Author: stevekuusisto

There are so many ways to fall apart. Live past 50 and your teeth start to go. Turns out human beings weren’t meant to live past 35 and our teeth will crumble like rock on a northern exposure. If you have money you can go to the dentist who will do her best to replaster you. If you don’t have money you can say aloud like the poet Charles Simic who has a poem with this line: “Brothers My Teeth Hurt and I’ve No Money to Have Them Fixed”. This isn’t funny. We’re dying over here. We’re lucky to be going slowly. That’s the goal. Erode slow. Think fast. Don’t confuse the two. Hold the live wires in opposite hands. Try not to touch them. 

A friend once slipped on the stairs. He broke his ankle. Then he got a blood clot and died. All because he went fishing. The steps were on a boat. He was going below to get a beer. He was having a good day. He was a funny man. He trained guide dogs. He liked blind people. I miss him. He told fabulous dirty jokes. He was a volunteer fireman and he loved his wife and kids.

What did I do today? I worried about appointments and the Rococo picture frame of capitalized nonsense and I felt like a failure chasing illusions. I tried to link my thoughts with those of minor administrators. I wanted to take a walk in the autumn woods and smell the cinnamon ferns, listen to crows fighting in the crown of a birch which, in autumn is a foolish thing for the crows are easy to see amid the golden curls of birch leaves which of course are starting to fall. Only crows believe they are imortal. Crows have no teeth. They don’t need to read poetry because they “are” the poem. You can check Poe or Ted Hughes or Anselm Hollo’s excellent bookCorvus.

I’m of course now conflating crows with ravens but that’s what happens when your teeth hurt. One resents the louder scavengers. Lumps them together.

“Easy, easy,” he says. “You are now thinking of the sweet corn of boyhood and those excellent teeth of yesteryear.”

S.K.

There’s an interesting roundup from feminist blogs over at The New York Times.

My favorite quote:

— Blogger Katie Allison Granju calls the situation the “perfect storm of unethical medical care” — a fluke that brought a “psychologically vulnerable patient” together with a “one-in-a-million crazy doctor.”

One in a million seems a bit optimistic, but hey, I’m just one short blind guy with suspicions.

S.K.

A story over at The Boston Globe highlights the results of a study in Massachusetts that found doctors in the Bay State are disinclined to see adult patients with developmental disabilities.

This is not surprising given the lack of consistent training around our nation for young physicians in the twin areas of disability and the social implications of patient care. Here at the University of Iowa where I hold a dual teaching appointment as a professor of creative writing and in the Carver Family Center for Macular Degeneration I have the privilege of attending weekly ophthalmology rounds and I have the excellent opportunity to talk with young physicians about the crucial importance of embracing disability. We talk about the fact that people who can’t be cured of their eye diseases are still important people who deserve great health care and informed support.

My fear is that an uninformed medical establishment will retreat in the face of treating people who are seriously developmentally disabled. I wrote at some length about “The Ashley Treatment”  on this blog and said: “Say It Ain’t So”.

Briefly: “The Ashley Treatment” concerns the case of a profoundly developmentally disabled child whose parents arranged for the girl to be surgically rendered forever small by removing her uterus and breast buds and having her treated with considerable doses of hormones.

This controversial “treatment” raised considerable alarm both within and outside the disability rights community for indeed its quite easy to argue that this procedure was a kind of experiment rather than a matter of accepted medical practice. I know of plenty of medical ethicists who see the matter as being unethical.

Now the ugly matter is resurfacing. You can read about  a group that’s apparently looking for ways to justify the treatment over at the blog of William Peace.

My fear is that when we have physicians who are wholly disinclined to treat adult developmentally disabled people that we will in turn see a stampede toward miniaturizing people. Why not? As the article above at the Boston Globe suggests pediatricians are often treating developmentally disabled adults  because the larger community won’t have them.

Since when do we surgically alter human beings to make them more convenient for others?

What troubles me even more is the possibility that some disability advocates are signing on to a broader acceptance of the Ashley Treatment. I can only speculate about this matter at the present time but I think its safe to say that the developmentally disabled are at the bottom of the caste system. Disabled people with Ph.D.s can be just as abstract and dismissive as any other group. Mistaken thinking has no monopoly.

S.K.

