Author: stevekuusisto

Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I love public radio. I listen to KCRW my local NPR station, while cooking, while driving in the car, while cleaning the apartment, sometimes even while eating dinner. So during this year’s winter fundraising drive, after listening to the station managers plead with listeners to donate more money to offset our bad economic times, I decided to give an extra donation on top of my yearly membership . When I called, the volunteer with whom I spoke mentioned that two tickets were available to a dance performance by The Batsheva Dance Company.  The company was co-founded by Martha Graham, the volunteer explained. Enough said. I had never heard of Batsheva, but I love Martha Graham and I love dance. I bought the tickets as part of my extra donation.

My tickets were for last Saturday night’s performance. I had thought about writing a post this week about the performance, about the power of watching bodies in motion, about the things dance can teach us about our own bodies’ capacities and abilities. But when I opened my email Saturday morning, I had a message from a friend involved in the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She was going to be protesting the Batsheva Dance Company, and linked to her email a story about the protest from the LA Times. Batsheva is actively funded by the Israeli government. She was hoping I would join the protest. Now this was a quandary.

I’ve participated before in boycotts and protests of Israeli government actions against Palestinians, and think I understand many of the issues that make speaking about Israel and Palestine in the US so complicated. But protesting dancers? What pressure would be put on Israel to stop its treatment of Palestinians if I let my dance tickets sit empty? I’m a writer and I believe strongly in supporting other artists. I also wouldn’t want to be protested because of the actions of the American government, especially the actions of the past eight years.

But the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is based on similar boycotts of South African artists and scholars during apartheid, and is supported by people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu who believe the anti-apartheid boycotts were effective in South Africa. Putting pressure on a country from all angles—politically, economically, religiously, culturally, socially—enacts change much more quickly than focusing on one angle.

I wrote back to my friend and she responded, “Of course we wouldn’t have gone to see an all-white South African dance troupe that refused to denounce apartheid policies, or supported a segregated South African soccer team.” That’s right, of course. Just like I won’t support cosmetic companies that insist on testing on animals or businesses that discriminate against people with disabilities. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference in the world that Proctor and Gamble hasn’t received my money for the past 10 years—it certainly isn’t hurting their bottom line. But as an activist, don’t I have to make these statements, even with just the hope that they will enact change? And why should artists and scholars be immune to responses to the actions of their country’s governments? Aren’t I always arguing that art and politics go hand in hand?

Indeed. And that means that I can’t attend the performance of an Israeli government supported dance company while Israel’s government supports an apartheid system. And I have to do something more than just letting my tickets go unused. I have to make it known why those seats were empty, what my dissatisfaction is. So here goes: I believe in the inherent dignity of the human body, no matter its color, size, sex, gender, religion, ability, preferences. I believe the human body should be treated with respect and should be valued from birth until death, and then even after death. And when the human body isn’t treated with respect, I believe it is my duty to take a stand against that treatment, no matter if that stand is big or small, wildly important or invisible to all but a few.

So instead of writing about dance, about the body’s ability to awe through movement, I’m writing about the importance of bodies at rest. About the ability of silence, an empty seat, an empty audience, a business no longer frequented, a product no longer purchased, to enact change. About the ability of every human body to help another that’s being oppressed.

For more information:

 http://usacbi.wordpress.com/

Andrea Scarpino is the West Coast Bureau Chief of POTB.

Visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

As a writer of autobiographical prose, readers often ask me how it’s possible to remember events that have happened a long time ago. Most people can’t remember what they ate for breakfast last Monday, and they certainly can’t recall what they said to the bus driver that very same morning.

In my first memoir, Planet of the Blind, I recall scenes from my early childhood, moments when I first became aware that I was different from other people owing to my blindness. Although I have always been “legally blind” I’ve been able throughout my life to see impressionistically. If I can press my nose to something I can make it out. Do I see things exactly as they are? I’ll never know. My seeing is invariably wrong and yet surrealistically true. Here’s a moment in Planet of the Blind when I recall being in Helsinki, Finland at the age of 3:

“In Helsinki I lean close to the gray, birdlike women with ether eyes who ride the trams. Each has survived the wartime starvation, and now, in the darkest city on earth, they are riding home with their satchels, which had taken all day to fill; the stores were ill-stocked and the lines were long. I remember their almost feral attention to the trolley’s windows at twilight. As a small boy, I climb ever closer to them, their strangeness imprinting on me an indelible image of hardship.”

When I wrote this passage I was forty-three years old. The boy who rode the tram was three. Forty years separate the boy’s mind from the man’s—then again, maybe not? The boy’s mind does not in fact exist. In lyric terms it’s an elapsed fragment, a lost scroll, the oral tradition song that people failed to sing. Memory, especially early memory does not exist without a lyric structure.

I cannot rely on memory if it’s conceived as a series of time capsules buried by my former selves. The writer Rebecca West put it this way: “My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and play with it. I think your hand concentrates for you.”

It’s possible to argue that there is no memory outside of writing. I remember things by following my hand across the page. Writing, like all modes of composition depends on a weird marriage of luck and discernment. Writing is the petri dish wherein memories grow. The idea is unsettling. It’s like the discovery that there is no true green in nature. Memories do not exist without imagination.

