Category: Uncategorized

By Andrea Scarpino

 

I heard the crying
as soon as I entered the security line: London Heathrow, Monday, 7am. I turned
to follow the cries and finally found a little girl in an adjacent line
clutching her mother’s long hair as her mother bounced her in her arms. The
child, maybe one year old, was tiny, but she wailed and sobbed and breathed in
long gasps that seemed to rattle everyone in line. She was inconsolable; she
wouldn’t sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with her mother, wouldn’t drink from
her bottle, wouldn’t engage the string of toys her father kept pushing into her
hands.

 

I sent
compassionate thoughts to the family, tried to will her parents patience, tried
to ease the girl’s pain. Suddenly, two paramedics on bicycles arrived, another
man with a two-way radio, a uniformed airline representative. Someone had
reported an ill child, I overheard; the paramedics were worried the child was too
sick to fly. The mother shook her head: the girl wasn’t sick, just tired and
overwhelmed.

 

Even so, the
security response shifted into high gear. The rest of us wore our shoes through
the x-ray machine, but security insisted the entire family remove their shoes,
a member of the security team pulling the girl’s red sneakers from her feet as
she kicked and flung her body into her mother’s chest and stomach. Then two men
and her father wrenched her from her mother so her mother could walk through
the scanner alone.

 

The final
insult: security personnel insisted the father take a sip from each bottle of formula
carefully packed in plastic bags. Sip after sip with a cadre of security
standing in a circle watching. “We’ll just leave it,” I heard the father say,
but he pushed on, a grown man drinking his child’s formula, his child still
screaming, weeping, the mother’s desperation, now, that they would miss their
flight.

 

And I
thought, this child is the only sane person in the entire security line. Of
course she is terrified, of course she is screaming—nothing about what she is
witnessing makes any sense.  

 

I started
flying alone when I was 6 years old. A flight attendant was assigned to care
for me from the moment one parent left me on the plane until the moment another
one picked me up. I was given bags of toys on each flight: metal Delta pins,
coloring books and crayons, comic books about flying. I loved the magic of it,
how I dressed up, how someone always sneaked me extra snacks, how the pilots
let me peak into the cockpit.

 

I know we’re
all supposed to believe times have changed, the world has changed, we need
extra security measures to keep us safe. But watching security’s response to
this family, to this crying child, knowing another passenger in line had
reported them, seeing how little compassion they were shown—well, it makes me
sad for all of us. It makes me sad for the kind of world we’re allowing
ourselves to inhabit. 

 

 

This is a proposition about bodies, yours and mine,

Book in hand, the one about god–

 

Book in hand and look at all the blind ones

And the lame, and deaf ones–

 

Weren’t they in the ink?

Weren’t they the alchemy all along?

 

The electrolysis, how it sparks,

travels through dust, enters the tongue

 

All to say “us” and “hazard”

Without remorse.

 

We know the early angels were bent.

William Blake saw them, our true father.

 

I walk with my stick on roads of green joy.

 

Comedy, bring me a goat. I’m no stranger to goats. I once knew a goat named Romeo. He was the size of a Buick, covered with the hair of Enkidu and he stank like a New Jersey marsh reclamation. And yes, he was always hungry. In fact Romeo’s hunger lead his owner Mrs. D, a country widow who cleaned houses to swipe food from her employers. My mother was one of her “marks”. 

 

My mother was eccentric and solitary and a heavy drinker. She slept most of the day and Mrs. D would run the vacuum ever so lightly, dust a lone room and then clean out the refrigerator, stuffing her oversized satchel with hams, onions, lettuces, cheeses, celery, anything that struck her fancy–which was Romeo’s fancy, for once, home for a visit, I overheard Mrs. D talking to herself at the wide open fridge, saying: “Oh, Romeo will love that. Oh, oh, oh, won’t Romeo love this!” She was actually cackling. And into the big bag went a whole baked chicken. I approached. Said: “Who is Romeo?” The question came from liberal conscience. I reckoned there might be a Mr. D who perhaps was a wounded veteran of the Korean War, or maybe he wore medical stockings owing to phlebitis–and certainly I wasn’t going to rat out basic humanitarian thievery if I could help it. Besides, my mother tended not to notice the disappearance of material things, even baked chickens. “Romeo?” she said, “Why Romeo is my goat!” “Your goat?” I repeated. “Oh yes, he’s a big one too!” More cackling. And into the satchel went a large head of lettuce and some grapefruits. 

