Author: stevekuusisto

Going to “The Big Apple” offers me a fair slice of nostalgia for I used to live and work in the metro New York area and back in the year 2000 I was even (yes, hold onto your chair) I was even offered a job by Rudy Giuliani to direct the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. I chose instead to return to teaching and that’s the name of the song. I really didn’t want to work for the Giuliani administration. There was plenty of cathected heartlessness in that bunch.

My term for cathected heartlessness is “The Shackleton Effect”. When things got tight Shackleton and his crew shot and ate their dogs. That’s how it goes when things get tight. Nowadays we see plenty of evidence that our nation’s political culture has adopted the Shackleton Effect. In the Giuliani administration there was a lot of noise about putting welfare cheats back to work. Funny how lots of those folks were actually people with disabilities.

Today, just across the Hudson River Governor Christie has adopted a state budged that wipes out programs for the disabled. He doesn’t want to hurt the millionaires. And as New Jersey goes, so goes the nation. The Shackleton Effect is becoming legion.

Yes, I’m using dogs as a metaphor. Dogs are loyal and they depend on their human partners. Right about now I’ll venture that people with disabilities need all the human partners they can get–especially in politics.

So anyway, I went to New York. I spoke at the New York Public Library as part of a panel on the ADA. Remember the ADA? Everyone is remembering it this summer because this is its 20th anniversary. Yes it is good to remember the ADA. We’re all for remembrance.  But we’re also for the ADA “in the breach” or in the trenches.

Imagine my dismay when upon arrival at Newark International Airport late last Tuesday evening I was immediately denied a taxi ride. The driver in question, when confronted with the law, told me he didn’t give a shit. Said it right in front of the cab stand dispatchers and a long line of waiting customers. A guy behind me said: “Fuck, I’m not getting in that cab.” 

The nest morning I endeavored to call the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission only to find that their telephone number has been incorporated into a city-wide system called “311”. Apparently the idea is modeled on 911. The system is supposed to streamline city services. But Lo and Behold its also a Byzantine loop of messages and hang ups. I never did get in touch with anyone who might help me file a complaint.

I’m quite pissed off. In general I don’t like being pissed off. But my mind is skinned. I will file a complaint however meaningless it may prove to be. However long it takes me.

**

It is hard to go places when you have a disability. The restaurant doesn’t have wheel chair accessible restrooms. The cab won’t pick you up. When you factor in the extraordinary unemployment rates for people with disabilities it leads one to ask: “Why go anywhere?” Indeed. Some days the whole matter seems hopeless.

To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg: “America I’m putting my crippled shoulder to the wheel.”

I guess that’s why I keep writing this blog.

**

Writing a blog feels a bit like being an old style Ham radio operator. Is anybody out there? “Come in, Rangoon!”

**

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I believed (with ardor) that the Americans with Disabilities Act would usher in a thrilling new era of employment opportunities for people with disabilities in this country. I was only 35 years old when the ADA was ratified and signed into law. I suppose you could say that I was just young enough to be uplifted by the adoption of a sweeping civil rights law. Young people are necessarily idealistic and thank heaven for that fact.

Still, 20 years later I can see how the organized “disableism” of corporate and cultural forces have worked assiduously to undermine the ADA and to further ensure that people with disabilities remain largely unemployed.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has been so hostile to disability rights that Congress had to create legislation to restore the employment discrimination oversight powers of the ADA.

Disableism is in my view the organized and determined use of power to prevent people with disabilities from becoming full members of society.

I believe along with tens of thousands of other people who have disabilities that the highest court in our land is guilty of disableism.

Justices like Antonin Scalia believe that people with disabilities should be grateful just to be carried up a flight of stairs when there’s no ramp available in a federal building. You can look it up.

Disableism is still rampant long after the ADA.

Shame on our Supreme Court. Shame on employers who set back the cause of employment for people with disabilities.

