It was in the steam room where men achieve greatness that my friend Geronimo said that President Obama should ask himself “What would Nixon do?” as he contemplates the fate of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. I think that’s a “spot on” idea, a capital idea, a non-pareil–and I don’t mean movie candy. I call this the WWND principle.
Nixon of course would call the general to the Oval Office for a bowl of cottage cheese with ketchup.
S.K.
Cary Grant could still move pretty well for a guy his age in 1964.
A great post by Lance Mannion on the subject of aging gracefully and Cary Grant.
The following article by S. E. Smith on disability terminology and popular media comes to us via the Inclusion Daily Express. You can read the whole piece by going to Inclusion Daily.
S.E. Smith: A Starter Kit For Nondisabled People And The Media
(Feministe)
June 21, 2010
FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA– [Excerpt] I thought I’d write a very brief primer on some disability terminology in US English, to familiarise nondisabled readers with the language that has arisen as disability rights activists fight for the right to self identify, to resist ableist language, and to confront problematic framings of disability embedded in the way we talk about disability.
The disability rights movement is much older than many people realise and from the start, people were tackling, confronting, and challenging language. Respectful language is already here; it’s been developed, refined, and used by people with disabilities for decades, it’s just disseminating to the general population very slowly.
It’s important to remember here that self-identification trumps all — if you are talking to or about a particular person, please ask how that person identifies or would like to be referred to.
It’s also important to remember that there are different frameworks for thinking and talking about disability, not just around the world, but in the United States. While this primer is broadly useful for talking about disability in the US, because that is where I am writing, your mileage may vary.
Entire article:
Disability Terminology: A Starter Kit for Nondisabled People and the Media
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0621e.htm
Related:
The media’s struggle with disabilities (Chicago Now)
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0621f.htm
The Vatican’s official newspaper has declared The Blues Brothers a “Catholic classic.”
We at POTB asolutely LOVE learning that the Vatican has declared the film "The Blues Brothers" a "Catholic classic". Soon we predict they will add "Last Tango in Paris"!
Back in 1995 a man named McArthur Wheeler was quickly arrested after he robbed two banks in Pittsburgh. He’d smeared lemon juice on his face believing it would prevent surveillance cameras from recording his image. An article in today’s New York Times by writer and film maker Errol Morris entitled the Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is takes a delightful look at what is now known as “The Dunning-Kruger Effect“. The gist of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who don’t know what they don’t know are prone to inflated self-assessments. See this link for Professor Dunning’s original paper on the subject.
I’ll quote the abstract of Dunning’s paper in full:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
As they say in a popular TV commercial: “Dogs don’t know its not bacon!”
The direction of Errol Morris’ piece in the Times is that not knowing what you don’t know frames an epistemological opportunity but only if one recognizes the limits of self-knowledge. “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” (Confucius)
One thinks of Wallace Stevens‘ famous concluding line from his poem “The Snow Man: “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” We know who we are and who we are not provided we possess sufficient skepticism about the consolations of sentiment and the errors of consciousness.
All of which is to say that none of this is news to poets. Consider the following short poem by Charles Simic:
Bedtime Story
When a tree falls in a forest
And there’s no one around
To hear the sound, the owls
Have to do all the thinking.
They think so hard they fall off
Their perch and are eaten by ants
Who, as you already know, all look like
Little Black Riding Hoods.
Or these lines by Anselm Hollo:
wherever there is a hole
in a metaphysical fabric
you are sure to find a
hundred metaphysicians
attempting to fill it
but above our residence
on earth the sky
is clear, an
uncommitted
avantgardist
**
What we do not know is the framing or incitement principle of poetry in the 20th century. Here are some lines by Gunnar Ekelof that I particularly like:
This music is like ankle rings
if nothing is the ankle and nothing the rhythm…
S.K.
The article below comes to us via Inclusion Daily Express. It is interesting that twenty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that “stigma and misconceptions remain in some workplaces, making it challenging for the disabled to even land interviews”. My argument is that the failure of higher education to create strong, seamless disability inclusion in all areas of academic life has meant that students with disabilities largely remain outsiders in the customary diversity dynamics of campus life. My own university (the University of Iowa) has a student disability services office located in the basement (I kid you not) of a dormitory–a basement that can only be accessed via elevators. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how a wheelchair user would get out in a fire, or how a blind person might even locate the place.)
Bad as that is, the UI also has major academic buildings that remain non-compliant with Title II of the ADA. Title II requires that bathrooms and adjacent public facilities (water fountains, doors, telephones, and the like) be made accessible whenever a renovation occurs in an older building. If you renovate a classroom (or even a broom closet) you must renovate the bathrooms adjacent to that classroom or broom closet. The UI’s student union has floor after floor of inaccessible restrooms. Recently the university put an art museum on the fourth floor of the building. You guessed it: no accessible bathrooms. My own academic building (the English-Philosophy Building) has been renovated on every floor and still has no accessible restrooms though there’s a plan to install them on one floor this summer. That installation will be of little help if you’re in a wheelchair on the fourth floor and you have a catheter and the elevators are busy. All of these problems represent a violation of the law but I’ll argue that this is less a matter of jurisprudence than it is a matter of culture. What lessons do universities teach future business leaders by relegating people with disabilities to the basement and by insisting that that pesky ADA is to be honored only rhetorically?