 

I asked Mrs. D if she’d introduce me to Romeo and she did. She stood at the edge of a broad pasture and with her cotton house dress billowing, she called to her beloved with high and plaintive tones, a sound known to our ancestors on the steppes of Central Asia–a song to waken the brute spirit–and over a hillock long un-mowed rose a creature so large and hairy I thought of Hemingway’s “Green Hills of Africa”. “Jesus,” I said, “that’s a big fucking goat!” “Oh yes,” said Mrs. D, who seemed unoffended by my expletive, for she added, “Oh yes, Romeo’s a bruiser!” 

 

How do you describe the smell of a goat? One thinks of Hell, of sulphur and desiccation, but that doesn’t really cover it. Goats smell of shit and testosterone and rotting cabbages. I wished for a kerosene soaked rag. But Mrs. D was oblivious and cackling again, tossing grapefruits and chicken legs over the fence and Romeo caught his morsels straight out of the air and I watched as my mother’s groceries disappeared down his gullet. “Isn’t he a fine specimen?” she asked. I agreed. And I told Mrs. D to leave a little food at home for my mother because one should share the wealth, as it were. And she cackled. 

 

I remembered an ancient Scottish superstition that called for a he-goat to be hanged from a ship’s mast as it would bring a good wind. I suspect the sailors couldn’t smell. There is no good wind with a goat. In the olden days it was said a goat was good on a farm, as its stink kept off diseases. I know naught of these things. But I saw Romeo. He was a doctor of something. Of this I remain certain. 

Over the past decade stories epitomizing the intersections of disability studies and bioethics have been at the center of international news. From the recent euthanizing of blind-deaf twins in Belgium to the story of Tomas Young a paralyzed veteran of the Iraq War who has decided to end his life, narratives of physician assisted suicide and disability are growing in frequency.

 

Contrasting and disparate narratives highlight efforts to modify people with disabilities, most notably a procedure called “growth attenuation” in which children with intellectual disabilities are rendered forever small. Genetic counseling suggests it is advisable to abort children with Down Syndrome or even less dramatic disabilities such as blindness.

 

One can scarcely imagine what Helen Keller’s response might have been to the sanctioned euthanasia of the blind-deaf Belgian twins, or the argument that disabled little girls should be rendered forever small, largely for the sake of their parents’ convenience. I think she would be demanding air time on our feckless televisions to argue for human dignity and to remind viewers we are not our disabilities but indeed are creatures more mysterious and precious than casual glimpses lead many to suppose.

 

Advocates Accuse Corrections Department Of Mistreating Prisoners With Mental Illness
(Associated Press)
March 14, 2013

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Hundreds of mentally-ill inmates in Pennsylvania languish for months and even years in isolated cells, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Monday that says the “Dickensian” practice only exacerbates their condition.

The federal lawsuit accuses state prison officials of punishing the mentally ill for head-banging, hallucinations and other psychotic behaviors instead of getting them needed medical care.

About one-third of the 2,400 inmates kept in restricted custody across the state suffer from serious mental-health problems, according to the suit. They spend 23 hours a day in small, windowless cells, and have little contact with other human beings.

A few have been held in solitary for more than a decade as punishment for various infractions, leading some to attempt suicide, advocates said.

“They don’t know what time it is, or what day it is. They have no feedback loop with reality,” said Robert W. Meek, a lead attorney with the Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania, which filed the suit in Harrisburg against the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Entire article:
Class-action lawsuit: Pennsylvania’s mentally ill inmates stuck in isolation
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132a
Related:
Disability rights group sues over ‘cruel and unusual’ treatment of mentally ill state prison inmates (Patriot-News)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132b
Advocates sue PA Dept. of Corrections for treatment of mentally ill prisoners (Examiner)
http://tinyurl.com/ide0314132c

Calling stars down was easy, we believed things could be close. Today we say “closer” as myth is weak but it wasn’t so long ago we thought we’d whistle up the stars. And the cosmonoauts and astronauts waved, leaving and returning, their heroic smiles said the universe was no different than a field left unattended after the war. Go on out there, said the smiles, you will find your missing horses. 

