Uncategorized – Page 165 – Planet of the Blind

What’s Wrong with Yoga Pants?

I was talking with my friend Lance Mannion on Friday morning. We were having our respective cuppa. Columbian Supremo for me, something decaffienated for Mannion, as he’s working on his blood pressure. Me? I drink coffee until I feel suffiently paranoid to face the day. (A phrase from my friend G.W. in Iowa City.) I was sipping Supremo when Lance said something about a GOP legislator in Montana who recently proposed a ban on wearing yoga pants in public.

As Jenny Kuttner writes at Salon:

We live in a world full of problems. Thankfully, we also live in a world of problem-solvers, such as one Rep. David Moore of Montana. The Republican legislator recently proposed an innovative response to a tricky situation his town found itself in last summer: A group of naked cyclists biked right on through Missoula in August, and they couldn’t be stopped for fear of violating free speech rights. So, to get back at ‘em, Moore would like to ban yoga pants in public.

Ah stretchy schandenfreude! Rep. Moore of Montana so hates naked bicyclists he decided to issue an edict about yoga pants—a “through the looking glass” topsy turvy Feudian “reaction formation” in which one unregulated hostility becomes another.

Lance and I couldn’t figure out why any American legislator would want to ban clothing. We don’t ban guns; we don’t ban flag burning; we don’t ban Nazis from marching in the streets; we don’t ban warrantless spying on innocent people; we don’t ban toxic chemical dumping in hydraulic fracturing; its a long list—but for Rep. Moore, in an era of climate disasters, terrorism, police brutality, and Charlie Hebdo, yoga pants are “it”—and worthy of a chronique scandaleuse.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Yes, Mr. Paine. Apparently the American Revolution was fought to install a tyranny of Puritan taste.

Ah, Dear Mr. Paine:

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. ”

Excerpt From: Thomas Paine. “The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete.” iBooks.

I suspect, being spiritual and all, yoga pants are highly esteemed in Heaven. So should it be in our democracy.

Disability as Snow Sculpture

The frozen wheelchair, the wheelchair tipped over. Sculpted by the boys of fraternity row. I think I’d like to see that.

Frankly I’d like to see anything in this Disneyfied nation that isn’t drivel. See Ariel Dorfman’s “How to Read Donald Duck”.

Meanwhile the disabled must inevitably turn on their own snow machines.

At Syracuse University the DCC (Disability Cultural Center) has been hosting for several years now, an annual conference called “Cripping the Comic Con” an event that brings together scholars, writers, performers, artists with disabiities or disability imaginations. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Me? I’m so damaged by popular culture I shut it out long ago.
As a kid I was harassed and physically beaten, always in the name of “Mr. Magoo” the cartoon character who couldn’t see.

I saw cartoons weren’t friendly. I made friends with Huck Finn and Jim on their raft.

Nowadays people come up to me al the time and say: “Hey have you seen Daredevil? You know he’s blind and all…”

I haven’t seen Daredevil. I think its likely good for someone somwhere that there’s a blind superhero.

But I have a suspicion, larger than a bread box, that Ameircan sentimentality can only handle disability as caricature—prevailing representation has to be two dimensional whether its Daredevil or one of Jerry’s kids.

There are rare exceptions in popular culture. Push Girls, Breaking Bad…

Disability makes its own snow sculptures, its own nuanced hyper-human drive toward the antithesis of abjection.

Cripping the comics is artful radicalism and this I applaud.

On the other hand (how many hands are there?) its best I think not to get carried away with the evolutionary progress of pop culture.

I don’t think that American Horror Story is a good turn in disability representation.

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Someone Has to Answer the Disability Call

What call? Call me Ishmael. Call me early or late. Call me an unpleasant fact of nature, a lusus naturae or worse. Say I’m so unsuited to community I must be housed elsewhere—asylum, hospital, prison. Whatever you do, don’t say in the manner of Phil Ochs—there but for fortune goes you or I—Americans can’t stand fortune; can’t stand luck; people who are poor deserve their fate; the disabled are insufficiently competitive for life in the open. They are a burden on the rest of us, don’t you see? I made my fortune, let him make his own. I’m sorry she needs a wheelchair, a breathing tube, a service animal, talking computer, prosthesis; I’m sorry she has a temper because of PTSD or some other spurious invisible condition.
I say I’m sorry—that’s what we do in this country. I’m sorry for you.