How do I know if my memories are true? I don’t. This is where artistic method becomes important. The desire to remember and the desire to write must be understood as twin activities requiring critical attention. Chekov put it this way: “I can write only by thinking back; I have never written straight from nature. I need to let a subject strain through my memory until only what is important or typical remains as a filter.”

What a wonderful idea Chekov has! Memory can be thought of as a filter. Another way to look at this is to imagine that images from the past are only reliable when we catch them more than once. I must write my paragraph about the trolley ride more than once and pay attention to the repetitions and similarities in the imagery. One can think of this as a writer’s system of checkcks and balances: imagination is strained through netted memory, and invention is checked against the careful arrangings of similar images or “archetypes” as Carl Jung would call them. There are, it turns out, buried images that are too powerful for mere fancy. The gray, birdlike women with ether eyes are a substantive memory after forty plus years.

It’s important to notice that I don’t give these gray women oversized, ostrich feather hats, or lap dogs. It would be fun to transform these women through the sudden electrolysis of imagination. Suddenness is the imaginative thing that makes literature so appealing as a cure all for the commonplace. This is important for writers of nonfiction to understand. We must employ memory but with restraint. I remember these old women who rode the trolley in the Finnish winter. They were distinctly “curious” and touched by the forces of gravity. Both the women and the child have passed away. It took me many days of writing to bring them back with their many austerities.

S.K.

“I do not like green eggs and sham,” said Unvle Sam.

“I do not like them in my Dodge Ram.”

“I do not like them in Afghanistan.”

“I didn’t like them in Viet Nam.”

“No, I do not like green eggs and sham.”

“I do not like them in my bank.”

“I do not like them in my tank.”

“I watched this morning as the stock market sank.”

“I do not like them, I’ll be frank.”   

“You think I’m joking? Go and smell.”

“I do not thing green eggs are swell.”

Etc.

S.K.

In his book Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the1960s Antiwar Movement Carl Oglesby writes of a time that is still broadly misunderstood and often poorly remembered. Just last week at the CPAC scrum the nation was treated to the opinions of “Joe the Plumber” who, among other things argued that members of Congress should be shot for opposing the war in Iraq—apparently re-imagining the good old days when wwar protestors could be gunned down in America.

Oglesby writes:

“Student reaction to Nixon’s April 30, 1970, invasion of Cambodia-Operation Rock Crusher-was immediate and massive across the country’s campuses,1 nowhere more so than at Kent State, my first school. Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered a brigade of the National Guard onto the campus to restore order. He warned the Guardsmen that the students were “scum.”

The situation at KSU had been tense for a while. In April, having crashed a trustees meeting to demand that a war-related research project be ended, the SDS chapter had lost its charter.

Then on the night of May 2, two days after Cambodia, either an angry student or a provocateur had torched the ROTC building.

The Guard were summoned to restore order but only brought more disorder. Student-Guard confrontations immediately became violent. On May 3, Guardsmen bayoneted several students.

At 12:30 P.M. the next day, May 4, without warning, Guardsmen fired sixty-one shots in thirteen seconds point-blank into a group of about two hundred students, murdering Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, and William Schroeder and wounding nine others.”

I think the word “provocateur” is the most interesting moment in this passage.

In May of 1970 my father was president of the State University of New York at Albany and he had just been named the new president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. That month, yes, a provocateur incited students to firebomb the ROTC office on campus. That “provocateur” was in fact working for the FBI. The story briefly made the national news before it disappeared.

I went to see the Nixon-Frost movie on Saturday and Joe the Plumber was still fresh in my mind. I was aware that Nixon used all the resources at his disposal to undermine the antiwar movement in the U.S. and he used federal agencies to incite violence.This part of the campus protests is poorly understood and much more work needs to be done on this treasonous aspect of the Nixon administration.  

Meanwhile Joe  the Plumber reminds me of another group of plumbers –you know, those dudes over at the Watergate hotel.

S.K.  

Ed Bighead has a permanent wedgie and in his comic book life he spends his days trying to ruin the good times of others. Now if you’re a maker of analogies you will see all kinds of reticulated similitudes because there’s an Mr. Bighead in every minute of every day and there’s no help for it. The ubiquitousness of Bighead-ism prompted Mark Twain to observe that the world is filled with stupid people and that wasn’t really the problem, the problem he said was that lightning isn’t more efficient.

Who is the Mr.Bighead in your life? Please send your comments for the time has come for a cyber confabon the subject of passive-aggresiveBig Headed Wedgie-ism.

For me the current personal Bighead is a certain bus driver who always pulls his bus to a stop directly in front of a street sign. At the impersonal level my vote is for Rush Limbaugh whose wedgie is most certainly–oh never mind. I was going to say something about Freud’s description of the symbolic implications of the nether partsin dreams. But you have plenty of imagination. I wish you a good day. I really do.

My cousin was the first person to introduce me to “the wedgie”and he did it the straightforward way. “Would you like a wedgie?” he asked. “Sure,” I said.

S.K. 

We received the following alert from our friend Pat Hill who is a Boston based disability rights advocate and a fellow graduate of Guiding Eyes for the Blind.

