Entelechy
Again with Aristotle, unseen treasure “zap” into poems,
no wonder tyrants hate the stuff.
Here comes Philoctetes with his stinking wound–
even he has poetry under his tongue–
even he makes the gods listen
like children at the orchestra.
When Zeus heard pain the first time
he thought insects were in his ears;
he wanted his mother,
then understood
he never had one.
There’s a piece by Chana Joffee-Walt on NPR’s website entitled “Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America” which is so ill informed about its subject it reminds me of one of those Ronald Reagan stump speeches. Driven by anecdote rather than cultural analysis, her thesis is simple: the number of unemployed Americans receiving disability benefits has skyrocketed over the past twenty years. She intimates without fully declaring it, that there’s a vast social “scam” taking place–in the absence of good middle class jobs, and following the “end welfare as we know it” enterprise, poor people simply decline into aches and pains, thereby getting themselves declared unfit for work. Alas, Joffee-Walt hasn’t done her homework, a matter that may be inapparent to many of NPR’s readers, just as Reagan’s audiences were unaware that behind the curtain the Gipper believed “facts were stupid things” and was untroubled by any and all of the misrepresentations of social programs that propelled his candidacy for president. Such arguments depend on pathos rather than facts. Joffee-Walt fails to address the biggest fact in the room, that disability is a social construction even more than a medical category, and in turn the artificial architectural and physical constraints marshaled against people with disabilities are both products of history and the industrial revolution. One wishes she had bothered to read Lennard J. Davis’ essay “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century”. Disability is entirely economic and has been so since the move to industrial models of labor. Those who cannot work in the factory were labeled “disabled” and that model of human economic utility largely continues to this day. Reasonable accommodations are the solution for workers whose physical capacities decline but as any seasoned person with a disability who has managed to remain in the workforce knows, obtaining accommodations is often so difficult, so humiliating, so Kafka-esque, most people give up. 70% of the blind remain unemployed in the United States, many of whom might well be able to work with the proper accommodations but employers don’t want to provide accommodations fearing the expense, though in point of fact most workplace accommodations are relatively inexpensive. Think of a laborer, someone who is required to lift boxes. He suffers a ruptured disc. He can’t lift boxes. Perhaps he could be retrained to work with software. Most businesses resist this kind of accommodation, preferring medical and social determinations that are no more sophisticated than those the Victorians had. Another way to say this is that a nation that believes in work is also a nation that believes in accommodations. Joffee-Waitt misses this dynamic and ongoing dialectic and fails to illuminate the true nature of disability and joblessness.
Technorati Tags: NPR, Chana Joffee-Walt, Lennard J. Davis
We want to thank Elizabeth Aquino for her attention to the story of Tomas Young whose worsening paralysis has led him to announce that he has chosen to die. War goes on long after the smoke has cleared. It enters the cells of our bodies, even the bodies of those who stayed home. War takes up residence in our food and turns up in what we say and what we do not say. All life appears cheapened and coarse. We stop paying attention to human dignity, redefining it as utility, waterboarding isn’t torture; the national security state doesn’t impinge our freedoms. The language of heartless approximations is easy. The devaluation of life is not easy. It means we have given up on people who look like us and those who don’t. We are all now like the poet Cesar Vallejo who wrote about tearing out his heart and putting it under his shoe. It doesn’t matter whether we believe in Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” or we’re worshipful–we are more jaded and morally impoverished because of the Bush wars. We don’t need data though there’s plenty of it, the thousand plus shootings in the US following the carnage in Sandy Hook, the evidence of rising intolerance that leads to rape culture.
When journalists trumpet the announced suicide of a wounded and depressed veteran because the story exemplifies the heinous and excruciating domestic effects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then they too become morally devalued. Those who keep silent or who turn the page are also reduced.
The only way out of this enervation of the soul is perhaps best described by Jesus:
“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else?” (Matthew 5:43-47 )
Last week I wrote the following on this blog about journalist Chris Hedges' post on Truthdig concerning the decision by paralyzed veteran Tomas Young to end his life–a decision that Hedges doesn't question and which is being spread across news outlets without interrogation. That a depressed, disillusioned, and paralyzed veteran would chose to end his life seems "right" to liberal commentators because in point of fact they haven't examined their assumptions about disability and the actual living of disability lives:
via www.planet-of-the-blind.com
I think the Pope's decision to kiss a man with a disability is a minor infraction compared to this story.
The TSA (Transportation and Security Administration) claims on its official blog that a wounded Marine was not asked to remove his prosthetic legs and forced to stand from his wheelchair as the Wasington Times first reported.
What seems clear is the TSA’s inability to acknowledge how humiliating it is for all travelers with disabilities to undergo screenings–I’ve been asked to hand over my guide dog, have been pushed, prodded, left to grope for my possessions, have been summarily and rudely ordered about, and generally demeaned for years. I’ve had good experiences of course, but what’s indisputable is how much my navigation of security checkpoints is influenced by the quality of the staff on duty at any given moment. Travelers with disabilities receive conditional or chance receptions at airports.
One may say the same for all travelers–stories of parents with small children who are unduly frightened or traumatized are legion. There’s no doubt the TSA has ongoing problems both of judgment and public relations.
As bad as the disability experience is at airports I will say to any and all who wish to privatize the TSA (for there’s always a call for this) that the old days of on the cheap security companies meant even worse treatment. I remember non English speaking agents dressed in maroon jump suits, yelling at me because I had a dog.
The TSA says the wounded marine “chose” to stand as if that settles the matter. But in my experience people don’t spontaneously make bad and painful choices. The TSA has some serious work to do in terms of its cultural awareness of disabilities.
