Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

Ota Benga Blues

I confess that war, pestilence, natural disasters and the nation’s collapsing infrastructure have recently done a good deal to erode my sense of humor. I’m guessing that you, in turn, likely have your own inner struggles with our blemished planet.

To cheer myself I decided to take a little walk around my neighborhood. The weather was fair after the Biblical Midwestern floods. I was feeling cautiously optimistic. As far as I could tell I wasn’t dead. 

Then I met them: a middle aged couple strolling about ten to fifteen yards ahead of me on the sidewalk.

Now you may well ask: “How do you know they were a middle aged couple, etc. since you can’t see worth a damn,” and I’d say to you that you’re absolutely right—they might have been past middle age—they could have been Senior Citizens, or perhaps they were a couple of lumpy Sasquatch wearing Izod shirts and shorts.    

And you’d be right to point out this “wrinkle” of veracity not merely in this instance but in all narrative employments rendered by means of my pen. 

It’s true: I have no idea what these two individuals look like. But if you want truth I suggest you read the “Style” section of the New York Times.

They were slow. And they were trying to go faster because I was coming up quickly from behind with my guide dog.

Their respective feet suddenly went “skippy-scuppy, skippy scuppy” and I could hear the drape of their considerable shorts making “zith zith” noises.

Yep. They were almost running to stay ahead of me. Then they reached the perpendicular turn that I was planning to take, and sure enough: they stopped and spun around (shorts making little gulping noises) and they stared as I came toward them.

In the split second when they might have said “Hello Citizen” or “Boy Howdy Pardner!” they said nothing.  They were staring. They were also blocking the very turn I was planning to take and since they had enough time to look at me and say something and chose instead to say zilch I felt the old “creepy crawly disabled person being stared at by toddling pink people blues”. 

It happens sometimes. I have a nickname for these kinds of people. I call them “Bob and Betty Boop”.

Continue reading “Ota Benga Blues”

Below Zero

Someone has stolen the mannequins

From the dress shop window,

Though thieves did not break in,

And according to police,

No one forced the door.

The owner of the shop

Works solely with his wife;

Surely they are innocent.

Small village , main street,

Mary, the Mother of God displayed

In half buried bathtubs…

O mannequin rapture!

Dusk comes early

To the faded storefronts.

S.K.

No Odd Job Too Small

Have you been pining for another deformed criminal mastermind?  Are you tired of all the clean cut post-modern corporate bad guys who can’t be distinguished from your local insurance agent?  Are "thrillers" and detective novels letting you down when what you need is some old fashioned freak show figuration?

Well rest assured.  The latest James Bond novel, "Devil May Care (James Bond) " written by Sebastian Faulks (under the imprimatur of Ian Fleming Productions) carries on the misadventures in the "Fleming-way" world of disability villainy.Devil_may_care  

The writing is terrible and you’ll have to stagger over more patriarchal cold war clichés than one supposed could be arranged between the covers of a single book, but that’s okay because the chief evil-doer is a dude named Gorner who used to be a Nazi but then became a Commie and all because "back in the day" when he was a student at a British prep school the other boys made fun of his deformed left hand.

Bond learns of him from "M" and here’s how it goes:

"The man crops up everywhere.  One of his hobbies is aviation.  He has two private planes.  He spends a good deal of time in Paris, but I don’t think you’ll have much difficulty in recognizing him."

"Why’s that?" said Bond.

"His left hand," said M, sitting down again, and staring Bond squarely in the eye.  "It’s a monkey’s paw."

"What?"

"An extremely rare congenital deformity.  There’s a condition known as main de singe, or monkey’s hand, which is when the thumb makes a straight line with the fingers and is termed ‘un-opposable’.  Being in the same plane as the other digits, it can’t grip.  It’s like picking up a pencil between two fingers." M demonstrated what he meant.  "It can be done, but not very well.  The development of the opposable thumb was an important mutation for Homo sapiens from his ancestors.  But what Gorner has is something more.  The whole hand is completely that of an ape.  With hair up to the wrist and beyond."

Something was stirring in Bond’s memory.  "So it would be larger than the right hand," he said.

"Presumably.  It’s very rare, though not unique, I believe."

Yep.  In "Devil May Care" (the title is completely irrelevant) you get a socio-pathologized Nazi-cum-Commie Social-Darwinized "missing link" who wears an oversized white glove in a vain attempt to hide his monkey paw.

The book aims for balance because Bond’s best friend, the redoubtable Felix Leiter of the CIA has lost a leg and an arm and now gets around on his true grit.  So you get dueling cripples in this book which of course makes the whole thing acceptable.

I can only add that this book should be divided into halves.  Each half should then be thrown away.  You can accomplish this whether your thumbs either do or do not work.

Trust me.

S.K.

How Poetry Works

I wasn’t one of those who believed in the end of days.

I gave a butterfly my fingertip.

I was sweaty, loving, crude, open, honest, and bookish.

I didn’t just "believe" in the Bill of Rights,

I wove my clothing from its threads.

I held the kelson of creation and a dying man

And knew they are the same.

I saw the constitution of the living and of the dead

And knew they are the same.

Sometimes in the sweetness of a summer’s hour

I held the face of the man I loved

And I held the face of the woman I loved

For all faces are divine

Reposed in the ardor

Of the sky.

What did I tell you anyway?

Poems hold so tightly to everything, everyone–

There is no good time to go.

