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In her book In Trump We Trust Ann Coulter has a chapter entitled: “Disabled Reporter Joins Media Effort to Create More Disabled Americans” (a giddy and generously flatulent title indeed) in which she writes about “The Donald’s” famous on camera imitation of NY Times reporter Serge Kovaleski who in fact, wait for it, is genuinely disabled. With the video rolling Trump made claws of his hands, flapped his arms and directly referenced Mr. Kovaleski. Coulter writes:

Trump denied knowing that Serge was disabled, and demanded an apology, saying that anyone could see his imitation was of a flustered, frightened reporter, not a disabled person. It’s true that Trump was not mimicking any mannerisms that Serge has. He doesn’t jerk around or flail his arms. He’s not retarded. He sits calmly, but if you look at his wrists, you’ll see they are curved in. That’s not the imitation Trump was doing—he was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid: “’Ahhh, I don’t know what I said—ahhh, I don’t remember!’ He’s going, ‘Ahhh, I don’t remember, maybe that’s what I said!’” 

Even a casual fact check showed that Trump did indeed know Kovaleski. His cruel pantomime was exact. It was vicious. Now Coulter wants us to believe that this was OK because Trump’s gesture wasn’t about a particular instance of disability—instead Trump was making fun of everyone who’s critical of him—they’re all imbeciles. And, according to Coulter, to make his point, lest his audience not be sufficiently alert, well, Trump just had to flap his arms and slur his speech and start babbling. Yes, he was doing a “standard retard” and apparently, according to Coulter, this makes the nefarious business OK.

As a disabled American I know a great deal about the “Standard Retard Complex.” Blind, wandering the playgrounds of childhood I was routinely called retarded and beaten by bullies who loved the “R” word—moreover the “R” word was always their opening gambit as even a six year old knows that once you’ve called a person “retarded” you’re free to do anything you want to him. You can dismiss him. You can punch him. You can push him down flights of stairs. You can put gum in his hair. You can poke him with sticks. You can push him to the ground and rub snow in his ears. You can follow him down the street chanting the foul poetry of scorn.

The examples above are entirely my own—I was a retard Ann. And to acknowledge your point dear Coulter-geist, they waved their arms and slurred their speech as they abused me.

For a disabled audience none of this is news. The disabled experience this and continue to experience it. Just last week a friend and colleague of mine who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Anthropology and is a noted human rights activist was followed in downtown Syracuse by a gaggle of boys as he made his way with his wheelchair. You guessed it. They called him a retard. Have you ever attempted to get away from bullies in a wheelchair? Have you ever tried to elude them when you’re blind?

“Standard Retard” is a lubricious phrase, oily, arousing ugly passion. For Coulter there’s nothing wrong with it—it’s no different than saying: “I’m gonna fuck you hard like you’ve never been fucked before, baby!” Hey! What’s wrong with that? That’s how tough men talk and tough women like it. Why I’ll bet retards would like it too if only they understood it. Duh! Wiggle arms. Make drooling mouth. Maybe drag a foot. The crowd loves it!

One suspects Coulter loves “retard jokes.” As a Retardologist I’ve heard them all.

Q. How do you get Ann Coulter to shut up?

A. Ask her about the etymology of the R word.

It of course originally meant to keep someone from doing something.

 

 

 

Why is it I prefer the voices of Placido Domingo and Jussi Bjorling over Pavarotti’s? Caruso was the greatest of them all. Jonas Kaufmann is a nice boy—very good looking, and more than passable though not as great as Bergonzi. You my blog readers shouldn’t care about any of this. There’s a world out there—a big scarified nasty place, lives short and brutish—Jesus, why should such punctilious amateur criticism mean a damn thing to you? Oh look at me this way: I’m giving you room to say what you like and don’t like and I hope you’ll join me.

I should say I grew up listening to opera. I had a shut in’s kind of childhood. I was either in the bomb shelter or the attic. And I listened to old recordings. That’s how it is with shut ins. When I was a college student I marveled at the improbable fact I was living in the age of both Domingo and Pavarotti. I heard them both. I also heard Jose Carreras, Alfredo Kraus—all at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. So there it is. I earned my opinions by being a fan. What I’m getting at is that over time I grew to feel that Luciano Pavarotti’s voice, as rich and soaring as it was, contained a strange quality, especially in the mid register—what I can only call a kind of “bleating” which I’ve never been able to un-hear, having heard it. He came to be known as “the King of the High C’s” and there’s no doubt Pavarotti could soar to high notes as assuredly as “the Great Caruso”—but it’s the middle range where much of what a tenor must produce and over time I came to appreciate the smoothness and control of Placido Domingo, who even today is my “go to” guy when I’m listening to opera recordings that aren’t vintage.

