Author: stevekuusisto

The story below concerns a veteran who was hassled by a restaurant owner because of her service dog. The story if a familiar one: a publican with no awareness about the ADA and who also has poor public relations skills. 

http://www.wmctv.com/story/19886812/questioning-service-dog-causes-problems-for-local-restaurant

Investigators Learn More About Nazi Atrocities At Austrian Hospital
(Associated Press)
October 22, 2012

HALL, AUSTRIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Forensic crews scraping away dirt from the remains of the Nazi-era psychiatric patients were puzzled: The skeletal fingers were entwined in rosary beads. Why, the experts wondered, would the Nazis — who considered these people less than human — respect them enough to let them take their religious symbols to their graves?

It turns out they didn’t.

A year after the first of 221 sets of remains were exhumed at a former Austrian hospital cemetery, investigators now believe the beads were likely nothing more than a cynical smokescreen, placed to mislead relatives attending the burials into thinking that the last stage of their loved ones’ lives was as dignified as their funerals.

But skeletons don’t lie. Forensic work shows that more than half of the victims had broken ribs and other bone fractures from blows likely dealt by hospital personnel. Many died from illnesses such as pneumonia, apparently caused by a combination of physical injuries, a lack of food and being immobilized for weeks at a time.

Neither do medical records, which show that medical personnel cursed their patients as “imbeciles,” “idiots” and “useless eaters.”

Indeed, there is now little doubt that for many of the dead — mentally and physically disabled people considered by the Nazis to be human garbage — their final months were hell on Earth.

Entire article:
Austria probes gruesome fate of Nazi-era disabled
http://tinyurl.com/ide1022123a
Related:
Accused Nazi Euthanasia Doctor Dies — January 4, 2006 (Inclusion Daily Express Archives)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/archives/06/01/04/010406aueuthkids.htm
Hitler’s Unwanted Children by Sally M. Rogow
http://tinyurl.com/ide1022123c

I don’t know about you. You may not care a whit about poems. That’s okay. No matter what the poets say, it’s possible to live well without poetry. In my personal view, to the extent that such a thing is possible, I think the arts help us live good lives–a Platonic idea to be sure and one that I’ve never felt the need to give up. Poetry opens pathways to potentially new ways of knowing. 

Unless it doesn’t. 

A poet who I admire writes:

“You’ll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.”

(The poet in this case is Charles Simic.)

Alas for the able bodied poets, who cannot see disability outside of its outworn Victorian metaphors, a blind person can watch a silent movie. Blind people have friends who describe what’s going on. Blind people know all about Charlie Chaplin.

Ableist poetry is still all around us. 

The human story is a grey complexity of fishing line and thumb tacks. But blindness is never abjection in the way Simic has used it. Don’t you believe it. 

Here. I’m catching a fish from my neighbor’s soul.

By Andrea Scarpino

A momentous event: I have purchased my first Playboy magazine, my first pornography of any kind. I put it on my credit card at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport. Don Peteroy, a dear friend of my dear friend Tara, won Playboy’s annual college fiction contest, and his winning short story was published in October’s magazine. I had been working up the courage all month to actually purchase the damn thing—I’m a firm believer that writers need to support one another, and Don is an amazing writer, and well, it just felt like something I should do.

But not in small-town Marquette. I couldn’t overcome the thought of running into someone I knew while buying it—or worse, having to hand my money to one of Zac’s students, many of whom seem to work as cashiers. I’m a feminist for god’s sake—how was I going to explain that?

So I was in Cincinnati last Sunday having lunch with Tara, who whipped out her copy in the middle of a restaurant while children chattered away all around us, and who laughed about showing Don’s story to her Rabbi. And no one batted an eye. Feminist police didn’t descend to confiscate my feminist card or anything.

Tara dropped me off at the airport for my flight home to Marquette and I realized if I didn’t buy the Playboy then, I would never buy it. So I did. And I carried it through three airports. And read it. In public.

And here’s what I learned: no one seems to get riled up about Playboy anymore. It didn’t even seem to me particularly controversial, or sexy, or provocative. Besides Don’s amazing short story, the October issue contains an interview with Stephen Hawking—Stephen Hawking for god’s sake!—and a column by James Franco, and some pretty intellectual and interesting articles. Of course, interspersed with Hawking’s discussion of black holes are photographs of naked women, which is pretty weird. Weirder yet is that the women’s bodies are so highly airbrushed they don’t even appear to be bodies.

And weirder still is the fact that I didn’t blink a feminist eyelash. Is it because I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing women’s bodies sell so many things that I wasn’t surprised to see them selling sex, or selling a magazine? Because their airbrushed bodies are so foreign to any naked bodies I have ever seen? That I expected more—more violence perhaps? I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m still surprised by how little outrage I could muster—and how un-sexy I found the whole magazine.

Of course, I won’t be buying Playboy regularly—unless Don keeps winning their college fiction contest. I couldn’t even keep the magazine in my house—I’ve already mailed it to another friend to read. But I’ve surprised myself. Have I lost my feminist sensibility? Become complacent? Does it take more to shock me these days than a woman’s naked body interspersed with articles I actually want to read? Maybe Playboy has lost whatever edge it once had. Maybe I imagined the magazine to be a bigger deal that it ever was. In any case, I feel like I’ve reached some sort of strange milestone: I bought pornography. Then actually read the articles.