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote Julia Kristeva. OK. And that’s because belief is harder than ambition itself.
And that’s because belief is not as disectable as faith. With faith you get to ask a hundred questions, questions ever more complex, see hermenutics, Paul Ricouer, Martin Buber. See the linguistic turn in hermenutical philosophy. But the depressed person, who for the sake of argument is Ishmael, is the girl with the breathing tube, is the wheelchair butterfly—she’s forced into the camp of disbelief in a hundred singular ways. They are not subtle. Suppose you wanted belief—something casually spiritual, suitable for a depressed Sunday. You’ll find Anerican churches are protected from having to abide by the Americans with Disabilites Act. Diid you know this? Perhaps its better to be a radical, sullen atheist. At least you’re not begging for entrance.

Call me Ishmael.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

Melville’s whaling ship was a floating asylum. A sheltered workshop. It beckoned the abject, it created disabilities. There were reasonable accomodations on board. Ahab had holes grooved into the decks to fit his artifical leg. The masts were perches for schizophrenia.
The captain and crew were the ones who stopped begging for entrance; who chose brutal lives of delirium on the open sea. Whenever today I read of developmentally delayed men, locked in a warehouse in Iowa, forced to slaughter animals, scarcely paid, I think of Herman Melville. Without irony. Life without faith requires no irony.

America with your history of eugenics.
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York.
America with your young Doctor Mengeles.
With your broken VA.
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition.
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it.
Wih your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilites.
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy.
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy.
With your terror of reasonable accommodations.
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly.
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus.
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight.
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy.
Ameica you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear.
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?

Someone Has to Answer the Disability Call

Call me Ishmael.

So I Was Shoveling Snow

And thinking about death, as I am wont to do.
Note: I don’t think of death while mowing the lawn.
Note: I don’t fear having a heart attack because I’m shoveling snow.
I suspect this mordancy has something to do with my ancestry.
My great great uncle had to dig graves in the snow. That’s how it was in old Finland.
Don’t kid yourself, muscle memory will bring back your great great uncle very quickly.
I also thought about Thomas Paine. Today is his birthday. I wondered how many of my neighbors have read “Common Sense”.
Poor Thomas Paine: the writer most responsible for the American Revolution—but only six people attended his funeral because he was an open critic of Christianity.
Thomas Paine. My kind of guy.
“Ph well,” I thought. “At least there’s plenty of snow to go around.”
For some reason I thought this was particularly funny.
Snow irony. A gift from my great great uncle.

So I Was Shoveling Snow

And thinking about death, as I am wont to do.
Note: I don’t think of death while mowing the lawn.
Note: I don’t fear having a heart attack because I’m shoveling snow.
I suspect this mordancy has something to do with my ancestry.
My great great uncle had to dig graves in the snow. That’s how it was in old Finland.
Don’t kid yourself, muscle memory will bring back your great great uncle very quickly.
I also thought about Thomas Paine. Today is his birthday. I wondered how many of my neighbors have read “Common Sense”.
Poor Thomas Paine: the writer most responsible for the American Revolution—but only xic people attended his funeral because he was an open critic of Christianity.
Thomas Paine. My kind of guy.
“Ph well,” I thought. “At least there’s plenty of snow to go around.”
For some reason I thought this was particularly funny.
Snow irony. A gift from my great great uncle.

Disability 24-7

I’m not really disabled but the “D” follows me around. He’s a shadow. He’s a shadow who’s roughly 7 years old and he wants to show me the picture he’s just drawn. He is in short, annoying.

“C’mon, look!” he says. “Look!”

I look. Its a Jackson Pollock on the back of an envelope.

“That’s your blindness,” he says, proudly.

I try explaining that blindness isn’t so complicated. I tell him its like having brown hair. Its only a component part of a life.

“No,” he says, “Blindness is what everyone sees and so you live inside it, just as Pollock lived inside his paintings.”

The D has a point. Even on my best days I can’t control the pesky public.

“Besides,” he says, “blindness becomes you.”

“You mean that ironically?” I ask.

“Oh,” he says, “of course I do.”

“So I could conceivably “un-become” blindness?”

“No, that would be an illusion,” he says.

Then he adds: “If the public thinks your blindness is the whole shebang, its the shebang.”

And because he’s roughly 7 years old he says: “Nyah nyah!”

