stevekuusisto

Half Asleep in Wartime

Because we have a very old dog my wife Connie and I "trade off" sleeping on the sofa downstairs so we can be near our pal "roscoe". We used to carry him upstairs to our bedroom but he weighs close to 80 pounds and though we’re strong enough for the task you can tell that being carried like a sack of potatoes is uncomfortable for the old guy. So we try to be near him in his dotage.

Last night I listened to the BBC while drifting in and out of sleep. At one point I dreamt I was in Iraq with the poet Brian Turner who was being interviewed about his experiences as a soldier and poet. I was asleep and yet abel to hear my radio. I half dreamt I was in a bombed out house staring out at the night sky. I heard Brian Turner reading a poem entitled "Here, Bullet" and then I was truly asleep and struggling to navigate a complicated and unfamiliar house.

The unconscious is always clever.

Brian Turner’s collection of poems Here, Bullet takes us through houses and landscapes of terrifying moral and psychological struggle.

You can read more about his remarkable book at:

http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/here_bullet.html

S.K.

Stigma, Redux

Why would a group of teenage girls attack one of their own and proudly videotape the crime? One expert said on television this morning that this collective psychopathology is related to the easy "star making" power of YouTube and My Space and the internet.

This is nonsense—the assertion that a form of media desensitizes people and turns them into stone cold predators is ridiculous. Americans invariably swallow this "media-centric" explanation every time we witness a scene of unexplainable violence. "It’s Elvis Presley’s hips!"; "It’s Moe, Curly, and Larry!"; "It’s MTV!"—and on and on.

People who video their own acts of cruelty are not emulating TV or cyberspace. They are simply vicious and heartless and proud of it. How do such people materialize?

Nature or Nurture? The crème filling in Twinkies?

Why did a whole nation follow Hitler? They didn’t have YouTube or junk food.

The answer to such questions invariably forces a return to the concept of stigma and its associated concept of "spoiled identity". The best book on this subject is the famous study by Erving Goffman.

Societies hand out permission to stigmatize certain groups of people. Today’s teens are more materialistic than their predecessors. Issues of identity and social value are prevalent. Who will be the chosen outsider?

As Goffman notes: the stigmatized individual is almost always a person with a disability.

Why?

Because social legitimacy depends on the act of casting an atypical person "out".

I don’t know enough about this current story, but I can safely say that the matter at hand is far more complex than the availability of YouTube. One could argue that YouTube helps us catch such predatory and atavistic people before they can do any further harm.

"I’m just sayin’"

S.K.

LINKS:

Full Story, Today’s Insanity, Fame Was Motivation

Why "Normal" People Can't Talk to People with Disabilities

The normative people who won’t talk directly to a person with a disability are legion as the comment below from Ruth reminds us. How many times have we heard this story? The power chair repairman doesn’t talk to the woman who uses the chair, prefering to speak with her companion. My wife Connie can attest to this same peculiar dynamic. She’s a veteran when it comes to saying: "Well, why don’t you just ask HIM?"

I’ve read lots of books about stigma and disability; books about the unconscious; books about social history; cultural theory; you name it. The bottom line is that "normates" fear pwds because they believe down deep that they could catch a disabling condition by means of discourse.

This offers further proof that people can talk themselves into anything.

My grandfather used to make a private cocktail with gin and dynamite. He imagined that this drink produced beneficial health. The man expired from clogged arteries.

All of this is to say that sub-Cartesian thought has its drawbacks.

"What," you may ask "does gin and dynamite taste like?"

It’s the flavor of terror under the tongue.

S.K.

Initial Conditions

It’s raining in Paris but it’s not raining in my heart. Verlaine.

It’s raining in Iowa City, but it ain’t raining in my heart. Anselm Hollo.

It’s raining in my head and the heart feels it’s a little island in the infinite. Kuusisto/Lorca

Oh, and what kind of rain do you have in your head, sir?

Clavichord rain. Johan Sebastian Bach, early spring morning, lights coming on in the houses.

S.K.