In this month when disability rights advocates are blogging about the anniversary of the ADA I want to remind cyber space that the work for inclusion is perhaps even more critical now than it was when the ADA was first conceived. Remember, Governor Chirstie is taking books away from the blind and physically disabled in the Garden State.

Disableism is alive and well in the halls of government. Governor Christie does not believe in the rights of people with disabilities. He thinks cripples are on the dole. Such people are shameful, and I still believe that these politicians are out of step with our nation’s sense of fairness.

This is why I’m getting a crick in my neck while typing at this little laptop on a beautiful day.

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

(Somewhere in Michigan, we think…)

Driving across the country for four days with three cats, suitcases, computers, a printer and scanner, kitchen essentials and Subway sandwiches fit into every available inch of car provides ample material and opportunity for contemplation.

For one thing, the scenery changes. Brown swathes of desert give way to redder swathes, then small shrubs and evergreen trees appear, then tall grasses and farms, rolling hills and deciduous trees, small lakes. The people change, too. Their accents lilt one way and then another, and their language changes—from soda to pop, from like to you know. Their clothing, bumper stickers, political signs change.

This is a huge country, I kept saying to Zac, which of course is something I should have already known. I’ve visited many countries where a drive from end to end can take just one day, where a train can bring you through multiple customs stops in just one afternoon. But passing through state after state, day after day, really hits home just how expansive the United States really is, how many different types of people call it home, how many different ideologies and time zones and landscapes and climates interact in one space.

Almost every presidential election, I look at the blue and red colored maps all the news organizations produce and say, We’d really be better off if this country were divided in two. I would be happy, in those moments, to give Texas back to Mexico—in fact, to concede much of the southern and middle states, to build my own country of coasts. But as I drove through some of those middle states (states that Californians like to call flyover), as I watched the changing landscapes and cultures, I wasn’t quite so sure.

And I worried at my snobbishness. Who am I, after all, to cut out entire states just because I don’t agree with their politics? Who am I to stand on my soapbox and decry entire citizenries stupid or less than? Yes, I was terrified by the man pumping gas in Utah with a pistol visibly strapped to his waist. But I have family members who own guns and I’m not sure I’m ready to disallow them from the Union. No, I’m not a big fan of the lack of vegetarian options at restaurants between Los Angeles and Chicago. But I’m also not sure that warrants complete state-wide ostracization.

Driving across the country with most of my worldly belongings squeezed into our car, I thought about the presidential candidate speeches that used to rankle me—how candidates talk about traveling our great country or meeting people in small town America. How they act like seeing our country unfold from a tour bus or airplane helps them understand something about Americans. But now, I almost feel like I get it. Something shifted in my thinking as I drove across the country, as I watched the incredible diversity of the United States unfold from the seat of a car. I’m not sure what to call it or how long this feeling will last, but I feel, for the first time in my life, like all the varied and strangely cut pieces of our country actually fit. That that gun toting Utah man belongs in our country just as clearly as I belong (if, indeed, I do belong). That there’s something magical about so many types of people and landscapes and accents and climates coming together into one country, one populace, somehow, somehow, making it work most of the time.

Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino lives now in Marquette, MIchigan and is a regular contributor to POTB. You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

I have been trying to cheer myself, what with two suspect wars at hand and watching 4,000 young Iowans boarding planes for Afghanistan. “Cheer” is course the wrong word, trite in all its variations. But I have been opposed to these conflicts and continue to oppose them. I will try any spiritual nick-nack, any mega-theric penny candy I can find.

Today I remembered an anti-war poem from the Viet Nam era by Bill Knott entitled “Prosepoem to Hart Crane”. Knott’s poem is better than penny candy. I first encountered it in Robert Bly’s magazine The Seventies. Here are its opening lines:

India and China, please help, there is a famine here, an

American famine, there’s no longer enough America to

Feed Whitman or Poe, and I’m getting very thin. Oh drop-

ping bombs upon what no longer exists! Glances traveling

through life and death…  

**

My melancholia on the fourth is marked by this unshakable sense that our nation is dying spiritually, that there are few heroes of the moment who might stand and say that our job is to feed the world, embrace human rights, and to finally, finally reject imperialism.