Why am I bothering you with this? I don’t know exactly save that I admire Placido Domingo tremendously and felt like writing it today on my blog. My favorite recording of La Boheme is with Domingo and Montserrat Caballe. If you’ve not heard it, download it. It’s probably even on YouTube. I’d be surprised if it isn’t. But the recording is really worth having.

I admit there are bigger issues to discuss today. The shooting of an unarmed deaf motorist has me all shook up. Bombings in Aleppo. Hospitals ablaze in Syria. How can anyone bother with opera?

Well, a shut in has to soothe himself. Herself. They-self.

Here, because you’ve read this far, is a lovely moment from La Traviata, Domingo with Teresa Stratis, another one of my faves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR-MG9lcfXo

 

It’s a Mozart morning—not all of them are—there’s Suor Angelica or Gillespie, Dizzy; Caruso; even Peer Gynt. But this is a dawn for Piano Concerto #23 in A, K 488, it’s second movement breaking my heart the way it first broke it when I was a boy. Dangle a heart—there’s flying in our lives. Drop it like a sucking wave—there’s so much sorrow. A little boy with bandages on his eyes listens beside a record player, A late summer’s day…

**

How early did he know himself? Very. Don’t you understand what Mozart does?

**

It’s the adagio kills me.

**

It is late or early for different people

I am without a name

Others talk in the smoky railway car

Morning sun—the loneliest physics—

My feet shift under the seat

As though my toes

Stitch seams on carpet

How one makes poems from nothing—

A train, a few flickering points—

Don’t cry body, we’re going someplace

**

Finnish poet Tua Forsstrom: “Nothing terrifies us more than the godforsaken places”

I don’t know about this

When I think about it—terror and nothing sacred, I think less of the outer world and more about my bones

She would say: godforsaken means bones too…not just ruined orchards…

But the bones invented godforsaken in their private sphere

**

Well well

I didn’t have much when I came

Don’t have much now

I do have a well worn record of “Swan Lake” which you can have if you like

**

I like black currants

 

 

“Jump!” says a fish to the other fish. When some actually do they’re carried off by hawks. You can’t trust everyone in a school. There’s also the adage: “fish stink from the head” but that’s a story for another day.

The problem, such as it is (it’s more than a problem really) has to do with failing to distinguish the difference between impulses and facts.

For a start, the eyes are deceiving. The sun sure looks like it orbits the earth. The famous “Zapruder Film” certainly appears to demonstrate Kennedy was killed by multiple people. “Jump,” says the conspiracy fish, and fishes leap.

You know all this. Why should we entertain the matter? Well for one thing, hordes of Mexicans are not crossing America’s borders and raping people. JFK was really killed by a single psychotic man who was given every opportunity to be a good citizen both in the United States and the Soviet Union. Only Cuba had sufficient sense to reject him.

We feel things and imagine they must be true. Bigots are especially prone to feelings. Trump’s supporters believe everything The Donald says—that President Obama was born in a hut in Kenya, that Mexicans are murdering Americans in droves, that Muslims are a threat to our very survival. Since none of these things are true let’s think about conspiracy theories for—oh, about one minute.

All conspiracy theories rely on the truth being uninteresting. Donald Trump could conceivably run a campaign about serious economic ideas but of course that’s not captivating. In point of fact he has no interest in fixing anything about the American economy. It’s better if you can get the easily misled to jump. And easier.

I remember as a college sophomore in the mid 1970’s sitting up late and arguing with a guy in my dorm who “knew” that JFK was killed by Lyndon Johnson. He talked about “the Yankee-Cowboy Theory” as I recall, and nothing I said about ballistics, fingerprints, forensics, and the ugliness of reality had any impact on him. That was my introduction to conspiracy and pathos as a way of life.

