. 

Preoccupation depends on selling the transience of physical well being. Against this the cripples are arrayed. And in this way they’re frightening.

If my colleagues wanted they could call me outspoken; passionate; even tiresome. Bully means I’m predatory and defective, which is not the case, unless one thinks a blind man is terribly terribly scary.   

  

Some colleagues at Syracuse University recently characterized me as a bully—a nomination as false as it is offensive. Calling an outspoken or forceful disabled person a “bully” is like naming a person of color “uppity” or a woman the “b” word. But this is how discrimination works—first by lingo, then by the politics of spoiled identity. “He’s too hot to handle.” “She’s unreliable.” “He’s disruptive.” This should be clear enough. But what do I mean by “preoccupation”?

Preoccupation equals privilege and protection—the “P” words are practical. Able bodied people are diverse and range widely in their temperaments and capacities. But we don’t say able bodied people are “uppity” since they occupy their proper station in our nation’s embodied politics. Now they might need accommodations: beauty aids, Calvin Kelin, or, as used to be the case, elocution lessons, but such things are reasonable. What is unreasonable, what’s tacitly enjoined, is imagining—conceiving of—the corrollary interplay between inaccessible environments and the embodied privilege of ableism. Thus preoccupation is both justification for inaccessibility and obfuscation.  It appears in various idiomatic expressions: “doesn’t someone else handle this?”; “I knew a crippled person once and she didn’t have these problems.”; “We put a Braille sign on the bathroom door—what more do you want?”.  The latter is so commonplace I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard it. “What more do you want?” 

I remember a colleague, a professor of art, who once told a student he wanted a trip to Paris in response to the anticipated question about an assignment—“what do you want”—and yes, let’s throw Joni Mitchell in too—to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive. Preoccupation is all about the fetters. Idiomatically: “Let’s not think about this today.” “Look Mr. Wheelchair. We got you into the building. Now you want to use the bathroom?”

It takes a lot of muscle to be preoccupied in this way. Freud called it “reaction formation”—a psychological defense mechanism wherein anxiety is masked by compensatory exaggeration. The overly solicitous person is actually cruel; the fuddy duddy is really a sadist. Ableism takes energy. But it’s easy on the idioms.

One useful way to think of able bodied preoccupation is to understand it as a social lie. The poet Kenneth Rexroth put it this way:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done.” 

There is something wrong with you my Dear. Since there’s nothing overtly classifiable about your defect we will sell you night repair cream; whitening toothpaste; lifts for your shoes; depilatories. 

Preoccupation depends on selling the transience of physical well being. Against this the cripples are arrayed. And in this way they’re frightening.

If my colleagues wanted they could call me outspoken; passionate; even tiresome. Bully means I’m predatory and defective, which is not the case, unless one thinks a blind man is terribly terribly scary.   

  

Inside a man or woman who owns a service dog is a hidden dog; inside that dog is another and another—dogs reaching all the way back to the Basenji and the Shar-Pei. Further in is a wolf and inside that wolf a soul of spine and desire. 

Who has time for Groucho Mark? “Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Funny old man. But inside a dog is where reality weights itself. 

Inside a dog is where whatever passes for instinct has its last chance. 

Walk uphill in the rain as Guiding Eyes Corky and I did one afternoon in late March 1995. We were in Northern California walking the grounds of an old estate. The woods smelled like bay leaves. Somewhere before us among the trees were many peacocks. Sometimes they screamed—a scream that drew a circle around us mammals. We stopped in our tracks. Corky scented the air and I listened to my heart beating. “Who has time for church or science?” I thought. The peacock made a sound so prehistoric my body wanted only to run. 

My body wanted to run but the dog inside the dog stayed put. The dog beside me had immeasurable and uncountable hearts. Corky said with her whole being, “let’s keep going.” And we did. We walked up a hill and a warm rain fell and from somewhere not too far off I heard the peacocks running in dead leaves. 

The dog inside us is all former dogs—old survivors. Call this epigenetics. Call me romantic. But by a year “in” with Corky I saw how inherited security belongs to us. 

You may be in love with the dog beside you, but I swear you’re in love with ten thousand dogs who have weathered countless storms and heard a million human cries.