Call the roller of big cigars, here comes another pope. I have never met a pope though once, when I was 16 I met Melvin Laird in an elevator at a Key Biscayne resort. I was sufficiently political to inform him I didn’t much care for “his wars” which earned me a frozen mackerel’s stare, which I interpreted as a victory. I don’t remember if Melvin had a cigar.

 

Of cigars and their creation Wallace Stevens had it wrong: cigars were rolled by children in Stevens’ day, even the big ones. How could he not have known such a thing? Because he was the pope of Asylum Street in Hartford. Melvin Laird was the pope of the Potomac Basin. Francis the First threw two progressive priests under the bus in Argentina back in the mid 70’s so he presumably knew a good deal about cigars and who actually made them, didn’t care, and had a conditional approach to liberation theology. The trouble always comes from the costume.

 

Here is how it began: I fell in love with a dog who could see. I imagine I may some day fall in love with a blind dog, that blind dogs are lovable–one reads about them from time to time. I even read about a blind dog who had a sighted dog as a pal. Of dogs and empathy there may be no end of stories. 

 

But I fell in love with a dog who could see and I could not and so all at once I discovered empathy and eyes. 

 

People don’t actually fathom the phrase “all at once”–it gets ruined for most by early fairy tales. 

 

All at once Prince Charming kissed Snow White and thereafter she was Lazarus and little people danced about in the town square.  

 

Corky entered my life like a sloppy clown. I was in a straight backed chair in a sunlit room and they told me to call and damned if she didn’t run full steam into my arms. 

 

She was the clown who leaps into the seats and sits on someone’s grandfather. 

 

She placed her front paws on my shoulders and washed my face and then, as if she knew the job would require comedy, she nibbled my nose but ever so gently like a horse who checks his owner’s hand for a peppermint. 

 

She gave me just the slightest touch of her teeth. Later I would learn from the family that raised her that she was famous for the “nosey nibble” but God I felt special just then and I laughed as if for the first time–it was one of those true laughs from childhood. It’s the laughing we have before cruelty has found us. As a small boy in Finland I laughed once at a reindeer wearing clothes. It was just standing on the street all dressed up. Oh Corky that was a good laugh, but not as good as the nosey nibble because, dear dog, I wasn’t lonely on the day I saw that reindeer, but on the day I met you I was lonesome as a dead man’s comb. 

 

Corky I thought I’d cry when the guide dog trainers gently said I should call you and I swear I was just on the verge of blubbering when you stole my nose. We left that room together walking side by side for the first time and you had “all at once” changed my relationship with two hard abstractions: the fear of going places alone and my depressed and solitary imagination. You, who already had ample training in guiding blind people through the streets; you who knew how to stop a blind person from stepping into harm’s way; you, dear, had comedy in your veins. 

I began the morning divesting my frail selves–I seated them in a boat of conscience, sent them out across the river of cavalier intentions, hoping to “school them” while having them out of mind. It’s a Victorian principle: one sends the kiddies off to Eton,  toughening them up. I waved goodbye to my fail innards, and they waved back from a flimsy Irish coracle, a rounded little boat, perfect for the psyche, a mandala with oars. 

“Goodbye frail selves,” I said, waving my baton. Then I went indoors with my lions. 

 

When I was in college I had a pal who liked to play what I called “comparative pain”. His life had been hard with an abused childhood, small town poverty; then, a turn of fortune that he learned to hate–a scholarship to the local private college where, among very rich students he perceived his deficiencies all the more. 