Disability History on the Go

We are cradled by History. You? No. Not you. You are shrewed. You are exceptionally literate and therefore you’re in charge of History—why heck, you probably conductHistory the way Toscanini conducted the Metropolitan Opera. By God! You’re an autocrat of both facts and influence.

But if you have a disability chances are good that History has its hooks in you. It builds its little walls around you. Frankly, for people with disabilities History functions like a portable play pen; it accompanies us from room to room—encloses, keeps us contained; holds us on display; and we sit inside our baby cages with our appearances by turns sentimental and cute or red faced, temperamental, shaking our rattles.

Every day I step from my house with the goal of finally rejecting this image of History. Yet I am followed down the street by memories and ghosts and the constraining or imprisoning realities of architectures and social systems that won’t let go.

I get on the bus in Iowa City and the driver tells me that they don’t accept dogs. I go through the dumbed down rigamarole explaining the so-called "White Cane Laws" and the ADA. The bus stands still while I try, dispassionately to explain. The driver finally says, "Well I thought those dogs wore blue blankets." "No," I say, as warmly as I can, "They wear a harness."

It’s only 9 in the morning and I’ve already had to shake my rattle while trying, ever so desperately to appear cute.

"Look, Driver! I’m wearing my pajamas with the little feet!"

No wonder those who temporarily seem to have no disabilities are terrified by those who do: they see us in every public setting, still wrapped up and sequestered by our traveling cages.

S.K.

A Poem for Kai Nieminen

When I was twelve years old and you were seventeen the poet Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon by chanting. He had tons of help. Robert Lowell was there; Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg…and approximately ten thousand young and old people who were fed up with the military industrial complex. The crowd chanted the names of all the gods and goddesses they could think of. "Help us,Gods and Goddesses," they cried. They danced and wept and begged the divinities to spirit the Pentagon from the Earth. And they went home disappointed. And nowadays no one is singing or chanting in this country.

Citizens still protest, of course. There are websites. People occasionally march in the streets. But unless I am mistaken no one dresses in red feathers and calls on Hermes to turn the brutal engines of Capitalism into straw.

I hereby resolve to shake a homemade amulet and dance in a field of soybeans. I won’t worry about the neighbors. I have just enough irony to be sincere and winningly unscientific, which is to say, I remain philosophically hopeless, Confucian as always…

S.K.

If the Nightingale Could Sing Like You

–for David Weiss

Watching the Marx Brothers in Ashtabula
is, of course, the title of a poem yet to be
written. I expect you will write it? I love
an earlier scene in the film where Harpo
and Chico, disguised as barbers, destroy
the captain’s mustache while feigning
concern for aesthetics. It’s the first fully
post-modern movie ever made. Stowaways
in the bilge of capitalism. Each of them
driven second by second by hormones
and appetites. And every moment Harpo
forgetting what he’s doing because he
sees a Bryn Mawr coed in a tennis outfit.
Every authority figure is a fraud. Dirty
money and guns everywhere. Thorstein
Veblen gagged and bound in the Purser’s
office. And the funniest joke of all —
they have to sneak into France. No
one sneaks into France. Only the pure
of heart would have trouble getting in.
Only the pure of heart would pretend
to be Maurice Chevalier and to disguise
themselves solely by singing like him.
The jokes are all so elegant, and
they are always stealing dinner rolls.
Once I was in Ashtabula, did I ever tell
you that, where the lake is Erie. What
else but Harpo batting his eyelashes
could make the ashes on our plate
palatable? So, here’s to Pig Alley
and to the girl (Lillian Gish) who rejects
Snapper Kid but lies to protect him from
the police. Sometimes that’s all you get.
And let me know how it comes out.

S.K.

Of Wal-Mart and Our Nation's Drinking Water, etc.

Yesterday the news leaked out that Wal-Mart has decided to drop its "duning" of Debbie Shank. This is good news, but one wonders if the hindquarters will offer to pay this poor woman’s legal expenses.

I received a comment to my Wal-Mart post that suggests in essence that Wal-Mart is perfectly within their rights to reclaim medical costs paid out by their associates plan if the injured party receives any compensation from legal action.

That’s true. All the more shame on our phony corporatized medical insurance system. Apparently the ugliness of profiteering and post-modern utilitarianism has gotten into the nation’s drinking water like diet pills and tranquilizers.