That’s of course “the thing”—belief in conspiracy depends on feelings—unexamined, fact-proof, and always self-serving. Let’s say for the sake of argument your life sucks. You feel it. It’s a daily struggle you have. Everything is wrong, even under your skin. It must be a force beyond you. They stole Camelot, killed the music, swiped your Mojo.

No one would say, “well Lee Harvey Oswald ruined my American fantasy,” since Oswald isn’t a coercive impetus, a strength, a force. Even if you have almost no critical thinking skills you can’t blame a lone nut for your misery. But if there’s a cabal, a secret society, an invasive horde, well then, you’re in good shape Sonny! You’ve been victimized! You’re not at fault if you believe America died on November 22, 1963 or your life has been destroyed because dark skinned foreigners do the jobs you and your children won’t do. If you’re miserable it has to be the product of someone else’s design. And there must be several conspirators, thousands, perhaps millions who are involved. How do you keep the fact that Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya hidden from the decent people of America? Millions are complicit. Don’t you see it? The sun orbits the earth. JFK was killed by his own driver. “Jump!” says The Donald.

The facts are of course touted by conspiracy nuts. My wife has been following a woman on Facebook who insists that if only those of us who distrust Trump would just watch a certain video, the smoke would be washed away, we’d see the truth, that The Donald is a messiah.

Trump’s supporters are wholly addicted to conspiratorial misery. Bigotry grows in such environments—I don’t think it always precedes the conspiratorial mindset…that is, you don’t have to distrust people of color or other minorities to hate yourself. But then, ah, how easy it becomes. You’re not a shifty little undistinguished ex-army corporal who couldn’t get into art school—you’re the purveyor of dark facts.

 

 

Why am I such a sad man? Oh I’m funny alright. I can talk Dolphin like Robin Williams and imitate a medieval jester’s lavish chicken bone dance, but I’m sad. Some days I think it’s because of disability—a “dis-life” is a daily struggle and there’s no use pretending otherwise. If the attitudes of the able bodied don’t get you, the build environment will. Every cripple knows it.

My friend Bill Peace (who is paralyzed) and I often talk about the moments when, early in the morning, we sense respectively we don’t want to leave our houses. The spirit flags. Bill can see it coming: the ugly encounters with parking lot bullies who steal the handicapped parking; the smarmy waitress who says, “I don’t think I could live if I was in your situation.” These things really do occur almost daily. Blind? There are all sorts of miscreants waiting for you. “You can’t come in here with that dog.” “We don’t have time to make our software accessible.”

Whatever. And then one has to imagine the possibility that sadness precedes this life. We bring it with us. Born crying. We die crying, most of us. In the middle we’re supposed to smile.

Don’t get me wrong. I love smiling. I’m not against a good grin.

Sadness, conditional, part of mortality, is exacerbated by disability and there’s no way around it.

The politics of disability struggle keep me awake, literally, for I think about all the disabled who don’t have jobs. They don’t have jobs because there’s profound discrimination in HR circles. If you don’t think so, try this:

Apply for a job. When they call you, tell them you’re blind. You’ll be astonished at what happens next.

Longfellow said: “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

A consolation I think: few will call me cold.

Stephen Kuusisto

Book Review:

Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

Luke Dittrich

Random House

While recently rereading Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman I was reminded of George Santayana’s observation that “sanity is a madness put to good uses.” Writers who seriously engage with mental illness or disability must necessarily aim for a forthrightness that’s unnecessary for “kiss and tell” biographies. (There’s no pensive candor in The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown.) Goffman details the circumstances of outliers and with strict passion. Defectives are among us. What does their presence say about the limits of social tolerance and the unspoken rules of normalizing engagement? Goffman notes:

“The attitudes we normals have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to him, are well known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in our daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving thought to the original meaning.”

Luke Dittrich’s book is about varieties of bias and concerns social class, neurology, madness, and oh yes, family secrets. (If Patient H.M. isn’t quite The Diana Chronicles, it will still hold considerable appeal for Oprah.) Dittrich relates the story of Henry Molaison who underwent brain surgery and lost nearly all his capacity for memory and became an invalid. Moreover H.M. as he was known by neurological researchers spent his adult life as the subject of medical inquiry. (Picture a man deprived of recollection spending his days answering questions in a neurology ward.)

