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Its a worn observation that on occasion people can learn more with their eyes shut but Ye Olde Bromide is warranted when the biology class doesn’t seem to be learning.  

Right about now if I had my way I’d have our elected officials in Washington slow down and if that meant asking them to wear blindfolds or struggle through the service entrances of badly designed buildings while using wheelchairs so much the better. (I don’t believe in “Try Disability On for a Day” sensitivity exorcizes and I don’t favor disabling vengeance fantasies but if having to work with accommodations made the politicians have to think for themselves, well I’d be for it.)

Not long ago I told a friend who has deep pockets and a clear head that I felt President Obama’s job at hand is to prevent the United States from becoming a third world country. We weren’t having an argument but we were feeling around the issues–I was for the president’s economic stimulus plan and my friend had serious doubts about the enterprise. I said a third world nation was one where the government and the people were so entirely in debt to the rest of the world that they no longer had any say about how they could spend moneyor what crops they could grow. I think I also said something about crumbling roads and bridges.

The spectacle of last week’s televised capitol hill outrage over the AIG bonuses tells me that the legislature is going to be unable to dissect the frog. Every minute of every day that our leaders are not putting their full attention to restoring the flow of capital and creating a renewed climate for investment is time wasted and I think this country has very little time.

In my view the three most impressive politicians in the United States other than the president are Governor Schwarzeneggerof California, Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania, and Mayor Bloomberg of New York City all of whom insist that we must tackle the erosion of the nation’s infrastructure if we’re to have an economic future.

Still I couldn’t help but feel today as I watched these men on Meet the Press that despite their collective argument that serious investments in rebuilding the U.S. are critical to our survival our Senators and Representatives in Washington are not up to the job.

Thomas L. Friedman’s OpED column in today’s New York Times is incisive about the evident crisis in our political focus. I was hooked by his opening lines:

“I ran into an Indian businessman friend last week and he said something to me that really struck a chord: “This is the first time I’ve ever visited the United States when I feel like you’re acting like an immature democracy.””

To this Friedman adds:

“You know what he meant: We’re in a once-a-century financial crisis, and yet we’ve actually descended into politics worse than usual. There don’t seem to be any adults at the top — nobody acting larger than the moment, nobody being impelled by anything deeper than the last news cycle. Instead, Congress is slapping together punitive tax laws overnight like some Banana Republic, our president is getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian, and the opposition party is behaving as if its only priority is to deflate President Obama’s popularity.”

 

Friedman goes on to say that the president missed a teaching moment last week by not having a fireside chat with the nation in which he would have shared with the country the full measure of our current economic crisis and I agree in part but I would add that no one knows the full dimensions of the crisis and in the absence of all the facts Barack Obama is not likely to risk looking like Jimmy Carter–that is, you can’t lead with merely the appearance of seriousness you have to have substantive policy at your fingertips.

I thought it was a good sign when Obama met with Governors Schwarzenegger, Rendell, and Mayor Bloomberg last week–I took this as the week’s most substantive story. And now in the spirit of Thomas Friedman’s advice it is time for the president to lead with what he knows. We’re in the fight of our lives.And yes we may have to throw more money at  the banking and insurance systems before all is said and done. But we need to do this with a sense that every penny is accounted for, a matter that even revisionist types can’t take away from F.D.R.. Say what you will Americans didn’t lose money on the New Deal.

 

S.K.

Here’s a nugget from St. Augustine’s Confessions:

“Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari .” (“Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions,”)

In that passage Augustine captures all of what a writing workshop is about if its of any use–for the imagination requires nonsense, sweet phrasings, occasional conviviality (though perhaps not too much?) and yes, the good services of others.

“Good services”is a fine term. I must now tell a writer that his story is littered with cliches and that by turns he’s not the master of the language’s tone. The poor fellow felt fine about his material and now I’m telling him to feel otherwise.

If the teacher of a workshop and the workshop’s participants (notice I don’t use the word students–students take orders; writers are mixing it up with aesthetics–a different thing altogether.) –if the teacher is any good she or he tries out some suggestions and doses the matter with high or low comedy. Comedy says we’re in this together. Tragedy is the demonstration of ostracism and its the thing you want if you’re orchestrating a mythology but its useless as a workshop principle. 