“Some of you may be aware of a new wireless E-book available by Amazon which allows the reader to view from a selection of over 240,000 books electronically via a single slim device that receives books sent over Sprint’s wireless network.

If it had been designed with all users in mind, there might have been some audio outputs built in so it would have all menu choices spoken with voice prompts.

However, this $359+ device has menus that are not accessible to people with low or no vision or people who like audio prompts generally. Note that the device does “read aloud”.

There is an online petition being sent to Amazon about the inaccessible menus.  Please sign it!  I saw only 82 signatures last time I looked!

http://www.petitiononline.com/Kindle2/petition.html

When I read these kinds of calls to action I’m reminded of Groucho Marx who famously said: “Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog its too dark to read.”

S.K.  

There’s a fine story about Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor David Onley at the Milton Canadian Champion (an excellent name for a newspaper–eh?)  Mr. Onleyhas had polio and post-polio syndrome for most of his life and he spoke last week at an Ontario Rotary event about the need for everyone to get involved in the effort to help people with disabilities find jobs. This is a speech that I too have delivered to many groups around these United States from Lions Clubs to Rotary to civic and educational organizations. I sense that Mr. Onley is my brother.

I believe that higher education needs to get involved with this campaign to help people with disabilitiesfind good jobs. Right now (at least in America) most colleges provide fair to passably good accommodations in order that students can attend classes and take tests. That’s about it.

But what if colleges took seriously the possibility that people with disabilities have far more potential than is customarily imagined?

By this I mean that PWDs are profound and aggresive alternate learners. They know a lot about assistive technologies. They are tireless when it comes to the art of “thinking outside the box” and isn’t that the truth?

What if the Big Ten universities brought together their considerable prowess in engineering and their muscular programs in critical thinking to actively promote internships for their graduates with disabilities?

Why help people with disabilities? Because if we’re serious as a nation about entitlement  reform than our first order of business should be helping the most vulnerable achieve success. Its just plain common sense.

But in order to achieve this revolution in thinking colleges need to see that students with disabilities are not a burden but a promise and that promise is embedded in our nation’s potential for success and resurgence.

Imagine if Apple which makes mostly inaccessible products actually employed lots of people with disabilities and accordingly their i phones could talk and in turn these devices could be used by blind people to scan the labels of groceries as well as play a song or call friends? Why not?

employing people with disabilities is about imagination and we can all agree that this nation needs as much imagination as we can muster.

S.K.

I remember a taxi in Finland in late February . A friend said: “That’s a taxi for dead people.”

It was snowing hard. The cab that pulled up was a Russian “make”. My pal (for all bystanders in fierce snow after the buses have stopped are “pals”) wouldn’t ride in a Soviet automobile.

I got in the thing. So what? I got home. I talked to the driver who had two children. He was hoping they would go to college. We talked about poetry. He loved the Finnish poet Lauri Viita who wrote a famous poem about being buried alive in winter.

I was glad for that ride on what was otherwise a gloomy evening.

Tonight snow is falling in Iowa.

Lights blaze in the houses.

The people take off their wristwatches and put them aside.

A father tries to explain algorithms to his daughter.

My neighbor puts her kids to bed then talks on the phone to her cousin who has breast cancer.

Neighbors three houses down are discussing the coming layoffs. Who will keep his job?

The snow is present and ancient as always. It has no heart and it asks for none.

You can hear trucks far off on the interstate.

The nation used to glide on servility. Now it moves in terror.

The governor of Louisiana appears on the nation’s TV screens and his eyes wander as he talks about the failings of government. He tries to sell the public on the idea that their ruling classes are friendly.

The local university is discussing the furlough of its employees–this in an era when the nation needs educational programs more than ever.

Americans are unfamiliar with the concept of neighborhoods. Neighborly feeling is in part what got us through the great depression. Can we “make it” on suburbanly feeling?

The snow is coming down and the houses are glowing where people are still up and watching E.R.

S.K.

I’ve been thinking this morning that serious work requires a check list. We might think of this as the kind of diagnostic list they use at the doctor’s office. We know that matters of life and death are serious. We like it when the medical technician has a check list. Of course we do.

And so perhaps the Iowa Department of the Blind which recently denied access to an educational program by a woman who uses a guide dog needs to have a diagnostic list because, after all, these are serious times. The list would look something like this:

1. Is the person asking for assistance a human being?

2. Does this human being experience blindness or substantial vision loss?

3. Do they live in the state of Iowa?

4. Does the state of Iowa meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the provision of state services?

5. Is it or is it not true that service animals are guaranteed rights of access to all venues that are open to the public?

6. If a guide dog user cannot take a computer class sponsored by the state of Iowa what reasonable accommodations are being made so she can take the class elsewhere at public expense?

We expect to have much more to say about these matters but of course there’s not much more to be said about seriousness.

S.K. 

This is a simple check list. The aim of all serious lists is to promote a good outcome. We believe that other kinds of lists can be constructed but they are not designed for good outcomes. We believe that serious individuals unilaterally reject  facile and anti-social lists, which are, as we’ve suggested, not serious at all.