The plot thickens as Dittrich’s grandparents are introduced. His grandfather was Molaison’s surgeon one Dr. William Beecher Scoville who Dittrich tells us: “removed some small but important pieces of Henry’s brain.” Set against Molaison’s post-operative life is another dark narrative—Dr. Scoville’s wife, Dittrich’s grandmother, finds herself committed to the “Institute of Living” formerly the “Hartford Retreat for the Insane.” The book gives a paratactic summary of two main victims and many secondary ones as H.M. was a medical experiment, the story a scandal and therefore ripe for a conspiracy of silence. This is a memoir about cover ups; the suborning of honesty and the destruction of desire. Dittrich notes that when Henry loses his memory he becomes asexual:

“The holes my grandfather dug in Henry’s brain caused many deficits, some brutal and stark, some more subtle. Among the things he lost, according to the scientists who studied him, was a capacity for desire. As far as they could tell, in the six decades between his operation and his death he never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, never had sex, never even masturbated. The returning strangers who flitted in and out of his life, the movie stars who flickered on his television, he received them all with perfect neutrality, and they left behind neither traces of memory nor pangs of lust.

“The operation,” one of the scientists who studied him concluded, “rendered him asexual.”

This is a book of stigma—hidings—neither brain surgery nor the asylum ameliorates or softens the realities of of abnormality. The story is familiar enough but Dittrich highlights the gradations of repression necessary if disclosures about mental illness are to be contained both within families and institutions. H.M. is poked and prodded for years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without informed consent. Mrs. Scoville undergoes a host of brutal therapies (electro-shock, fever inducing baths, hydrotherapy) without any significant communication with her family—a matter that parallels Dr. Scoville’s indifference to H.M.’s suffering. Is it the destruction of desire or it’s absence altogether we’re observing? In the end Dittrich isn’t so sure. He does tell us that H.M. and Mrs. Scoville are much like the syphilis victims at Tuskegee—clear victims of a post-war medical industrial complex that still haunts the disabled today.

Dittrich’s prose is at its best when he’s either reimagining the past or using a journalist’s lens to show how lives can be reduced and squandered by medical and professional indifference. Less compelling are the moments when he buttresses the book with his own backstory—how he climbed ruins in Egypt—came down from the heights possessed of a desire to be a writer. The  memoir is sufficiently compelling without the well written but sophomoric marginalia.

 

My wife (who has a Roman shrewdness though she’s more cheerful than Calpurnia) says I’m posting too much political material on Facebook—she fears both for my wits and my reputation. It’s one thing to be known as a gadfly but really quite another to be seen as a pest. She’s right of course and in my better confessional moments I know I’m an annoying person. I tell myself it’s OK as I’m not intentionally vexatious, or I say I’ve good motives and recite them silently—I believe in civil rights for women, people of color, children, refugees, all the disabled, LGBT, religious tolerance, help for veterans, the poor—it’s a long damned list—animal rights, biodiversity. God help me, I’m also an ardent Jungian who thinks our very planet has consciousness.

It’s a firm list. As Cardinal Newman said: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.” I know my choices well. I’m also of an age when (again quoting Newman): “You must make up your mind to the prospect of sustaining a certain measure of pain and trouble in your passage through life.” Did you know what fights were proper? Did you accept the consequences? Admit you couldn’t be liked by the ablest, the bigot, the homophobe? You accepted the repercussions. There would indeed be a certain measure of pain. We’re answerable for what we choose to believe, whether we’re religiously inclined or atheists. We’re also answerable for the choices we make when it comes to speaking or not speaking. In an age of calculated victimization, when universal human rights are besieged on all sides, not speaking is a choice but one I fear for which I’ll be answerable. You too.

I so firmly believe this that I’m not inclined to self-imposed modes of sufferance, shrugs, distractions.

My wife is correct: I’m quite likely speechifying too much on social media. But I’m driven by the New Testament especially “the Beatitudes”—

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,

for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,

for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Gospel of St. Matthew 5:3-10

Cornel West once wrote: “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

I’ll take disapprobation over silence.

 

 

It’s a little life we’re after, minnows in a pond, a donkey standing beside a ruined house, oddities of chance, but always with hints of revelation. Most will miss it—the sure knowledge that discovery is small and not altaic. The poet says, “let’s be small together,” and the sweet soul takes some comfort.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

How happy is the little stone

That rambles in the road alone,

And doesn’t care about careers,

And exigencies never fears;

Whose coat of elemental brown

A passing universe put on;

And independent as the sun,

Associates or glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute decree

In casual simplicity.