Occasionally I hear from some abstract administrative source that things at the UI are going to get better. Meantime I’m supposed to take the stage this summer in Iowa City with Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (who co-authored the ADA) to celebrate the ADA’s 20th anniversary. That is of course an honor and one that I will cherish. But I know and now my blog’s readers know that my university is complicit in training its future graduates to think of people with disabilities as a problem. Small wonder then, that real people with real disabilities continue to struggle with stigma and misconceptions in the workplace.
Stephen Kuusisto
People With Disabilities Continue To Face Higher Jobless Rate
(Boston Herald)
June 18, 2010
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt] Nearly two decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, advocates for the disabled say much work remains to train disabled job-seekers and match them with employers, especially during the jobless recovery.
Stigma and misconceptions remain in some workplaces, making it challenging for the disabled to even land interviews, advocates say. While the May unemployment rate in the United States for the general population was about 9 percent, the rate among the disabled was nearly 15 percent.
Businesses slammed by the recession have made cuts that have hit the disabled particularly hard, eliminating the part-time and temporary work that many disabled workers seek, said Jay Himmelstein, a professor of family medicine at University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Cindy Higgins of Jamaica Plain, who has cerebral palsy, worked as a peer counselor at Boston Self Help, a nonprofit group that serves the disabled, for 15 years before her job was cut several years ago due to state budget cuts, she said.
Entire article:
High jobless rate burdens disabled
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0618b.htm
Writing in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Mark Borkowski observes that while testifying before the United States Congress, BP CEO Tony Hayward looked “like a tired undertaker who was rather bored with having to look mournful.”
The history of boredom has yet to be written but here are some highlights offered in a sincere effort to contextualize Mr. Hayward’s performance:
Thomas Carlyle:
“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”
Viggo Mortensen:
“There’s no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there’s no excuse for boredom, ever.”
Mark Twain:
“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
Of course when you mix the advice of attorneys with a penchant for the appearance of upper class disinterestedness you’ve got a helluva a PR cocktail.
The best book on boredom (in my view) is Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind.
If boredom is a modern preoccupation–one that is a co-efficient of leisure and of dramatic or comic narratives (the novel) then yesterday’s performance by Mr. Hayward was an engagement in cynicism and despair. Boredom as a condition means that the bored “subject” no longer believes in the future–either his or anyone else’s. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Hayward is in this camp. But the infusion of legal discretion as a necessary dynamic of public testimony invariably must lead to a dire absence of personal narrative–and hence the hyper- cognition and soiled drama of the politicians.
Boredom for everybody!
Sic semper borianus!
S.K.
An article in the Albany Times Union highlights the cross country journey of Matt Eddy who is crossing the United States in his motorized wheelchair to highlight the independent living movement. Matt is being accompanied by his friend Ron Steenbrugen who is following him on a mountain bike.
There are still tens of thousands of people with disabilities warehoused in hospitals and state institutions who have the desire and the ability to live in their own communities. The independent living movement and groups like ADAPT are on the front lines advocating for the rights of citizens with disabilities to live like, well, “citizens”.
As the Marines would say: “improvise, adapt, and overcome…”
S.K.
The following excerpt comes to us by way of The Inclusion Daily Express:
When Asperger Syndrome Becomes Cool
(The Globe and Mail)
June 15, 2010
TORONTO, ONTARIO– [Excerpt] In an interview with The New York Times, the musician Moby talked about how he was a purist when it came to tea, preferring it untainted by milk or sugar. “It might be a function of Asperger’s,” he said.
“You have Asperger’s?” asked the interviewer.
“No,” Moby said. “I just like to pretend I do. It makes me sound more interesting.”
No, actually, it makes you sound like a pretentious numbskull. No matter what you think of a privileged pop star pretending to have a rather serious neurological disorder to increase his street cred, there’s no doubt that Moby, for the first time in eons, has his finger on the cultural pulse.
In novels, movies and on television screens, autism is suddenly the go-to disorder when you need a charmingly strange protagonist; it’s become a plot device.
Entire article:
When Asperger’s becomes cool
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0615a.htm
It is said Ernest Hemingway wasn’t a good boxer, that he was a poseur in the ring and accordingly he got his head handed to him on many occasions. And although he once said that “courage is grace under pressure” Hemingway was evidently a sore loser.
As Woody Hayes once said: “There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.”
Of course Woody Hayes could generally console himself with the thought that after receiving a good ass whipping, his Ohio State Buckeyes had probably “given it their all” as they say in the vernacular. This is called getting beaten fair and square.
Hemingway was a pugnacious drunk and invariably, after downing way too many, he would insist on fighting men who were better boxers than he was. In turn, upon waking the next day, his lip split, his teeth loosened, and with welts on his shoulders, Hemingway couldn’t say that his soul had been cleansed.
Hemingway wouldn’t have been a better boxer if he’d been sober. But he’d have given it his all.
Speaking of Woody Hayes, as they note over at Wikipedia: “After losses or ties, Hayes would conduct locker room interviews in the nude. A journalist from his tenure noted, “He was an ugly guy so it would clear the locker room out pretty fast.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 