stevekuusisto

Fable

I was trying to stand for something so I talked in the streets. Strangers passed me on the sidewalks and they looked away as if I was a tramp. In these times men aren’t supposed to talk about civil liberties or human rights while walking alone on the ordinary thoroughfares even though this is the country of Jefferson and Paine and Frederic Douglas. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll get me one of those mobile telephones—not a real one of course, but one that’s been thrown away. And I’ll hold it next to my ear and talk about habeas corpus outside this Laundromat and people will say:”Ah, there is a man speaking the truth to someone unseen, but not to me—just the way we like it in

America

.”

Let this be a lesson to you brethren. My dead cell phone began vibrating and Lo, I received messages from the mournful dead. Naturally some were frivolous, dead people are jokers like the rest of us, so Ladislaw from an undisclosed Hansiatic city wanted to know how antinomianism is faring in Cincinnati and what can you say to a dead man like that?

But my dead phone received some very serious dead calls. The best was from a long dead caller who asked to remain unidentified. He wondered why capital is not re-invested by the most successful capitalists and pointed out that Dick Cheney has moved his money to

Dubai

. “Reagan is here with us,” said this incognito ancestor of someone who could be my neighbor. “Reagan just keeps asking, “How can they screw up my trickle down idea so aggressively?” And none of the dead have an answer for Reagan. The dead don’t understand greed either.

Continue reading “Fable”

Old Fart Eats His Own Tail Like King Salmon

My friend Bill Peace is right: today’s college students are working harder outside the classroom than ever. Many are holding more than one job while taking full course loads. In turn their professors who are charged with providing post-secondary educational course work are frustrated by the many ways today’s students seem to vanish from classes or vanish in conditional ways. My post below raises the thorny issue of “post-ADA” students with disabilities who don’t seem to have the insane work-ethic of their “pre-ADA” professors who often really did have to shoulder whole mountains in the bad old days when accommodations and social acceptance for pwds could be severely conditional at best.

And so I am an old fart. I like to think of myself as a scarred and dented King Salmon who has learned how to bounce off of the rocks and keep on going. In fairness to old farts everywhere and in further latitude to disabled students, I think most students today are reading less and asking fewer tough questions both of themselves and of the faculty.

“Ipse dixit,” says the old salmon. “Ubi sunt?”

The other salmon eye him from a safe distance before they swim away.

S.K.

Class in Ten Minutes

I have a class in ten minutes–and so I’ve got to be fast. I’m 53 years old and went to public school and then to college in the years before the ADA. Like all pwds in my generation I can report that geting an education was quite hard and that accordingly I found myself working even harder than my classmates.

Nowadays I see many students in higher education who, knowing they have accommodations and rights, will appear to use disability as a factor when explaining why they are doing less work.

Obviously this is a dreadful generalization. But I swear I’ve been watching this development over the past 8 years and I see that pwds who are teachers and professors may have to stand for renewed rigor in new and unexpected ways.

In haste this morning I’m hoping to start a little dialogue with burning sticks…

S.K.

Born Rich and Squishy

I continue to marvel at the appalling acceptance of the McCain campaign’s repeated assertions that “with Sarah Palin, parents of special needs children will have a great friend in Washington” etc. blah blah blah. For some good writing and other blog references on this disgraceful misrepresentation of Palin’s record I recommend William Peace’s blog “Bad Cripple” at:

http://badcripple.blogspot.com/

I believe that the lives of real parents and the problems that their very real “special needs” children face daily are so complex, fatiguing, socially driven, and seriously in need of assistance that I can’t accept the simplistic manipulation of these problems by a cynical political campaign.

As for John McCain: just look at his woeful record when it comes to supporting the health care of veterans.

For my money the telling thing about the McCain-istas utilization of “special needs” is that the term is divorced from the broader denomination “people with disabilities” which means that the right wing base of the GOP can rest easy that no one at McCain-Palin is seriously proposing anything that looks like a real social program. “Special needs” means sentimentality only. “Hey Muriel, that little special needs baby they’re holding up sure is cute!” Ah, but who in the GOP wants to think of a lifetime of physical and social struggle to get accommodations and an education for that special needs child?

I like the word “squishy” for this kind of neo-Victorian sentimentality. Translation: it’s at once soft and dead.

S.K.

Of or Pertaining to Neruda

In the garden of earthly delights

Where sumac and cinnamon ferns

Exhaled like birds or animals

Where odors of humus and granite

Seemed things one could live on

I saw myself

Walking for the long, mineral

Chain gang of the dead,

As if there among the trees

They had elected me to live

On their behalf, upright, lonely,

Oddly bruised,

But walking swiftly

The live one who carries inside him

The carved Russian dolls

Of all the dead.

I went alone in the late October night

Toward a copse where the last sun

Streamed through branches,

A caprice of twilight,

Walked with my head up,

Shoulders squared

Like any living person

without a proper country

& who in turn

Hears the live one

And the dead ones

In the poor drums of his shoes.

S.K.

What Double Standard Are Yu For?

What Double Standard Are You For?

One can find over at Lance Mannion http://lancemannion.typepad.com/ some of the most trenchant writing about the decadent anti-feminist and racist symbolism that’s being employed by McCain-Palin as this presidential campaign enters the home stretch.