“If you go water skiing, you’re a BLIND water skiier!”

“If you take a walk, you’re a BLIND guy taking a walk.”

“Get over it!”

“Here, look at what I drew!”

“Now you’re really being ironic,” I say.

“I’ll describe it for you. Its a man being chased by bees.”

“How Dantesque of you,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, “I’ll have to read him.”

The First Guide Dog I Ever Met

In grad school I ran into a blind undergrad named Frank. I was exiting the English building as he and his guide dog Bruno were coming in. Bruno was a giant Black Lab and he bowled through the door just as I opened it. All three of us collided. Undergraduate essays flew everywhere.

Frank was a funny kid who thought nothing of telling strangers he’d lost his sight while having vigorous sexual intercourse and that the advantages of blindness were, in his estimation so great, he was paying Jesus a daily fee not to cure him.

We went to a downtown bar for coffee. “No one orders coffee here, so they’ll always make you a fresh pot,” Frank said. Then he added: “And the waitresses love my dog.”

He was right, both about the coffee and the waitresses.: “Its Frank and Bruno!” shouted a girl from someplace out back. We were waited on by three young women. Bruno got a bowl of Coca-Cola with ice.

“Is he supposed to drink that?” I asked. “No,” said Frank, “But its his favorite thing.”

“You don’t give him beer, I hope…?” I asked. “No beer,” said Frank. “Bruno’s my driver.”

In the weeks to come I’d learn a lot from Frank. He carried his blindness lightly; parried with sighted people, most of whom as I came to see, were either clueless or intrusive, routinely asking insensitive questions: “How did you go blind?” “When?” “Do you have dreams?” “How do you dress yourself?”

In the years to come, when I got my own white cane, and then a guide dog, I would have to field these questions too.

“I see that being blind is like being the guy in high school with all the little notes stuck on his back,” I said.

“Yeah that’s pretty much it,” said Frank. “Ask me stupid questions.” “Oh come on, you can try harder than that!” He laughed.

Bruno drank his Coca-Cola and ate the ice.

The First Guide Dog I Ever Met

We went to a downtown bar for coffee. “No one orders coffee here, so they’ll always make you a fresh pot,” Frank said. Then he added: “And the waitresses love my dog.”

“Is he supposed to drink that?” I asked. “No,” said Frank, “But its his favorite thing.”

“You don’t give him beer, I hope…?” I asked. “No beer,” said Frank. “Bruno’s my driver.”

In the years to come, when I got my own white cane, and then a guide dog, I would have to field these questions too.

“I see that being blind is like being the guy in high school with all the little notes stuck on his back,” I said.

“Yeah that’s pretty much it,” said Frank. “Ask me stupid questions.” “Oh come on, you can try harder than that!” He laughed.

Bruno drank his Coca-Cola and ate the ice.

The Disability Machine

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote famously about “the desiring machine”—a way of highlighting the feedback loop between commodities or “products”, advertising, depression, government, and a hundred other dynamics of the abjection industry. In Deleuze’s articulation desire itself becomes reality—hence social production determines that all living beings, even their organs, become machines.
Another way to think of this is that we are no longer beings who wish to acquire things—we are merely acquisition devices.

Borrowing from Antonin Artaud, Deleuze argues that under the tryannay of desire we actually beocme bodies without organs—in effect our very tissue is subsumed by desire.

Now cultural problems associated with disability are familiar enough: activists in dis-communities can recite the catalogue: “nothing about us without us” we say; “defend disability life’ we say; inclusion and community living are a must; we have a host of desires connected to affiliation. They are right.

But Deleuze is right: capitalism enforces illness to maintain its reality. And dis-activists must “out” this at every turn.

And so what do we say about affiliation? Do I merely wish acceptance? A key to the Mens room? “Look! There’s a blind man with a key to the Mens room! Let’s do a Super Bowl ad!”

BTW: Super Bowl ads are “low drivel” and if one loves them, one also loves power. Which is of course to love abjection. Loving abjection means you likely are addicted to inspiration porn. People really do fight for their servitude. (Spinoza)

I do not wish to be docile within my disability. Craving the Mens room.

What I fear is disability inclusion mis-understood, lived as a singular goal, becoming its own engine of repression—a machine of acquisition, fueled by its repressed, neurotic blood.

I fear the desire of repression. Not the disability itself.