When the soul’s diary tends to smallness and insignificance it also turns toward aloneness. We were children alone looking into the shallows. We stood at windows and drew our names on the chilled panes. If we were lucky no adult came along to say we were dirtying the glass. There were no exigencies, no arbitrary pressures to absorb or assuage.

A small life is absolute decree. It’s enough. And as the soul knows this, it grieves for the adult who it must accompany; it sorrows; hurts because she’s compelled to go to human resources meetings, endure the social frostbite of grownup politics and all their mordant habituations. How many meetings have I attended where I’ve thought: “there isn’t an ounce of life in this room” and wished I could don the mantle of the universe and fly to independence? Well, too often to count.

A little life. The magnanimity of less and less. Soul says—Once I aspired to tallness like the oak…now it’s magenta seeds I’m after…

Emily Dickinson again: “My best Acquaintances are those/With Whom I spoke no Word”

Small life needs nothing of the tongue or ventriloquism. Finger at a window…

 

Conventional wisdom holds that bullies of the schoolyard variety grow up to be workplace tyrants. Doubtless some do, but the evidence for a clean bully-path from kindergarten to the board room isn’t terribly compelling. In fact most little bullies grow out of it quite naturally having discovered the advantages of socialization. The ones who don’t become school district superintendents. (Note: when I say school district superintendents I mean the entire dairy industry.) One more tip of the hat to CW: it’s said that bullies are insecure types. I don’t have statistics at hand, but it’s a good guess most are not uncertain or self-conscious since these dynamics require comic irony. Bullies are angry. Grown bullies are still angry. They’ve never had a molting period where their nursery rage finally falls off. (Imagine you could hear such a thing—you’re standing with a loosely affiliated group when you hear a clunk and a common enough looking guy with a man bun says: “Thank God! My toileting anger just dropped!”) Forgive me. It’s no joke, this business of unrepentant intimidators failing to grow up. From hate groups to fraternity parties, from fringe occupiers to vulgar staff meetings one sees the un-remediated and intolerant waving their arms. What interests me, and hence the motive for this disquisition, is when in America did adult bullying become fashionable, or more precisely, when did it again become voguish, for we know slavery and indentured servitude were built on bullying—so much was this the case, Thomas Jefferson’s family was eager to portray him after his death as the nation’s only “kind master.” The United States was founded on industrial scale bullying. Cruelty was always taught by school and plough. But when did it become OK to carry on in the public square as though one’s poorly individuated potty training and sand box bitterness over swiped toys is admissible as a component of civics?

Silly. Of me. I’m disabled; my people were always being locked up just for how they looked or sounded; abused; catcalled; reduced to beggary; shelved; squashed; abandoned; branded. The tragedy of disability stories is consistent with tragedies written large across the American landscape. (And we’re the osmosis minority—we factor into every marginalized group. Native Americans have never had good health care or rehabilitation services; just to try find wheelchair repair in the inner cities.) A “big lock up” depends on the creation of, the ready availability of, bullies. I mean we should be clear. In these United States we’ve consistently had machinery for bully manufacturery, and more insidious is how we learn to shrug it off. In his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury wrote:

“Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”

“Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.” She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. “Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing ‘chicken’ and ‘knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

The passage always takes my breath away. The Fun Park! To bully people around! Just picture the damaged kiddies, drunk with ragged enforcements and funneled pedagogy out on a spree. It’s just good clean fun. In fact, bullying is popular entertainment of a certain type. Zan. W. Zack, a young writer who’s written a good deal about coming of age as a gay teen writes: “Bullying builds character like nuclear waste creates superheroes. It’s a rare occurrence and often does much more damage than endowment.” This is superb! We’re best served when we see bullying has no consistent upside even as metaphor. Despite it’s wide spread and accepted narrative place it’s analogous to toxic waste. TW is not much of a plot driver.

**

I’m forced to admit that like many born in America after the Second World War and who grew up in the Sixties I’ve always imagined our nation was making firm social progress. Even when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary I stuck to this. When the ethically moribund presidential campaign of George Herbert Walker Bush was racializing the mom and pop-ism of the white body politic I didn’t see it for what it was. One must believe in aberrations when the times turn poisonous—I honestly thought the Willie Horton commercial was an anomaly. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008 I actually believed it was proof that we were better than Lee Atwater or Karl Rove allowed.