Stephen Drake writes over at Not Dead Yet of the cheer leading industry, now wildly out of control, rooting for disabled war veteran Tomas Young to end his life–framed with the martyrdom of political tragedy. Drake writes of lefty journalist Chris Hedges’ martyrology:
“Hedges seems to have a problem with distinguishing between fictional characters and real people. Tomas Young is a real person. Hector was a mythical character in a story about a dimly-remembered real-life Trojan War. Bonham was a plot device. It’s telling that when Hedges wants to talk about people who are used and discarded, he conjures up fictional characters. Tomas Young is not a fictional character, but a real person. And if and when he kills himself, his death won’t be a fictional death, but the real thing. And media folks like Hedges will have used and discarded Young just as surely as Bush and Cheney did.”
I am horrified by the de facto acceptance of a man’s suicide by the liberal media, which now includes Democracy Now. Apparently after a decade of nationally sanctioned human rights violations the death of a disabled veteran (who needn’t die) is AOK if by offing himself he creates a shiver of outrage at Bush and Cheney. This story is so profoundly corrupt I can’t find much with which to compare it, save for a handful of crime novels.
Last week I wrote the following on this blog about journalist Chris Hedges’ post on Truthdig concerning the decision by paralyzed veteran Tomas Young to end his life–a decision that Hedges doesn’t question and which is being spread across news outlets without interrogation. That a depressed, disillusioned, and paralyzed veteran would chose to end his life seems “right” to liberal commentators because in point of fact they haven’t examined their assumptions about disability and the actual living of disability lives:
“The facts are otherwise as disability activists convincingly demonstrate. Has anyone given Tomas Young some useful books on living as a quad? One wonders if he’s read Nancy Mairs’ incomparable memoir “Waist High in the World” or if he’s encountered the amazing artistic work of Neil Marcus. One also imagines the answer is no. What is clear is that Chris Hedges is using the language of religious sacrifice as an altogether easy analect–that is, he critiques the moral condition of the American people using Young’s condition as metaphor, a thing that is detestable though not unsurprising for many liberals are no more adept with disability culture than they are with nano-flowers. Let’s just say that Hedges’ use of Christian metaphors of sacrifice depends upon hideous sentimentality and the unexamined dialectic of valued bodies vs. devalued bodies, a position that’s essentially neo-Victorian and largely uncivilized.”
I read this morning a new piece by Nick Wing over at the Huffington Post which repackages Hedges’ narrative frame, again without any critical irony. What seems to be emerging is a liberal cheering section for a veteran’s suicide, tricked out in the language of outrage against America’s war in Iraq. Fair enough: I belong to Poets Against War and have been opposed to American military interventions since Viet Nam–but I don’t have to kill myself in a glass box to make my point. Tomas Young is being rooted for–cheered to turn himself into a sacrificial martyr in a Kafka-esque display. Why is this okay? Why are people not lining up to tell Young that a paralyzed but imaginative life is fully worth living?
It can’t be that the spirit of eugenics has reared its head can it? It wouldn’t be the case that the recent state sanctioned euthanizing of blind-deaf twins in Belgium (whose deaths were wholly unnecessary) represents a failure of the western cultural imagination to conceive of disabled lives as noble lives? I phrase the matter in rhetorical terms not because I think I know the answer but because I’m afraid I might know. The giveaway is the fealty of pathos in the posts by Hedges and Wing, who both essentially frame Young’s imminent death as inevitable, which is to say they imagine his terminus as a dark mercy. In turn, they see the flames of his funeral pyre lighting the faces of Cheney and Bush. Instead what’s being illuminated is a crowd of bleacher bums cheering for a man to end it all–a man who would be better off alive, as, in fact he has lots to live for if only he and his posse could imagine it. In the meantime I’m chilled by the ample evidence that people think Young has made the right choice. Shame on Truthdig. Shame on Huffpost.
Blue in boyhood equals jazzy circles when old.
Once I was St. Sebastian, but Orphic birds all about.
Its the things we can’t make up that count.
Don’t knock on my door unless you’ve been around the farm at least once.
Riding the train: mile after mile of abandoned houses and automobile skeletons
And track-side warehouses pulling the twilight close.
I can’t tell you how to roll your wheelchair. Can’t even tell you how to be blind. Certainly haven’t a clue about inspiring people. But I know two things for sure: sequestration is harming the elderly and people with disabilities and the negotiations underway in DC are going to do more harm because the Obama administration has firmly put medicare and medicaid on the table for serious cutting. These are bad times for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
On the flip side I know a blind man who climbs mountains with his guide dog. People love this story. It gets good media. Now I’m starting to wonder if blind people should scale the Washington Monument. What will it take to awaken the public to the plight of the needy? We spend more time lamenting the fates of people on stalled cruise ships or worrying about Lindsey Lohan’s days in court than the prospect of people in need being thrown to the wolves.
One wonders if the eugenics movement has come around again–or if it never left. The easy and collective shoulder shrugging when news arrives about the euthanizing of blind-deaf twins in Belgium tells a frightening cultural story: we’re weary of “those people” and want to send them packing and if they want to send themselves packing so much the better. Is that where we are? Oh dear.
A story by Michelle Diament over at Disability Scoop relates how physicians’ offices in the United States remain inaccessible to patients with disabilities some two decades after the passage of the ADA. Talk about a cultural divide. If you can afford health care you still can’t get it.
Meanwhile a story at the Brooklyn Eagle highlights a lawsuit being filed by people with disabilities against the City of New York. During Hurricane Irene many pwds discovered inaccessible shelters.
We have to fight back both in cultural terms and in the pragmatics of living dignified lives.
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Planet of the Blind 