These leaves know nothing

But light and dark

And how to live.

S.K.

George Bush comes to town

Steve and I happened to be in downtown Iowa City yesterday.  I heard a helicopter approach and when it and another passed over our heads I said "It’s George Bush".

Turns out I was right.

This photo captures his helicopter flying over the flooded Coralville strip.

P.S. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Bush_4

ADA Restoration Act Clears Hurdles

While you won’t hear much about it from the national press the “ADA Restoration Act of 2007” cleared two House committees yesterday with only one opposing vote. (I’ll have more to say on that in a minute…) 

You can read all about yesterday’s proceedings and learn a good deal about the history  of the “ADARA” at the website of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD):    

It is heartening that in a time of divisive squabbling in Washington the cause of Americans with disabilities has once again “shown the way” for true bi-partisan legislation and negotiation.

Disability is universal—it transcends race, class, gender, point of origin, sexual orientation, social status, age, fortune, and happenstance. Just so: the lives and concerns of people with disabilities are in fact the most logical point of “ethos” for a largely divided country to reassert its American values of fairness and decency.

While you wouldn’t always know it from the strident qualities of my prose I am at heart an optimist about the United States. I have lived to see kids with disabilities get a real chance in public education—when, not so long ago I was one of those “mainstreamed” kids who struggled without civil rights or appropriate educational supports. Yes, we’re a decent nation. We’ve come a long way in many areas. There’s reason for  a positive outlook. And yes, there’s also reason to stay strident. Rights and liberty are inconvenient for the ruling classes and we forget this at our peril.

“Aw, c’mon, Kuusisto, you don’t really think we have a ‘ruling class” in the United States, do you? I mean, don’t you agree that we’re a ‘classless society” etc. etc.?”

Continue reading “ADA Restoration Act Clears Hurdles”

The Scene from Iowa City

As I write I am reminded of the old story of the Finnish fisherman with a leaky boat who observed that owning such a thing is better than having a sunken boat, etc.

Connie and I are doing just fine here in "river city" (yes, Iowa City is the spawning ground of "The Music Man") and we are safe and dry.Flood

The good news is that according to the Army Corps of Engineers the Iowa River has "crested" and we should now begin to see the flood waters recede from the University of Iowa’s buildings. At present 19 buildings on campus are either flooded or are damaged.

But mercifully no one has been hurt and we have much to be thankful for.

I know I speak for many when I say I am thankful to the thousands of Iowa City citizens who worked tirelessly to save the University of Iowa’s library from the floodwaters. While several adjacent buildings to the library have been flooded the library is still operational as of this afternoon. Perhaps its just the student and scholar in me, but I feel great sentiment about the library and the sight of over 2000 people erecting a wall of lumber and sand in the service of saving our books, well that’s a very powerful thing to behold. The spirit of our students and staff and of the local friends of the University of Iowa has been evident all over this town.

If the weather forecast is right, and if the Army is correct, then we should begin to see the waters receding soon. It will take a lot of work to put the U of Iowa back together but I know that the Hawkeyes will succeed.

S.K.

LINKS:

More Photos…

Civil Rights for People with Disabilities vs. “The Usual Suspects”

Right now, even as we drink our coffee there are powerful forces working overtime on Capitol Hill. I like to call these forces “the usual suspects” because I love the old TV series “Dragnet” and also because it takes too long to type all the acronyms of the various business and human resources lobbying groups that have assembled to fight the “ADA Restoration Act”. Oh yes, and there are prominent corporations opposed to the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce.

The Usual Suspects are opposed to the legislation because it would require that employers actually make reasonable accommodations for employees who have disabilities—rather than allowing said Usual Suspects to proclaim that these accommodations are wildly unreasonable. Why, By Golly! even reassigning a disabled employee to a different but equal job is an undue burden on said Usual Suspect. Enter the extraordinary, well funded, hence powerful Allied Usual Suspects who are working like junior attorneys to “mark up” the bill.

Their aim? To do to the “ADA Restoration Act” what the Supreme Court has done to the original ADA of 1990.  In decision after decision the Supreme Court has exonerated employers from having to make workplace accommodations for disabled employees. The court has used a cynical  loophole when deciding “for” employers against disabled workers: they’ve argued that Congress, in adopting the ADA has assumed the power to regulate commerce within the respective U.S. states—in effect the conservative majority on the court has asserted that Congress doesn’t have the authority to legislate civil rights for people with disabilities—and by extension, for any other group.   

What’s the final final rationale for such a position? Why by God if you give one disabled employee an accommodation well then, by God you’ll have to give all the differently abled people accommodations and heck, that would mean living up to occupational safety and human rights standards and that’s an undue burden on capitalism which, it turns out, doesn’t always see the opportunities for new markets.

So what you do is declare the authority of Congress null and void. You do it by the process of red herring-ism, you confuse the public that the issue is about disabled people in the workplace who are always a suspect group in the view of the general public—aren’t these people faking something? Trying to get an advantage with a better parking space?

If Americans don’t demand of their Congress true accountability on behalf of our nation’s disabled citizens then they are in effect giving away the last measure of our civil rights—the stakes in this argument are really that important.

Write to your Congressman or Congresswoman; take a stand. Don’t let the “usual suspects” continue to evade social responsibility by means of obfuscation.

S.K.

LINKS:

"Permanent Link to ADA Restoration Act Blogging Round-Up, Feb 11-28 ‘08"