Posted with Blogsy

Last night, trying to fall asleep, I started reading Christopher Hitchens memoir “Hitch 22” by means of my iPad with its “VoiceOver” speech synthesis software. Like many an English writer before him (all acknowledged) Hitchens undertakes a chapter on the horrors of boarding school replete with beatings, buggery and brutality. For my money he’s not as good on the subject as his hero George Orwell, but who could be? What interested me was a burst of neo-liberal nostalgia wherein “the Hitch” opines sniffingly that today’s incarnation of his school boasts custom cuisine for vegetarian students, and a host of programs for children with learning disabilities, and accordingly, a certain rigor may have been lost.  

One problem when one is reading with the iPad is that you can’t throw it across the room. I most certainly would have thrown the hardback edition had I been reading one. But had I been reading one, I wouldn’t be blind. Rigor, Mr. Hitchens? Could you have conceived of the possibility that the students with disabilities now inhabiting your Ur-Scholastica, might be the hardest working ones? 

Forget your gramophone or the squeak of the door, dogs know the circumstances of emptiness. They understand the moon’s lost gloves and a spoon dropped in snow are equal, both make a circumspect music. What is marvelous is that dogs also possess the notes of silence–and who can describe them? Blood oranges in a dream roll off a table. I raise my head. Stare. 

“Lancashire Police apologised to Farmer for the “traumatic experience” but confirmed last night that the officer who fired the Taser has not been suspended and remains on duty.”

http://m.guardiannews.com/ms/p/gnm/us/sDKy1pwv7ncWCN7UW24NA7A/view.m?id=43

There are people who make a living by threading their ways through dark places, and we know this. As a boy I was fascinated by sewer workers, by the idea that men and women can descend beneath the streets and work. I imagined them making their ways in the pitch black like undersea divers in heavy suits with enormous helmets. I was a blind kid. I liked the darkened undersea, stories of Captain Nemo and the television character Mike Nelson, played by Lloyd Bridges on a show called “Sea Hunt”–I used to pretend I was scuba diving in the dark woods behind my house. I was a lonesome and circumspect boy. 

The first time I met a guide dog trainer I saw my natural neighbor. He was someone who understood me. Someone who knew what its like to be Mike Nelson with a fogged mask. 

Blind since childhood I’d never met a sighted person who “got it” until I met Dave See. I also loved that his name was “See”–what a Dickensian trick! He rang my doorbell, Dave See did, and he announced himself: “I’m Dave See from Guiding Eyes for the Blind.” And so I told him my name was X-Ray Vision from Blinkyville. Why not? 

If you work with dogs and people in equal measure, striving to make a team that’s safe in traffic, you must have an empathetic and compound mind. Later I’d see that it’s a bi-cameral mind–as Julian Jaynes would say–with a capacity to problem solve in two worlds. 

Guide dog trainers know how to become six legged creatures, creatures with two minds and one purpose, which is surviving. But don’t kid yourself, this is a profession that takes years of preparation. 

–from What a Dog Can Do: A Memoir of Life with Guide Dogs

by Stephen Kuusisto

forthcoming from Simon and Schuster

Recently on this blog I said that vanity concerns itself with survival but it won’t take you very far. I was thinking of heightened self regard as a tool, one of the many tools a person with a disability needs. Physical difference requires emotional intensity–whatever we might call the opposite of retreat. 

But vanity, less emotional intelligence won’t open the road before you. Politicians who live solely for vanity learn this the hard way–Joseph McCarthy, Newt Gingrich, Gary Hart, all come to mind. The landscape is littered with wounded vanity-slingers, and yes, they occupy every profession. One can see plenty of them at the university, but just so, check out your local Chamber of Commerce. There’s a Becky Sharp or Uriah Heep in every workplace. These are people who look at the rest of us with indifference, with a contempt born of wounded pride and of having lost their way. 

If you have a disability you might call yourself a “wounded warrior” or a “crip” but the vanity noose will strangle you if you think that heightened self-awareness is its own singularity. Among other things vanity means being simultaneously wise and contemptuous, and the road for people in this condition is thin. 

I am angry. I experience discrimination. And yet I’m also a Jungian, which means I see every instance of difficulty as alchemy, and yes, sometimes this is dime store alchemy, to borrow Charles Simic’s phrase–meaning the tools of transformation are available to us even in the dollar store. What I believe in is the spirit’s heat, the soul’s capacity for expansion, the amplification of interior space–the place where the meanings are. What I mean is that the inner life can evade the dialectical battle between the world and human worth. I am misunderstood and I am best so. And all the monsters in the mind, all the spiritually shattered people who surround us, these too are parts of the mind. Here: in the Woolworth’s of the imagination I have placed a plastic cattle skull on the head of a Human Resources functionary. And now she is part of me, a bit of inspired containment, part of the kaleidoscopic soul. Yes, this is an interminable task. But it’s a thing of beauty. 

Once, at a Greek monastery I saw intricate tin cut-outs of body parts hanging from the altar. These were the votive implications of magic. Prayers made visible. But these body bits, as one might call them, were also metaphorical fragments of the human soul. 

I was young when I saw this. But I wrote in my notebook: “You forget this at your peril.”