I am pleased to announce that my new guide dog is "Nira"–a female yellow Labrador. I will be meeting her for the first time in about ten minutes.
All I know for sure is that she’s a tall, fast, and poised guide dog.
I feel a little like an adoptive parent waiting in the anteroom of the orphanage. Or maybe I feel a little like a Sweepstakes winner.
One thing’s for sure: I feel very lucky to be making her acquaintance.
S.K.
Over breakfast at Guiding Eyes I hear assorted stories about blindness. How often one hears the refrain: "My eye doctor said, well now you’re blind, go home, there’s nothing more we can do for you." I think that the national ophthalmologic societies should be having breakfast at the guide dog school. Blindness isn’t a calamity unless the "professionals" make it so. I drink coffee with people who have recently lost their eye sight and I’m reminded all over again just how clotted and befuddled our "normative" society is when it comes to blindness or disability in general. Good God. You’d think that these ophthalmologists are getting their scripts for communicating with their patients from Victorian novels. "I’m sorry but you’ve been struck blind by a force mightier than humankind. You must now go and wander the forests of Germany."
Thank the Lord there’s strong coffee here at Guiding Eyes.
S.K.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will be united with my third guide dog. This will happen in the early afternoon. Once more the circle of blindness (at least for me) will be entered by a safe and reliable creature who was raised and trained by innumerable loving people. I’ve written about this in my memoir Planet of the Blind and I don’t think I can do more than reiterate that having a new guide dog is absolutely the "ultimate blind date". There’s a difference though for this dog will be poised and self reliant which is more than one can say about your average human blind date. They know what they’re doing at Guiding Eyes for the Blind.
By early afternoon I will have a remarkable four legged companion and together we will work over the next two weeks to earn each other’s trust and loving kindness None of us can claim any more for our relationships.
Blessings on the puppy raisers and the guide dog trainers and the superb staff here in Yorktown Heights, New York.
And thanks, Al Roker, for the temperatures which are in the mid sixties.
S.K. .
I teach English at The University of Iowa and some of my classes are
focused on disability in the literary arts. One book that I like to
give my students is the groundbreaking history of disability in the
movies The Cinema of Isolation
by Martin Norden. This book shocks students when they first encounter
it, for few realize that movies have featured disabled characters from
the very beginning of the film industry. What’s even more eye opening
is how poorly Hollywood has treated people with disabilities from day
one. The old footage rolls again and students see malevolent and
monstrous "cripples" for disability functioned in these old films as a
metaphor rather than just being a part of daily life.
When those early movies weren’t using people with disabilities as
figures of moral judgment they eagerly used them as low comic
characters whose afflictions were funny because the lame tried to walk
or the blind tried to do the work of the sighted. "Low comedy" means
humor that relies on slapstick or vulgarity. "The Three Stooges" are a
good example of low comedy. In turn, of course, "High comedy" uses
verbal sophistication and artful disguises to achieve its effects.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or All’s Well That Ends Well are good examples of the genre.
What the students find out all too quickly is that first in movies,
and then in television, people with disabilities have been almost
uniformly presented as "figures" who represent immorality or
ineptitude. Between these two poles one also finds Victorian
representations of absolute purity like Charles Dickens’ "Tiny Tim" who
stands for the angelic compensations of suffering and whose presence in
the story is necessary if Scrooge is to be redeemed. Alas, Tiny Tim is
as unreal as all the other stock disabled characters in TV and film
history.
When my students look for contemporary depictions of real people
with disabilities in the media they discover that the field is still
quite narrow. Some of them point to the current "reality TV" series "Little People, Big World"
on the Learning Channel. Others point to "Monk", a detective show that
features a leading man who solves crimes because he has an
obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the movies there have been some
notable triumphs over the past thirty years like "My Left Foot" and
"Children of a Lesser God" and students eagerly mention Marlee
Maitlin’s character on the hit TV show "The West Wing".
There have been some undeniable advancements in the representations
of people with disabilities in Hollywood and the TV industry.
Nevertheless it remains hard to find substantive mainstream reporting
about disability on network or cable TV. When disability does appear on
the nightly news or as part of a daytime interview program like "The
Oprah Winfrey Show" often presented as an "overcoming story"- a
narrative in which a person with a disability is either cured by means
of medicine or spiritual belief, or in turn they are distinguished by
their ability to inspire others by successfully denying that they have
any kind of limitation. As any person with a disability can tell you,
we need better reporting.
