When I was a kid I learned a lot about stigma. Blind and a bit frail I was routinely bullied by children. But the adults were worse. From my earliest days in school to college disability meant I was a problem. One professor said I didn’t belong in his class if I couldn’t see. My story isn’t unique and believe it or not it endures for thousands even as I type these words.
By the time I was middle aged I thought I’d mastered the art of disablement. I’d learned to be proud of my blind life and I wrote a best selling book about the matter. I turned up frequently in the national media. I was a joyous disabled man. Moreover I was celebrating others. I thought I’d figured things out. If I was blind I also had value. That American thing.
I didn’t recognize that my triumph would be a limited thing. As I near the end of my sixties ageism is now upon me. Not long ago I posted something about disability discrimination on Facebook and a very young disabled person commented that old disabled people should “just go away”—a thing so nasty even the “Snark Fairy” would wash her mouth out with soap had she trespassed in the same way.
I puzzle over the matter. If you’ve a disability and you sneer at older cripples you might think you won’t be disabled when you grow older. In the field of disability studies we call this the “medical model” of disability. It’s the idea that doctors will cure you. And if they can’t fix you today then they’ll do it tomorrow. In this view the cripples only have value insofar as they can be fixed.
Maybe the callow cripples don’t believe this. Perhaps they think the old crips failed to make the world fully welcoming place. I remember telling my dad his generation caused the war in Viet Nam. I was 16 when I said it. This is a more likely scenario.
In his essay “Of Cripples” Montaigne wrote of gullibility, a curious word and I’ll return to it in a moment. Here is the master:
“Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.”
How I love the phrase “to be gulled”! Gull comes from Middle English “to swallow” or, and this is even more interesting, to pretend to swallow—one imagines its early usage—“he gulled me with the proffered poisoned pill for I swear he’d swallowed it…” Gull is from “gole” which means throat. Some lies will stick in your gullet.
Truth and lies are faced alike so long as they appear or sound profitable. Gull capitalizes on wish. Desire is conformable with our being—is our being—and Montaigne, like Shakespeare, understood the dread implication of modernity: we’d rather be lied to than question our yearnings.
Montaigne never uses the word cripple in his essay. It appears only in his title—and so implicitly his readers are the cripples, all of them. All pretend to be someone or something they are not— soldiers, prelates, merchants, scholars…everyone is alike in his falseness so long as his vanity is conformable with being.
Cripples were everywhere in Montainge’s time. The blind were still thought to be uneducable and were turned out to beg. While the juridical blinding of criminals had largely ceased in Europe by the 17th century blindness in particular, but crippled-ness generally still carried the symbolism of thievery. Moreover, there were false cripples, a story as old as humanity itself.
So maybe the young cripples don’t believe they’re disabled at all. Instead they’re gulled by a feature of contemporary identity politics, namely that if you insist that you’re remarkable you needn’t worry about anything else.
Planet of the Blind 