To paraphrase Lou Reed, somewhere an arms manufacturer is laughing til he pisses his pants.

My job, the job of conscience, the job of laughter that isn’t burnt, of tears that are not bled out is to play the same song over and over.

Here, for what its worth, is a poem I wrote against the “wars” almost three years ago.

Life in Wartime

There are bodies that stay home and keep living.

Wisteria and Queen Anne’s Lace

But women and children too.

And countless men at gasoline stations.

Schoolteachers who resemble candles,

Boys with metabolisms geared to the future,

Musicians trying for moon effects…

The sky, which cannot expire, readies itself with clouds

Or a perfect blue

Or halos or the amoebic shapes

Of things to come.

The railway weeds are filled with water.

How do living things carry particles

Of sacrifice? Why are gods talking in the corn ?

Enough to feel the future underfoot.

Someone is crying three houses down.

Many are gone or are going.

S.K.

P.S. We at POTB believe that Bill Knott and Robert Bly continue to be national treasures…

The Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof wrote: “When you have come as far in meaninglessness as I/each word is interesting again…” These words are like things hidden in the dirt which we dig up with an archaeologist’s spade. Even the personal pronoun “I” can be retrieved from the loam of history. Ekelof holds the “I” up to the light, dirt still clinging to it. He says that perhaps it was a flint shard “that someone in his toothlessness used to scrape his tough meat”.

Pronouns are embedded in a long history of sufferings. Each generation must bury them in order to live. I remember first understanding this when as a teenager I dug up a 19th century burial ground of old bottles–patent medicines all. That was a burial site of spring and fall toothaches and infant deaths. And the high school students cleaned the bottles and took them home and put flowers in them.

Under the dark membrane of the cultural or collective unconscious are nails and broken wheels; spaces filled with unease; mutilated faces and broken hands; blind children, dark and alone; the smiles of consumptives; glittering rivers in their ancient beds; wounded soldiers making their ways on homemade crutches; oh and there are abstract assertions down there–crippled survivors are the merchants of catastrophes, the mendicants of the evil eye. The ancient pronouns with the dirt still clinging still have meanings, miscast though they may be, like the figures of an Italian circus. Human sentimentality has no sophistication. See, this man over here has the evil eye. We must kiss the bull’s horns.

Each generation must bury the sufferings of the past in order to live. And yet, when we dig these shards of mutilitation up, when we hold them to the sunlight, we must know that they stand for. This is the work of cultural advancement. We must know that torture is torture and not miscast it as an “enhanced interrogation technique” as the W. Bush white house (spelled small) did recently–an Orwellian miscasting that was glibly echoed by our mainstream press. Waterboarding is torture. It was always torture. Hold a buried pronoun up to the light. The people who came before us understood this matter.

This is why we pay attention to old suffering. We do not see it as prologue to our own. Susan Shweik’s excellent book on the history of “the ugly laws” in the United States tells us a good deal about the ways that civic spaces were closed to people with disabilities or people who were in any way deformed. The good and tasteful citizens of Chicago or Columbus, Ohio, or scores of other cities wanted people who made them uncomfortable “off the streets” for indeed, are not our civic byways places of recreation and amusement? By the late 19th century America had plate glass windows and the new ideal that our cities were places for shopping–the city was a new proscenium arch with its Santa Claus. No one wants to see a cripple in front of Macys. Hence the ugly laws.     