Real people with disabilities are impatient for change and ready to
take their places in the media arts. I believe that our time is coming
– perhaps slowly, but surely.
Disability in the media is the topic of the next Disability Blog Carnival, to be hosted on Blog [with]tv Thursday, January 10. JOIN US!
Cross-posted on Blog [with]tv
After two canceled flights and a long day’s journey I arrived back at Guiding Eyes for the Blind last evening. I’m embarking on a fabulous adventure, training with a brand new guide dog. In twenty minutes I’ll be heading to my first full day of training–a humbling process for although I’ve had two previous guide dogs, the training has evolved and the dogs nowadays are trained to follow some new commands. Can an old blind guy learn new tricks? We shall most certainly find out.
Guiding Eyes is one of the nation’s premier guide dog training schools and my wife Connie and I used to work here before we moved to Ohio and then westward to Iowa City. The school has undergone some significant changes since Con and I were last here in 2000, most notably there’s a brand new student residence and a fabulous new dining hall and a beautiful new multi-purpose room for classes and events.
There’s also the "march of time" because of course the new guide dog trainers are ever younger. And they have new training techniques and I already feel like a slightly disreputable uncle whose manners need to be seriously improved.
As always, the other students come from every corner of the United States and they are made up of new guide dog users and old timers; young folks and those of us who are middling old. There’s a nice camaraderie and I know I’ll be hearing all kinds of disability related stories over the next 10 days. I’m immediately reminded that disability is entirely democratic in its discriminations: we are a diverse group from all kinds of backgrounds and we have only blindness in common. And soon we shall have dogs in common and that’s a beautiful fact. We will get our new guide dogs on Wednesday.
I got my first dog "Corky" when I was 39 and now I’m 52 and the veteran staff keep telling me that I look good and haven’t changed and aside from the decency of that premise, maybe in a small way I’m lucky to have had two good dogs to work with and travel alongside as a principle means both of being safe and staying young. Dogs after all are important for human physical and emotional well being.
I must go now into the busy day with its lessons and unimagined astonishments. Here’s to the good dogs and their human pals.
S.K.
Photo description: Black & white of Steve and yellow Labrador "Corky". This is the photo that was used on the cover of Steve’s memoir: Planet of the Blind. While we only see this "headshot", Steve is actually lying on his left side with his face propped against his left hand. He’s wearing tinted glasses. Corky is sitting next to him in such a way that we see her profile, and because her head is higher than Steve’s because of their positioning, it almost looks as if she could be resting her head on top of Steve’s. Many have said that Steve looks like a young Paul McCartney in this photo. Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger
Almost thirty years ago I had the chance to hear the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges deliver the keynote address at a conference on the work of Vladimir Nabokov. The event was hosted by Cornell University and I rode a bus to Ithaca, New York from Geneva—a trip that took me about two hours. I was going through an unpronounceable personal crisis because I was losing the last of my usable reading vision and I couldn’t talk about it. I had been "legally blind" since birth but had managed to read with one eye by holding a large print page by my nose. I had survived college using this technique. I had also graduated from the University of Iowa’s "Writer’s Workshop" with a degree in poetry writing.
I had enough dramatic irony to know that my emotional vocabulary was failing me. I could write like other people. I could imitate Garcia Lorca or H.D. or Robert Bly but I couldn’t find the sub-rosa dialect of disability and I knew that I wasn’t finding much about this in the pages of The American Poetry Review or The Atlantic Monthly. All I knew for sure was that Borges was blind and he was slated to speak about Nabokov and I knew how to find the event on my own .
Thank you for this link to this post:
Borges on the Planet of the Blind
Today is a big one in my life and in the life of my guide dog Vidal. This is "Mr. V’s" official retirement day. After working alongside me for 8 years (and after visiting over 30 of the U.S. states and four foreign countries) Vidal will now get to be a house pet.
When my first guide dog "Corky" retired I was able to keep her in our home. But that was a different era when my wife Connie was working at home and Corky had lots of companionship.