So we’re in this together. We are going to levitate the cliches right out of this story the way Alan Ginsburg once attempted with about 100 other convivialists to levitate the Pentagon. Of course a good workshop has only 10 or 12 convivialists but the levitation doesn’t require more than that. 

A writing workshop is not the place for therapy or affirmation of desire or a massage but neither is it a place for excoriation or pedestal climbing.

The worst participants are those who want something of the above and the worst teachers are those who want to wave from a considerable height. Such teachers are among us and they’re invariably second rate though they are finalists for the Pulitzer or invitees to a Washington reception none of which means they can teacha workshop. There’s no room for a crystal throne in a good workshop.    

“Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi…”

Out you damned cliches! We shall substitute wormwood and the minty reeds of Lake Lentini. A cloud shaped like a spider. Victory tailed swallows. Dead leaves blown about in a Russian dance. Anything other than the word “awesome” okay?

 

 

S.K.

 

Logan Magazine: Spokane Woman Finds Niche In Publishing
(Spokesman-Review)
March 19, 2009

Excerpt provided by The Inclusion Daily Express.

 
SPOKANE, WASHINGTON– [Excerpt] In the fall of 2006, Logan Olson became a publisher, and a young one at that.

She was 21 when the first edition of Logan Magazine hit the stands. Producing a glossy magazine four times a year is a big job for anyone, yet Olson had mainly one person on her staff: her mom, Laurie. Neither had any publishing or professional writing background, and there were many times they found themselves overwhelmed by the decisions they had to make.

“We thought we were just going to do a magazine for Spokane,” Laurie Olson said. “But now it’s going national and we’re hearing from people from all over the country, all over the world. We never thought that would happen.”

Perhaps what’s most amazing about their publishing success is that Logan Olson is living with a brain injury, which makes it a little difficult for her to talk and type.

“It’s awesome that we have the magazine,” Logan Olson said. “We are having a blast with it.”

Entire article:
Spokane woman finds niche in publishing
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0319b.htm
Related:
Logan Magazine
http://www.loganmagazine.com

 

S.K.

Like most people with disabilities who find that their lives are not circumscribed by their physical bodies I discover myself itching every now and then to just go somewhere for the sheer hell of it. Its as though one of William Blake’s babyhood angels touches me: invisible fingers stroke my hair and I decide for no apparent reason to hit the road. I went once to the Aland islands midway between Finland and Sweden in just this way. I went with only a small rucksack filled with books and a guitar slung over my shoulder.

The next thing I knew I was sitting beside a Viking grave and singing Jim Morrison songs and a little ditty by Federico Garcia Lorca and I was splendidly alone. For me “getting away” has something to do with this desire to be by myself.

I’ve been giving this some thought because Lance Mannion has a superb post about Paul Theroux and travel writing and Lance makes some important points and one of them is that Paul Theroux didn’t do all that travelling to widen his character, he did it because his character was already opened and the art of travel has then to do with discernments both about others and about the self–what we really can call apprehensions of culture which always depend on opposition and similitudes. I am like this and not like that; I am furthered by this experience and not that one.

Traveling I learn that I’m at my best when alone. Sighted people say things to me like: “How can you bear being by yourself when you can’t see so good?” To this my answer is invariably: “Why is the joy of being a bit lost any different for the blind?” People are afraid to travel with no itinerary and they don’t like to lose their ways. I like both of these things and as I’ve mentioned already I like being solo.  

Here is a poem from my book in progress “Mornings with Borges” that I think captures something of this attraction for solitary disorientation.

 

Invisible Cities, Redux

Italo Calvino has invisible cities and I recommend them. What could be better than traveling the universe and finding extraterrestrial versions of Venice?

I go out in the early morning rain in Galway, Ireland and tap the cobblestones with my white stick.

Immediately I get lost.

On my left there is a river.

On my right there is a window shutter making a kind of funereal percussion.

“Songs of the Earth,” I think.

I am not unique.

I stand beneath the shutter and weep.

I love this world.

I am alone in a new city.

if I died here beside the river and the window maybe everything I’ve known would make sense in the gray of an Irish minute.

“Good-bye to the peregrine falcons,” I think.