Decadence as a literary term means the adoption of old ideas and manners—the trotting out of tired material. Writers who do this hope to God that their readers will be sufficiently uninformed about literary history that they’ll fail to notice the mediocrity of the enterprise.

Lance Mannion, being a literary writer, sees how the McCain-Palin crew is working the engines of decadence for all their worth. I particularly like Lance’s observation that by associating Obama with the Weathermen—a radical group that most Americans probably can’t remember, the McCain campaign hopes to implant the idea that Obama is a direct descendant of one of those other “hard to remember” groups from the 60’s—the Black Panthers. You see the drift. If you’re using decadence and your audience likes it well you can just employ as much phoney symbolism as you like. There’s no bottom to that ditch.

Lance’s most recent posts are the best things I’ve seen on this nauseating and dangerous enterprise.

In the meantime I find myself growing more alarmed and humorless by the day. Last night I watched with horror as Minnesota Republican RepresentativeMichelle Bachmann asserted on the Chris Matthews Show that liberals in Congress should all be investigated to determine whether they are supporters of

America

. See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/

Fascism relies on decadence both in art and in its symbolism. In turn I’d like to suggest the re-application of the dunking stool for Rep. Bachmann.

S.K.

Graffiti

Sometimes when I sit in a dull meeting

I think of my deathbed

But strangely enough

I do so without sentiment—

I was always sub-rosa

Like tea in a glass;

Whispered, savored alone;

That’s what it is, I think

To be graphein of body

A jigger’s worth of mind …

S.K.

The TruthAbout Sarah Palin and Special Needs

AlaskaDuring last night’s presidential debate John McCain repeated one of the oft-pronounced assertions of his campaign: namely that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be a great supporter of special needs children should their ticket be elected. IN point of fact Gov. Palin has a woeful record of budget slashing for educational programs for kids with disabilities in Alasaka

For more information on this matter check out this post on MOMocrats.

I am perhaps too sentimental when it comes to old fashioned images of horse drawn sleighs and farmhouses decorated for Christmas but my sensibilities as a disability rights advocate are sorely abused by the kinds of falsehoods that John McCain and Sarah Palin are employing by suggesting that the Alaska governor is a genuine disability rights advocate. Nothing is so false as this canard and I point it out because this claim by the McCain team uses disability as a “feel good” opportunity—and alas the good feelings are entirely unwarranted.

S.K.

Don't Hold Your Breath for Human Rights

What does it mean to witness if you’re an artist? IN the 1980’s the poet Carolyn Forche associated the craft of poetry with the political act of becoming a moral witness. Forche’s work in the arts of poetry and political witnessing lead her to edit an important anthology of political poetry which remains the standard volume on the matter.

I remain troubled by the absence of moral conversation in our current presidential campaign. IN fact it’s possible I think to view the antics of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a kind of anti-witnessing. She has recently been attacking Senator Barack Obama for having raised the issue of our military’s frequent involvement in incidents that have led to civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Obama was citing the U.S. military’s own findings that suggest that a lack of troops on the ground in Afghanistan has caused the U.S. to rely on air strikes against suspected Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds. In turn more civilians are killed than might otherwise be the case.

Senator Obama’s assertion was not unpatriotic or "anti-military" as Sarah Palin has loudly claimed, but rather an assessment drawn from our own top military leaders. It is fair I think to remind ourselves that in general terms the U.S. military does not like to kill innocent people. If you are on the left you may well laugh at my assertion; if you’re on the right you will quite possibly sneer at anything the military has to say—after all, that’s what the past 8 years have been about eh bien?

And so in this instance I am a witness to a mealy mouthed and unethical attack by Sarah Palin on the decency of our own military. And as seems to be the case so often, she is willing to confuse the messenger and the message for political gain while ignoring the real human rights issues.

And that’s my point of course: there have been no human rights issues in this campaign. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll hear about human dignity and freedom tonight.

S.K.

How Many Stories Am I Holding Up?

The film "Blindness" which is now in theaters offers the latest instance of what scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called "narrative prosthesis" where in effect, disability is used as an artificial device to help what is otherwise a weak story line.

Blindness remains a frightening disability in no small measure because the literal condition, the disruption of the physical eye is invested with outworn symbolism that still resides in what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the cultural subconscious. People may know next to nothing about eye diseases but they know deep in their bones that there’s something suggestive and darkly portentious about the blind.

In literature and film the blind have often functioned as a form of narrative prosthesis: their presence in the story is designed to deflect the reader’s attention from the fact that the narrative is essentially uninteresting. Stevenson’s "Blind Pew" is a classic example of the technique. Aside from evil blind figures there are hundreds of stories in which a blind man or woman is victimized. Never mind that blind people are no more likely to be victimized than anyone else–the imagined scenario is all that matters. Fear sells a bad story every time a strong imagination isn’t doing the typing.

For more information about how the blind community is responding to the film visit this excellent link at the American Council of the Blind:

http://www.acb.org/press-releases/press-release_Blindness_the-movie.html

There are of course real lives in the balance. As I have said many times previously on this blog the unemployment rate for the blind remains unacceptably high in the United States and around the world. The film "Blindness" or the execrable novel that birthed it are guilty of false disability figuration–aesthetic choices that can only further harm real people.

S.K.