Now I’m taking what I believe is the "right step" for Vidal and I’m sending him to live with my friend Barbara and her daughter Zoe. They live about two miles away from me in Iowa City. They are excited about having a handsome yellow Labrador in their midst. I think that Vidal will be excited as well, because Barbara and Zoe have two cats. Vidal loves cats.
If for some reason Barbara and Zoe find that having a nearly 80 pound Labrador is too much to handle I will of course take Vidal back into my home. But I think it would be hard for him to watch me going out every day with a new guide dog. I think Vidal needs to be the "star" of the house.
Just a couple of weeks ago Vidal performed what’s called a "traffic check" by pushing me back from a car that was cutting the curb. He’s always going to be my special friend.
Goodbye, Buddy! I’m proud of you. Now make me proud over there at Barbara and Zoe’s house. Keep your nose out of the cat box!
S.K.
Why is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying organization for American businesses, opposed to the ADA Restoration Act currently being debated on Capitol Hill?
What is the ADA Restoration Act all about, and why should Americans who do not have disabilities be concerned with these questions?
(FYI the ADA Restoration Act has received bi-partisan support in the U.S. House of Representatives. However the bill faces greater opposition in the Senate.)
The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is generally heralded as the most successful bi-partisan legislation ever enacted in the United States. Disability affects everyone regardless of political affiliation.
The ADA became the law of the land because Congress did its homework. The Congressional Record shows that the 1990 act remains the most thoroughly researched and carefully vetted legislation ever adopted in the United States.
The aim of the ADA is to give people with disabilities civil rights by opening the doors to all areas of civic life in this country.
What is it like to be a person with a disability in the United States some 18 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act?
For my money it’s like those old Peanuts cartoons where Charlie Brown and Lucy are on their backs gazing at the clouds and telling each other what the clouds resemble. Of course in order for that analogy to be effective you will have to concede that Charlie Brown and Lucy each had an invisible disability, but I don’t think that’s a hard stretch.
Unemployment remains high for PWDs but if you look long enough it looks better than that. The ADA has certainly raised the consciousness of employers and the advent of better and cheaper assistive technologies has been a means of employment progress. In turn the people with disabilities who have jobs are very productive and attractive members of the labor force.
Yet the unemployment figures for PWDs remain high. The stigma associated with disability and the lack of substantive managerial knowledge about disability are the most likely causes of these problems but if you’re looking for mainstream political or editorial engagement with the issues you will be hard pressed to find it. A recent event for the presidential candidates of both parties which was held in New Hampshire and was designed to promote discussion of disability issues drew only five of the candidates (Clinton, Biden, Kucinich, Dodd, and Gravel)–John McCain joined the event via telephone and John Edwards sent a representative.
If you’re thinking "Peanuts" you could say: "Well, five candidates in person and two in spirit, that’s a helluva good cloud!" That would be the Charlie Brown position.
Lucy would say: "Where was Obama? And what about Richards and Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney; and what happened to Ron Paul and Thompson and Tancredo?"
Lucy would argue that eight candidates didn’t bother to show up.
Charlie B. would respond that five were there and one was on the phone and another sent a surrogate and that’s a long way from nada.
Both would be correct. The clouds are suggestive.
What did the candidates say about disability?
Senator Clinton spoke about the "ADa Restoration Act" and the "Community Choice Act" and said that she would reintroduce President Bill Clinton’s plan to have the federal government hire 100,000 employees with disabilities.
Senator Biden called for state implementation and Department of Justice enforcement of the Olmstead decision and spoke about Education for All.
Senator Dodd
spoke about the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and called for strengthening enforcement of the ADA. He also mentioned affordable, accessible transportation; fully funding IDEA; improving access to telecommunications and technology; he also mentioned his sister Carolyn, who is legally blind.
Congressman Kucinich mentioned
his single-payer health care plan and his childhood experience with a speech impediment.
Congressman David Bonior (on behalf of Senator Edwards)
discussed the connection between disability and poverty; improving accessible transportation; and fully funding IDEA; reinstating President Clinton’s executive order of hiring 100,000 people with disabilities into the federal workforce.
Congressman Gravel
spoke about his criticisms of representational government and his recommendation that laws be made by the people directly and he mentioned his childhood experience with dyslexia and his adult experience with neuropathy.