Good-bye to the glass of water that contains a single day lily.

Farewell to Mahler on the radio late at night.

Don’t get me wrong.

I get lost in cities every week.

I have learned much by following, blindly, the whims of architects.

 

**

I like to think that being lost is what calls forward the material that’s in my subconscious: Mahler on the radio; peregrine falcons; a day lily; and weren’t these things always there and weren’t they waiting for me to feel sufficiently delicate to hear them?

 

S.K. 

Our friend Valerie Kampmeier writes: 

I thought you might be interested in the following: one of my favorite BBC radio broadcasters, Peter White, who has been blind from birth, and is a total delight to listen to, recently entered a competition organized by the BBC for their annual charity fund raising day “Red Nose Day”. It’s to raise funds for all kinds of causes at home and abroad. He competed against three other seasoned broadcasters to do five minutes of stand-up comedy. They were all surprisingly good (having never attempted it before) but he carried off the prize. Here’s the link if you’d like to hear him and the others:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/standupwiththestars.shtml

 

Enjoy!

 

S.K.

So a friend told me a hilarious story that I can’t repeat because its his story and he will doubtless write it but it involved childhood humiliation and turds. Listening to him tell it I had to lie down on the floor. I was preparing to meet my maker. I was thinkinghow in my first moments in Heaven I would have to explain that it was the word “poop” that killed me. I was thinking that everyone in Heaven would admit they also died of scatological shock. And yes the very thought made me happy. Lordy!Isn’t it great that dung is still funny? Isn’t it marvelous to contemplate an afterlife that’s sparked by a vast, collective shit hemorrhage?

I think this is a cheerful thought. What’s the opposite of entropy? Shit. What’s the opposite of situational depression? Shit. When my maternal grandfather died and our family was picking out his casket my uncle Mert tracked dog shit all over the funeral home up and down streaking the Persian carpets and the runners on the stairs and while the funeral director was declaiming the advantages of “the Conquistador–the coffin that conquers death”–well, seeing those blobs of shit all over the place caused first one of us and then all of us to break down laughing. And then the funeral director said: “No one has ever laughed in here before”but he said it with the neutrality of someone born without a medulla and therefore we laughed all the harder. Sweet Christ on a crutch! We had to get out of there.

I think rubber shit is funny. I think Freud was right about shit–its the same thing as money. I think its funny to think about astronauts and shit. I think the cuneiform mystic  shit that follows the circus has instructions in it about how to arrive at the pearly gates. I feel better just thinking about this. Ain’t caca grand?

 

S.K.

Last night while appearing on the Tonight Show President Obama compared his family’s bowling adventures in the White House basement to the Special Olympics and within moments of climbing back aboard Air Force One his staff was hitting the phones to apologize to the Shriver family as a means of controlling the damage.That’s perhaps as it should be but this is something more serious than a mere P.R. gaffe. 

Because I don’t believe that the dignity of people with disabilities is negotiable it follows that when physical challenges are used as an analogy for able-bodied ineptitude the symbolic exchange values are skewed away from humor and toward bigotry. Like it or not President Obama must be held to a higher standard given his ardor for change and his well demonstrated sensitivity regarding people who have been historically marginalized in America. Translation: disability is a serious business particularly in these days when we are reading of criminality in the care of our most vulnerable citizens.

Yes, Queen Victoria, we are not amused.

 

For another post on this matter see what Bad Cripple has to say.

 

S.K. 

My friend Ruth O’Brien’s new anthology of essays and legal analysis concerning women and civil rights issues in the workplace has been chosen as a book club selection by The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.

 

We are very pleased at POTB to learn of this and of course we recommend Ruth’s book to everyone who is interested in women’s rights and justice in the workplace.

 

S.K.

David W. Boles over at Urban Semiotic has a terrific post from 2007 about the “Ugly Laws” –laws that were on the books in the 19thand 20th centuries  both in the United States and in Great Britain and which were designed to keep people with disabilities off the streets. This development came out of the eugenics  movement: it was believed that deformed or crippled people were a blight on healthy humanity and per force such people needed to be sequestered in back rooms or better yet in institutions.