 

We used to sit up late and drink bourbon and argue about everything from the merits of T.S. Eliot’s verse to the lathered stupidities of fraternity boys who drove BMWs and spoke with diphthongs though they were from New Jersey and Long Island–they had the faux patrician accents one hears at private schools in these United States. We imagined the advent of this pretentious accent was a result of vanishing elocution classes for the rich–that in the time of Franklin Roosevelt one learned how to speak with true “back bench” verve. We decided this was another thing ruined by the 60’s. So young rich boys had to invent a patois on their own and of course they weren’t equal to the task. You can still hear this accent at America’s tonier colleges. It hasn’t gone away. 

 

So we had fun in the manner of boys with weak super-egos, or, we had fun until we had too much bourbon when we’d invariably turn our attention to “who had it hardest” and that’s when I learned comparative pain is a poor contest. I claimed that having a disability I was wretched. And my pal would relate how his cruel older brother locked him in a closet and no one bothered to find him. We’d argue until bitterness overtook us  and then we’d impeach each other’s character. We were both depressed, each convinced our problems were external. 

 

Around that time I encountered a short poem by the American poet David Ignatow. I think it was Robert Bly who brought it to my attention. Bly was a frequent visitor to our college and as many know, he has always been an inspired talker. Not all poets possess that skill. The Ignatow poem reads:

 

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment of my life.

 

Such lessons are not easy and where comparative pain is concerned I don’t think age offers serious educational advantages. It’s easier to forgo compassion and empathy when your own pain wraps you up.  Irony always fades with self-involvement. Neither youth nor age wins out versus bitterness and reaction formation–Freud’s term for the internalization of bad stimuli. It’s too easy to be embittered when one is seriously depressed. 

This is one reason why Jesus spoke in parables. Our grid-locked psyches need to be tricked into curiosity. You can substitute intrigue or mystery–but life is seldom what we imagine and in general I think this premise is a source of hope. I remember telling a very good psychiatrist about my fears. They were all future fears and dark. Suddenly she said: “Have these things happened to you before?” And I had to admit the answer was no–I was simply embellishing gravity according to the rankings of depression. 

Last night I lay awake obsessing about comparative pain and the supernumerary co-efficients of disability and depression. I read a column at Truthdig by Chris Hedges concerning Tomas Young, an American veteran who has decided to end his life because his disability has overtaken him. I do not know how one person can judge another’s disability-pain-index, nor do I know Tomas Young. But I do know enough about pathos in rhetoric to be very suspicious of Hedges who has entitled his piece “The Crucifixion of Tomas Young” which ought to give any sensible reader the cerebral chilblains. Here is how Hedges’ article begins:

 

KANSAS CITY, Mo.—I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.” He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.

“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intends to die. “I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration. …”

Tomas Young wants to die because his disability has progressed strikingly over the past four years. He says to Hedges:

“If I were in the same condition I was in during the filming of ‘Body of War,’ in a manual chair, able to feed and dress myself and transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and I would not be having this discussion. I can’t even watch the movie anymore because it makes me sad to see how I was, compared to how I am. … Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was best to go out now rather than regress more.”

 

Hedges than says:

 

“Young will die for our sins. He will die for a war that should never have been fought. He will die for the lies of politicians. He will die for war profiteers. He will die for the careers of generals. He will die for a cheerleader press. He will die for a complacent public that made war possible. He bore all this upon his body. He was crucified.”

 

One of the things I learned about comparative pain all those years ago in a stuffy little dormitory room at Hobart College is that its entire rhetorical force depends upon pathos, which is to say, a raw emotional appeal as opposed to facts. It is not, for instance, a fact that increased paralysis connotes a life that will be devoid of favorable qualities. 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’ve long been opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and I belong to Poets Against War and have written broadly about the conditions of veterans. What Hedges has done here is to reaffirm the depressing narrative about the value of life and physical wholeness, and he’s done so by the most scurrilous means, affirming a wounded warriors depression, doing so without critical irony or knowledge, and using the language of sacrifice with altogether too much frisson. 

Comparative pain is always worse than one supposes. And its always a bad bad script. In this case, when veterans are fighting the good fight for health care and psychiatric support, when they’re fighting for reasons to live, Hedges has done everyone a true disservice. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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