It’s true, we’re not entirely a nation of bigots and twerps. But we’re more accepting of ugly behavior just now than at any time since the fifties. Bullying is increasingly a passable standard, held aloft like a Nazi guidon, bragged about, excused by media, indulged by apparently well off white people. Bullying is sweeping like wildfire, jumping ditches, flashing in schoolyards, workplaces, political rallies, youth hockey leagues, even in churches and non-profit organizations. We may not yet be wholly a country of bullies but we’re tending that way which leads to a question: what happened to reproof? Is admonition dead? It’s tempting to feel this—though harder to defend the claim as the opposite of bullying is disclosure and the smart phone stands, if not as an ideal, a serious corrective.

We have more bullies now. I can’t allow myself to think it’s an anomaly.

 

Disability, the noun is agentive, connoting a set of facts. The “D” word is never still on the page or slow in the air. One may speak a word like philosophy or zoo with certainty, and yet, ipse dixit, the “D” word differs from these examples as it is a neologism. Moreover, unlike philosophy or the zoo, the “D” word came into existence without spiritual provenance or natural science which means it has fewer possible attributional meanings, less of depth psychology about it. Disability always, from the beginning, meant one couldn’t work. It’s the written or spoken dingus of capitalist suspicion. Disability rights activists must always prove they have value. In a real sense, dis-activists must be philosophically inclined, as must all who care about human rights.

We’re writing and speaking always for our lives. Accordingly I don’t like the word inclusion. The very word suggests one can come in—suggests architecture—come in “here”—be in the room. Few who toss the word around know it comes from the Latin for “shut in” and it originally meant to be confined. It’s a terrible word and represents little of advantage. And yes, “inclusion” has no agency since it’s a tight little word like “track”  or “evaluate”—it’s not a warm word at all. One supposes words have provenance still. You can look them up. I neither believe I’m disabled, nor am I included. I’m certainly never nourished by either word.

Now if you’re a human resources representative or a college administrator you’ll think me daft (without knowing the ableism inherent in the term) as I cling (desperately) to the notion that how we talk about ourselves matters, not merely as a dynamic of respect or correctness but in terms of imagination. Human Resources is a repulsive term. It suggests looting. “We drained that resource alright, and heh heh, nowadays, you can just force the employee out afterwards, when he’s flat as a stingray—and we don’t even have to give him a pocket watch!”

How about “Human Stewardship” or “Advantage?” Nah. Just kidding. After all, as the “D” word tells us, value is ambiguous and conditional.

Which brings me back to “inclusion” which is always conditional. One prefers a word like guarantee—a hyphenated word that means participant, welcomed, maybe even ingrained. I’d rather be fully a part of a table than be a crumb on it’s surface.

Ahem. E.M. Forster (who should have known better) wrote: “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”

Forster forgot tables. The poor sleep at tables. If they’re lucky they eat at tables, give birth on tables, even die on them among the forks.

The Disabled. Tabled. Never at the right one. The culture table. Heavy. Of massive wood.

If they’re lucky the table fits wheelchairs; provides ample space beneath for guide dogs; there’s a place for your assistant or interpreter.

Mostly never the right one. Infelicitous. Crabbed. In Human Resources Land (a terrible board game) the table is a diminished fact. The profit motive is more important than the table. One writes: “And yet sometimes it is all I can do to stand or sit before a table. Merely arriving almost kills me.”

The table—the first reasonable accommodation. We had to get the food higher than the snouts of dogs. We had to coin the word “sit” both for the dogs and ourselves.

**

A deaf man sits at a table. Beside him is his interpreter. Opposite: two job interviewers.

Job interviewer #1: “If we hire you, what accommodations will you need?”

Deaf man: “It depends on the job you offer me.”

Job interviewer #2: “We’ll get back to you.”

This is the table as portcullis. The table turned on its side.

**

The table I always wanted: a place for the antithetical meal—no dominant cuisine.

Disability is a tableaux, a tabula, a treatment of tables, since the “D” word undermines the furnishings. Here is my Platonic table: shifty but of original form which is to say protean. The gods are always changing shapes.

**

After every meal the Greeks slid their tables under their beds.