This story isn’t news to disability studies scholars or to people with disabilities who have an interest in the history of disability and civil rights but its often a shocker to students taking a disability studies course for the first time. Of course once they’re shocked they are even more apalled to find that tens of thousands of people with disabilities are still living in institutions against their wills.

Like the ghost of old Marley in  “A Christmas Carol” the spirit of the eugenics movement still walks and drags along behind it the chains it forged a generation ago.

Each day as we read about the abuses being committed in state schools and institutions against the mentally ill or the developmentally disabled we are being hit over the head by the legacy of ugly laws and Social Darwinism. How is it possible that despite the fact that its more cost effective for people with disabilities to live in their own communities these antiquated and abusive institutions continue to exist?

The answer to this question is that the NIMBY principle and hieratic governmental administration work in tandem.  No one associated with state and local legislative bodies would openly declare his or her affection for the ugly laws but having a budget and an institution to administer is a time honored way to handle matters.

Yet as mentioned above its cheaper and altogether more humane for people with disabilities to live in their communities. There are also spin off benefits to be realized from this as young people can volunteer to help pwds who have returned to the public and dare we mention that with familiarity comes the civic life?

 

S.K.

There’s a post over at The River of Jordan that I have been mulling over for a long time. “Jordan”is a little boy whose mom writes with discernment about how he is not the sum of his disabilities. This is of course very very important for those who are outside   this thing called “the disability community”. By analogy no one is ever believed to be the sum of his or her bones, the outcome of his or her dental work (well, maybe that isn’t true in Hollywood?) but outside the world of pwds where the indeterminacy of bodies is understood those who have impairments are still conceived of as faulty algebraic equations. In the post I’ve linked to above, Jordan’s mother writes about the myriad and indeed relentless ways that doctors attempted to persuade her that her infant son would be impaired in hyper-theric ways–she was told that he would have so many maladies and incapacities that his life wouldn’t be worth a thing.

Jordan’s mom writes:

“I recently edited a book that prepares people for taking a nursing exam. The author stresses that giving “false hope” is unethical. Nurses shouldn’t say, “Everything will be okay” when it might not be. But is it also unethical to give only worst-case scenarios? That seems to be all doctors give these days. I understand they want to protect themselves from malpractice suits. But would it be so bad to give a little hope once in a while? Anyway, can hope ever be “false?””

Often it seems to me that those of us who reside (whatever that means?) within the disability community are better able to talk about both the poetry and the pragmatism of being alive than those who live in the constant expectation that normal health is sustainable or to be counted on.

Wheelchair Dancer  writes about the ways that “universal design” is being marketed as an aesthetic idea to the baby boomers who presumably have enough retirement income to imagine that they won’t be disabled they’ll just be “aging in place”. This is the architectural co-efficient  of the medical narratives that are described by Jordan’s mom–the expectation is that disability is (for lack of a better term)a “take away”–as if living in a body is some kind of board game in which the “d” word is like the “Go to Jail” card in the Monopoly game.

Why should we who have disabling conditions have to assert and re-assert the full value of living or say that beyond mere existence there’s artful splendor about our ordinary days and nights? This is a serious question and its not enough to say that we are talking back to the normates or taking on the social construction of normalcy or whatever one wants to call the matter. We are all too often forced to talk among ourselves because the “Go to Jail” card troubles the public’s nerves like smoke above a scene of violence–the “d” word is so deeply and psychologically devastating that its far worse than Hester’s scarlet letter. (One  can avoid having to wear the scarlet letter by the force of her will; avoiding disability is simply a matter of luck or concurrent with genetic counseling.)

It is the word “disability” that forces pwds to talk among ourselves.

Dark Angelwrites about having an undiagnosed autism-spectrum disorder and the agonies of living publicly as someone who was often judged to be deviant (to use VictorTurner’s anthropological term). Now that he knows what he “has” he feels like telling people to    “Stuff it.”

Disability is not an extrinsic social or cultural matter but despite the staggering numbers of pwds here in this country and around the world we are still encoded as people who reside outside the ritual circle of the village. Baby boomers would rather “age in place” than admit to having disabilities. The pediatric doctors would rather talk about the calamities of disabilities than the complex ways that human beings grow and adapt and live–yes, really live.

 

S.K.