I once went to the Reichstag in Berlin to see an exhibit of Nazi atrocities. Films of Goebbels whipping up the masses in favor of pogroms and murder; school books depicting deformed people as shackles on the state’s money supply; photographs of goose steppers. But the most chilling display in that vast legislative hall–which as students of history will all remember was burned down by Hitler shortly after he got a hold of the keys to the kingdom–was a single typed page illuminated under glass. The page looked like any other office memo. It was properly signed and initialed. It put into legalese the order to exterminate the Jews.

Legalese is either a force for social progress or it’s the lingua franca for what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil".

Wal-Mart discovered that even though Americans are doped on religion, sex, and TV (as John Lennon once said) they’re not entirely disposed to seeing people destroyed for profit.

If a legal settlement is large enough to pay back a health insurance system but not large enough to leave a profoundly impaired person with the hope of living in dignity, then the issue is human dignity, not profits.

Our ancestors are still weeping.

S.K.

LINKS:

Debbie Shank Vindicated, but Our Job is Not Done

Wal-Mart Backs Down…

Olbermann 1- Wal-Mart 0

Les Miserables, American Style

I begin with the premise that suffering is a commodity like everything else.

Now Wal-Mart wants their money back.

"Don’t kid yourselves, they wont make a ruckus in America," say the apparatchiks at Wal-Mart’s hindquarters.

She’s just a disabled woman who can’t go back to work and now that she’s won a minor lawsuit against the trucking company that left her brain damaged, let’s sue her to get that money since our corporate health care plan had to pay for her over the past three years. And what the heck, let’s sue the woman for more than she received in damages—who cares if she has to live in destitution. It’s only fair you see, because suffering is a commodity and we at Wal-Mart are always, always rolling back the prices."

I kid you not.

Wal-Mart trots out its public relations hacks. They have the hubris to argue that the solvency of their employee’s health care plan depends on putting this woman into bankruptcy.

Really.

Heck, this argument worked with the court.

What’s the difference between a Reaganite court and the Sermon on the Mount?

We no longer have to strive to alleviate suffering. We commodify it like everything else.

What’s my second premise?

It’s raining like mad in America.

Our ancestors stare mutely at us from inside every rain drop.

S.K.

LINKS:

Keith Olbermann Continues Feud Against Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Responds

Wal-Mart Screws Up an Easy PR Problem

Latest on Shank Wal-Mart Story

Meet Debbie Shank…

Hold the Wings!

I always wanted to be one of those writers who could turn religious stories into poetry. Jacob’s Ladder; The Prodigal Son; Milton’s Satan coursing among stars…

When I write about anything having to do with religious themes three things happen almost instantly.

1. I forget something crucial about the original story. If I were to write about Jacob’s Ladder it would look like this:

Jacob looked up the ladder and saw angels proceeding ahead of him and Lo! He saw that the angels weren’t wearing any shoes. This caused Jacob to wonder if the ladder, which he found to be rather a splintery affair was just a miserable contraption designed for human kind, or whether in point of fact the angels could even feel pain—or did they no longer feel pain, in which case, should he take off his shoes?

2. As you can see, my version of the story leaves out the other half of the ladder which had the angels coming back down.

3. If you forget about the earthward angels you are likely also forgetting to look at the returning angels’ feet. This is hugely important for if the angels coming back from heaven are wearing shoes then we know that the afterlife is full of cobblers and leather tanners. That would be very comforting information for my Finnish ancestors.

Alas I am too practical and salty for religious poetry. I wish the facts were otherwise.

What for instance do the angels do about those wings while they’re going up and down the ladder? How do the upward angels keep from tangling their feathers with the downward angels? I’ve been on a ladder or two in my lifetime. In general I think its safe to say that wings are a liability when you’re climbing or descending.

Genuine religious poets know that the ladder is symbolic. They know that the wings are real. I don’t know how they know this, but they do.

This is of course the origin of all mysticism: wings, yes; ladders, no; giving Jacob the impression that both are real: easy. Show him the ladder; don’t mention the wings.

S.K.