Senator McCain
called for improving services for returning veterans with disabilities and strengthening the ADA.
Charlie and Lucy watch the clouds in Iowa and New Hampshire and everyplace PWDs live in these United States.
They know that public transportation in this country has never been worse.
They know that despite the Olmstead decision, PWDs are still being denied the basic right to live in their own homes and that thousands upon thousands are being warehoused in institutions against their will.
They are aware that IDEA and other education rights legislation is routinely ignored by school districts and municipalities and that gaining enforcement of disability rights by the Department of Justice is an uphill struggle at best.
They know that veteran’s services are currently in a disgraceful state.
They know that fair telecommunications and access to the "digital highway" is still just a dream for PWDs.
They know that a quarter of a century of diminishing public programs has left PWDs with fewer opportunities for education and rehabilitative services than ever.
They know that these problems do not get discussed on Fox or CNN or MSNBC or the three mainstream networks.
And yet Charlie wants to think that the cloud above the barn is shaped like Thomas Jefferson.
Lucy thinks it looks frighteningly like the entire U.S. Supreme Court which has been largely hostile to the ADA much to the consternation of congress.
Charlie says that seven candidates out of fifteen participated in the New Hampshire event.
Lucy counters that Tom Tancredo has dropped out and therefore there are only 14 candidates and if you subtract the two who weren’t really "there" you have only a 36 per cent participation rate.
Charlie thinks that’s pretty good. He remembers zero.
Lucy says that just about all the candidates are "zeros" when it comes to disability issues but she thinks that Senators Dodd and Clinton and Senators Edwards and McCain are the best of the lot.
"Good grief!" says Charlie, "That’s still a winning hand!"
Lucy says: "Charlie, if you play poker the way you play football, we’re in big trouble."
S.K.
My fellow disability rights blogger, Moggy, brought this to my attention today.
In a recent Slate Magazine obituary of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, writer and composer Matthew Guerrieri absent-mindedly notes that the composer’s disabled mother was “euthanized” by the Nazis. I am choosing to think of Mr. Guerrieri as “absent-minded” rather than being overtly insensitive or worse. Beginning with the infamous T4 project (which was launched on the same day Hitler invaded Poland) the third Reich rounded up people with disabilities and forcibly removed them to state hospitals where they were subsequently gassed. The term for this is “execution” and not “euthanasia” and one would like to imagine that a talented composer like Mr. Guerrieri knows the difference.
German construction workers are still today finding the mass graves of people with disabilities whose remains were buried in the woods behind the hospitals.
Murder will out.
Perhaps you may be wondering why I labor over such a dark subject on this Christmas Eve?
The most obvious answer is that people with disabilities are still struggling for their rights all over the globe. As with all human rights struggles the language we employ really matters.
There is a lot of “ableism” out there in normative society where the temporarily abled imagine that physical perfection is the sine qua non of true life. Ableists think that “the disabled” are living lives of quiet desperation.
In turn, I’m a big fan of the organization Not Dead Yet which fights to make certain that the general public understands that people with disabilities are living rewarding lives, even in the face of the physical and emotional challenges that accompany so many disabilities.
Although I am essentially a left of center Democrat I sided with President George W. Bush when he attempted to rally Congress in the defense of Terry Schiavo who, as you will recall, was slowly starved to death under the banner of “euthanasia”.
I will never forget that Adolph Hitler called people with disabilities “useless eaters” and I’ll never forget that we have an unjust medical care system in the U.S. which routinely denies appropriate and necessary medical care to the poor.
I can’t use the words euthanasia and disability in a paratactic way. I think that ableist assumptions about the lives of the disabled and the social inequities that surround disability are terrifying.
I suppose you could say I’m having a “blue Christmas” like those folks who were featured this morning on NPR. They ran a story today on “Morning Edition” about an Episcopal church in Washington, DC where the pastor has created a Christmas service for people who are experiencing real grief during the holidays. My hat’s off to those folks. People of conscience feel the pain of life on this blue planet, and for sensitive souls the terrible holiday music and commodified cheer is especially hard to take.
But really, I mean it: I’m not having a blue Christmas. I just want to share the expectation that human rights are supported without exception today and always.
And as Tiny Tim would say: “God bless us, one and all.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 