Old suffering is not a prologue. But it informs. Troubles. In Iowa City, Iowa where I now live, the city fathers and mothers are trying to get the pan handlers off the down town streets. The pan handlers are not violent. They cause no trouble, unless of course the matter is essentially an aesthetic problem. And of course Americans won’t say this. They’ll say that the pan handlers are a nuisance. If being asked for a buck is a nuisance then of course we can create an enormous category of nuisances: the clock on the bank is a nuisance, for it causes me to recall that I’m in a hurry. Grazing cows are a nuisance: they make a man look away from the road. The fluidum of earning and paying is a nuisance. Yes, the economy is a nuisance. And purple Mohawk haircuts; rose bushes; other people’s lullabys–these are all aesthetic problems. They cause me to have to think. How I resent this! How I resent the other people! (Are we getting “close” to the “Tea Party” types yet?)

Here come the people with disabilities–both visible and invisible. They project the dread of the underworld to my easy eye–my lazy eye–my shopper’s eye. Oh I do not want to be inconvenienced by an old dirty bottle dug up from behind the shopping mall, a blue vial that once held patent medicine. I do not want to be inconvenienced by knowing of the infant mortality rates in the U.S. or the numbers of homeless veterans or the unemployment statistics for people with disabilities. Please do not make me think of these things.

The long struggle of people with disabilities lives in our contemporary language and it lives in our culture’s nonobservance. I would ignore the past if I could. But it is all around me.

Even so, I do not believe the past is prologue. Gene Robinson, the first gay bishop of the American Episcopal church does not think the past is prologue.

Again, Gunnar Ekelof: “the little word You, perhaps a bead that once hung from someone’s neck”

Let us imagine someone who was brave, who asked difficult questions, who held onto hope with everything she had. Who did not forswear imagination.

“Yes, I long for home,
Homeless I long for home,
Home to where love is, the one, the good,
Home to my real home!
That home is bright –
In my mind I open the door,
See everything awaiting me there.”

–Gunnar Ekelof 

S.K.  

“What then,” writes Marsilio Ficino “is the beauty of the body?” He answers the question this way: “Activity, vivacity, and a certain grace shining in the body because of the infusion of its own idea.”

I have pondered these two sentences for over thirty years.

Ficino was a Platonist and accordingly he undermined his own perception that the body might imagine itself–that the body could be beautiful and unique by asserting that “the ears be in their proper place, the eyes in theirs, the nostrils in theirs, etc.” This is the old Platonic idealization of arrangement and proportion–an idea more Apollonian than Dionysian. One may say that Nietzsche had it right: Greek tragedy began with Dionysus as its only character, hence it was an art of disambiguation and deformity. Later the Greeks embraced the Olympian gods and began to worry about the proportions of noses and the straightness of limbs.

Accordingly I believe that people with disabilities must be beautiful in a Dionysian way though we can and should steal Ficino’s sentence about activity.

People with disabilities put their bodies back together not in idealized, Platonic shapes, but in Dionysian infusions of thrilling oddity. See! The broken god is putting himself back together. The god is full of activity, vivacity. He has a certain grace though his feet will be wrong. His feet will be not quite neighborly. His feet will represent a separate realm of physicality and not the eidolon of Appollonian perfection.

Activity, vivacity, broken feet, blind eyes, arms and legs seasoned by catastrophes. How beautiful is the body that understands its own idea! The Dionysian body. Blind though it is, it still opens the windows when the moon rises.

Crippled though it is, it still rolls its chair down to the beach to see the shiny rain between sea and sky. The body takes these things into itself. This is the wisdom of the body. That it understands its own vivacious and incomplete idea. That it has its own relations to the strangeness of nature’s most unpolished gestures. How wise the crippled body is! It is the oldest body! It has a long memory!

The crippled body rejoices and mourns without shame.

It says the soul and the body are not inside and out.

These ruined limbs say their living must be thorough.

The Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof wrote: “Deep in me abides a freshness that no one can take from me, not even I myself…”

These ruined limbs say their living WAS thorough, perhaps more thorough than the occasions of a straightened man.

The art of the broken body day after day is the infusion of its own roads in winter or on windless summer days.