Why did a local TV reporter and her camera man just step by me when looking for local commentary on the politics surrounding the state funding of scholarships at the U of Iowa? Well blindness of course. Gets me right back to the argument below in my post entitled “Toxic Shlock Syndrome”. TV Land even the local version can’t conceive of blind people as being real.

Too bad. I’m a pretty fair interview. See my Nixon-Kennedy debate on U-Tube.

Yours,

John Fitzgerald Milhouse

I need to practice hate. I can’t keep up with the big haters. I can’t imagine voting against Obama’s economic recovery plan because a radio demagogue has excited my limbic node. I’m not properly hating able bodied people who plunge ahead of me in public and then fail to hold the door open as I approach. I need to become much much angrier. I will have to study this matter. How does one become a misanthrope? Is there a workshop somewhere I can take? You know: “How to Hate People 101”.

Having been blind since childhood I know a few things about being lonesome. And I still go to cocktail parties and feel out of the loop, standing in a corner with my dog at my side and a foggy sense of the isolato about me. Everyone else it seems has made useful eye contact. I sip a glass of wine that someone has brought me and think about the icons in a Russian church. I’m lonesome in public.

Haters don’t think about the icons in a Russian church but prefer to imagine that everyone else has something they don’t. Lost in my corner I think that everyone is likely lonely its just that my brand of it has greater evidence. I think of a weeping icon. I think of gold dust in the corner of Mary’s eyes. I take another sip of the Merlot.

Hate is dependent on abstraction. If human beings are symbol making animals as everyone from Ernst Cassirer to Foghorn Leghorn will tell you then its also patently obvious that the ability to metaphorize others is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut would say is a problem of having “a big brain”.

The big brain says that someone who is not you is getting a better deal, more land, more natural resources, more beach front property, more poems in the New Yorker, more sex, more and more. In “Hate 101” the step from envy to metaphorized hatred involves demagoguery. The anthroposophist stands on a soapbox and shouts. He has an unfortunate reedy voice. He sounds like Orville Popcorn. He says that the people in the next neighborhood are stealing the bedsheets off the clothes lines. Never mind it was the wind. Its the Poles or the Slovaks or the Finns or the Blacks or the Jews or the Arabs or the unions or what have you.

Someone yet to be named is stealing from you. But in “Hate 101” that’s just the first lesson. The next step is to imagine violence against your house, your district, your local watering hole. Imagined violence is the Big Brain’s specialty. “The Gulf of Tonkin” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq” are two useful examples.

In washington the Republican’s rage concerning Obama’s stimulus    plan has much to do with the sense that the Democrats are now getting the goodies. They forget Haliburton. Forget the secret energy deals. Forget the siphoning of American wealth upwards to the top wealthiest 10 per cent.

But it doesn’t matter because the Big Brain is outraged. Someone is stealing. I’m going to hate you. I’m going to stop thinking. What a relief this will be. Hate is to  discernment as connect the dots is to designing a micro processor but what the hell.

And this of course is the problem for me. Hate is easy so I don’t trust it. Not in the abstract. The man who beats his horse in front of my house is a different matter. He’s real. He needs to be confronted. We might have to arrange to steal his horse. But that’s for another class. “Horse Thievery 101” will be next semester I’m told.

S.K. 

This is a national epidemic and the story here (from the Hattiesburg American) can be repeated all across the U.S.

This is our contemporary national totem of shame though its points of origin and its sources of blame are too numerous to mention in the time allotted to me this morning.

I’ll merely state that the medical industrial complex we call pharmacology which is in turn the driving force behind the toadies of private medical insurance  has created conditions that put mentally ill people (and especially young ones) onto the streets without short or long term therapy.

Local police have no training and no resources for helping people who are mentally ill and so Juvenile Hall and the local lock up are the solution when there’s no place else to go.

I once talked to a disgraceful man in Columbus, Ohio whose sinecure rested with placing the troubled children of the very rich in mountain top residential programs. When I inquired of this Dickensian character if expensive “hideaway” programs for troubled teens had any financial aid for ordinary families he sniffed: “Not everyone gets to go to Harvard.”

No, but the kid next door can go to your local penitentiary. You can thank your HMO and your local sheriff for that.

S.K. 

My beloved second guide dog “Vidal” (pictured here just three years ago alongside his human appendage and looking ever so much smarter than the H.A.) has passed after having been diagnosed with a massive doggy prostate tumor. He was himself to the last, talking, eating biscuits, and enjoying the attention of his entourage. I am bawling like a baby and whispering Tibetan prayers of passage and hoping that Vidal is now in the company of my beloved first guide “Corky” and my beautiful Guiding Eyes “career change “Labrador “Roscoe” and who’s to say we are not the geniuses of imagination in our despair? 

S.K.

A few weeks ago Saturday Night Live managed to outrage the governor of New York as well as many blindness advocacy groups by portraying the governor’s blindness in what was essentially a form of 18th century rural farce. Carl Augusto president of the American Foundation for the Blind quite properly said: “It is difficult to understand why ‘SNL,’ a show known for its clever, political satire, would take cheap shots at people with disabilities instead of coming up with better material – especially when mimicking a politician known for his sense of humor.” 

Last evening SNL did it again. Comedian Fred Armisenportrayed Paterson with a reprise of the offensive buffoonery they demonstrated about a month ago: Armisen stumbled and groped his way around the stage, squinted uncomprehendingly into the camera and held a pair of binoculars by the wrong end, and when his presentation was done couldn’t find his way offstage. .

I think its not difficult at all to understand why the 30Rock suits are dismissive of the outrage that’s been expressed by and on behalf of blind people. TV Land is not able to conceive of people who can’t see their cathode ray tubes or plasma screens. And as we all know, bigotry springs from the inability to conceive of others as being in any way real.

For my money this is what most offends me about Lorne Michaels and his SNL crowd (who not only refused to comment about the protests last month but have seen fit to reprise the loathsome enterprise) –to whit: they do not believe that genuine blind people who struggle daily to gain employment against nearly insurmountable odds, who are collectively disadvantaged  in wholly unacceptable ways are real human beings. The academic term for this is ohptho-centrism. Vision is the a priori assumption of importance. If you think I’m kidding just try to imagine SNL producing a “step ‘n fetch it” show about African-Americans or a bit about Indians who speak pigeon English and scalp their co-hosts on the news segment. You can’t imagine this because in fact the case for the reality of these alterities has been established. There are black and Native American TV viewers after all.

But the blind are different because they’re not culturally recognized within the bubble of TV Land. Their only place in 30 Rock or anywhere else in the media is still a matter of the grotesque caricature and the shopworn cliche.  

When NBC weatherman Al Roker heard that Don IMus had made racially objectionable comments about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team he helped to lead a protest within Rockefeller Plaza calling for the ouster of Imus from MSNBC. This was appropriate and I was in agreement with Mr. Roker’s view that there’s no place for bigotry at NBC.

Well there’s no place for ableism either but I’m not at all certain we will be hearing from any celebrity broadcasters about the matter. The “blind” are not real viewers you know. They probably don’t own property or vote or have businesses or raise families don’t you know.

And besides: its just a joke.

And we can leave it there.

Just remember that over 70 per cent of the blind who are of working age are unemployed. They are thought to be incompetent. Its in this context that the SNL farce takes on a much grimmer meaning.

S.K.

 Steve and I are a day late with this message to Jeff.  It was my fault; all week I thought today was the day.  Had it been, this Happy Birthday wish would have been on time…

Jeff –

"Here's health to the future;
A sigh for the past;
We can love and remember,
And hope to the last,
And for all thh base lies
That the almanacs hold
While there's love in the heart,
We can never grow old."

– Unknown

Happy Birthday, Jeff. 

Sent with love in our hearts for you and Clare,

Connie and Steve

Over at his blog Lance mannion has written the best rant I've seen (ever) on the predatory and cynical efforts of the neo-cons and their corporate lackys to dismember the American middle classes. Chief among the richest of the rich with the most lucre in his vault and still insane for more is Bernie Marcus the king of Home Depot who has been aggressively lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act along  with his trough swilling corporate bailout pals who, you guessed it are fat recipients of public smackeroos but still want more. Why if employees had fair wages the top 16 per cent of the population couldn't own 90 per cent of the nation's wealth and by god then where would we be?  Etc.

I'm no pinko and by jinkies I believe in the right to make money. But the spectacle of corporate bailout recipients lobbying against the rights of workers to form their own representation is quite a big chunk of hypocrisy. The more so since these same fellows have sneeringly referred to social programs like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security as "entitlements" ever since the Reagan years. Clearly corporate handouts are not entitlements–they're the just desserts. Yum Yum!

There sure seem to be lots of Bernies in the news these days.

S.K.