S.K.

Maybe because my father was a scientist and the nuns who taught at our school all had college degrees in their subjects—the nun who taught my seventh and eighth grade science classes had a master’s degree—but I grew up thinking that one of God’s great gifts to us was a world that didn’t operate by magic.

via lancemannion.typepad.com

Mr. Mannion has spritus mundi and the chicken and the egg nicely circumscribed in his "free thinker's tea cup"–I dare say..

Photo of Eugene Roberts, marathon runner

What do I believe? I believe that disabilities are a fiction. Only the physical body with its boils and fevers, its losses and displacements is real. Accordingly I believe that every day, everywhere, people with disabilities must negotiate two dynamics: the literal materiality of physical systems, and (far worse) the figurative errors of hyper-semiotic “normate” culture–a culture addicted to a heavily marketed and entirely false idea of physical perfection. Whether we’re talking about the fashion industry or the worship of spectator sports–Hollywood heroes or telegenic politicians–we’re talking about the public’s idealization of bodies and body types, an idealization that marks all deviations with stigma.

By today’s standards Jean Harlow would be too fat for the movies. Clark Gable wouldn’t pass his screen test. The “normate” culture believes in the emperor’s new clothes. It thinks you’re lacking in all value if you wear a size 6 dress. God help you if you have a birth mark, crooked teeth, a bump in your nose, or you’re pigeon toed. 

What do I believe? I believe that people with disabilities have a certain inner balance, a richness and clarity of their own natures. I believe that people with disabilities possess inherently beautiful forms for all form is composed of lines and planes, twists, colors, diverse arrangements. And all the better.

The interior lives of people with disabilities are harmonious with the diversity of nature itself. These things I believe. I believe the soul needs nothing added to it to be beautiful. I believe all figures of creation are beautiful. I am rooted in this. I find I cannot be moved.

What do I believe? I believe Peter Singer doesn’t know enough about art. I believe that wounded warriors are only measured by the spread of our welcoming arms. I believe that one day we will look on the age of Hollywood and Milan and Madison Avenue and cluck our tongues at the slavishness of conformity and the simplicity of taste and habits that ruled these times. I’m not saying this revolution is coming tomorrow.

What do I believe? I believe in the beauty of aging. Like Ficino I believe the body is subject to time and time is beautiful. I am rooted in this. I find I cannot be moved.

What do I believe?

Art can deceive us and it can save us.

S.K. 

I had this dream last night: Socrates was telling me about beauty. I could see that Socrates himself was not beautiful–that in fact he looked like an old boxer with a badly healed nose. Because I tend to think in dreams I wondered who broke Socrates’ nose. Was it an Athenian guard or did Plato do it? When I woke up I found that I was troubled by this dream-like nose, the Socratic proboscis.

I shall endeavor today to rid myself of Socrates’ nose, his oneiric busted beak. And good luck to me in this art, for if Plato was correct the ruined nose is a creation of the gods.

Why would the gods break Socrates’ nose while I slept? Surely they can’t still be jealous of this human quest for truth and beauty after 2000 years?

Oh what a nose that was.

S.K.   

We at POTB like this article by Johnny Punish over at Veterans Today.

Excerpt:

Mexico is now the only team in our beloved North America left in the World Cup tournament. Over the last decade or so, Mexico, the country and it’s peoples have been beaten up by many in the US Media for being a weak burden on the USA.  We hear the grumblings about drug wars, immigration, and brown peoples who don’t share our values.  But Mexico is changing fast and we’re missing another opportunity…    

S.K.

This past week, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution submitted by Sen. Kent Conrad [D-ND] marking today, June 27, as National PTSD Awareness Day. Boy, have we come a long way. See full article at:

http://ptsdcombat.blogspot.com/2010/06/30-years-in-making-national-ptsd.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ptsdcombat+%28PTSD+Combat+%3A+Winning+the+War+Within%29

S.K.