Category: Uncategorized

I get it at last. The decline of American newspapers and the failure of department stores are the same auto-destructive principle. If you’re a newspaper you cover less and less news by hiring no reporters. Hence: there’s nothing to read. If you’re the local Sears you hire no staff so customers can’t actually find or buy anything.

“Ah,” say the HR types. “We cant afford their wages.”

Well can the HR industry afford a bread line? A soup kitchen? How about more prisons?

Does anyone remember the era of the department store floor walker? Does anyone recall the days of serious local news reporting?

Not so very long ago Connie and I said goodbye to our beloved black Labrador Roscoe who is pictured here in his 13th year enjoying his view of Lake Winnipesaukee.

Roscoe was bred by Guiding Eyes for the Blind to become a guide dog but although his   intelligence was keen his sweet sensitivity made him a poor candidate for guiding a blind person in traffic.

Roscoe was essentially a loving bull in a china shop whose myriad barks of greeting and playfulness were unlike those of any creature I’ve met before or since.

We miss you pal.

 

As the President-elect heads to Washington one can see that his avowed bi-partisanship is less a matter to be honored in the House and more a problem of the senate. For all her faults (and they are many) Nancy Pelosi presides over a house chamber that is sufficiently partisan to achieve something like Democratic consensus at least on most days.

The senate is a different story. Harry Reid may once have been a boxer but he’s oddly without any scrap left in him. His tenure as the majority leader has been marked by a singular avoidance of confrontation with the G.O.P. That’s good news for Obama you might say but in fact the opposite is more precisely the case: the Republicans who believe that all government programs designed to save the banking system or the auto industry are socialism pure and simple are never going to be persuaded that an ambitious stimulus package is worth supporting.

Enter Harry Reid who is 9 times out of 10 unwilling to allow his slim Democratic majority to stand independently. Watching his stewardship of the Democratic party it is hard to remember why Senator Reid’s party was given majority status in the first place. Opposition to the war in Iraq? Job creation? The voters’ disgust over the misuse of power by the executive branch?

Yes Barack Obama promised to unify the red states and the blue but if the principle of unity is achieved at the expense of serious change then the new president will himself resemble old Harry. Bi-partisanship is a fair principle and it is not to be treated lightly as the Bush administration has managed to do with disastrous consequences. But neither should it be a monolithic totem of sacrifice before which the duly elected Democrats squander their opportunity to save the nation as F.D.R. once did by promising a new deal for Americans.

Not offending the hard right is not bi-partisanship though Harry Reid may not have heard.

If you are blind and you use assistive software like JAWS or Window Eyes (just to name two first rate products that turn Windows based programs into speech) you may sometimes ask yourself why you need a third party software package that costs over $500just to use the same computer that everyone else can use “right out of the box”.

 

The problem is that Microsoft didn’t take the accessibility of the Windows operating system into account when they introduced it. In turn blind software developers created software and after a series of legal battles with Microsoft they got cooperation of a kind that opened the doors of MS scripting to programmers who hoped to make windows accessible. The problem is that this work became a third party cottage industry and in turn that industry (making computers accessible) let Microsoft largely off the hook.

And so it costs the blind tons of dough to use the computer and meantime the upgrading of software systems invariably leaves the assistive software industry months behind every time a major operating system is upgraded or tweaked.

 

Don’t get me started on Macintosh–their accessibility for the blind is mostly a trick pony.

 

In truth the blind ought to demand full accessibility of electronic products”off the shelf” for indeed that’s what’s needed.

 

SK 

Like most blind people who use computers I depend on assistive technology or adaptive technology or whatever else you may wish to call it. I tend to think of all technology as “assistive” though not without irony for surely current history and our prior century prove how “unassistive” technology can be. The mass scale bombings of civilians comes to mind: Guernica, Dresden, London, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Nanking, Hanoi, around and around it goes. But I digress. I use assistive technology. I’m typing at the moment with JAWS version 10 on a Sony VAIO laptop that was customized by my friends at Universal Low Vision in Columbus, Ohio. Hooray for Universal Low Vision–they are, to my mind, one of the best outfits in the U.S. when it comes to customizing systems for people with disabilities.

 

But I digress. I get around on a hat pin. This is a delicate business. I walk like any of you but then I don’t. I never know when my blog service will change their interface or when the coursemanagement software at my university will leapfrog me right out of accessibility. It remains a common factor that the people who design software do not know that there are basic accessibility needs that ought really to be taken into account so that people like me and the tens of thousands who may become like me can use the internet.

 

So I’m trying Windows Live Writer to see if it will interact with my blog a bit better than the blog’s own posting page which remains rather opaque for my screen reader. This of course shouldn’t be the case. But that’s a long and boring tale. Getting around on hat pins is more interesting. You put them point end down through the bottoms of your shoes and balance on them like a Rosicrucian and you mumble as you steer ever so vaguely down the street. Come on. Just try it. Just try! You will be able to claim that you’re on the information highway in a form.

 

SK

This is a test of the Windows Live Writer blogging software package.

 

Blubbity blub

        Educators have long documented that students with disabilities face disadvantages in the acquisition of critical thinking, writing, and oral communication skills. While non-disabled adolescents participate in numerous summer educational programs, students with disabilities are frequently isolated, leading to a lack of self-esteem and experience that can assure success in higher education.

 The Autistic Self Advocacy Network of Northern Virginia makes the case for easy to find information about access to higher education, health services, housing, and accommodations for people who are on the autism spectrum. Their recommendations are designed for legislators in Virginia yet the clarity of their recommendations speaks to best practices when it comes to including people with disabilities on the "map" of citizenship.

Their recommendations speak to a national problem, one that's replicated in all 50states. People with disabilities and their friends and families can't get access to information and networks that will assist them in their efforts to get an education, gain housing, or find a job.

Many people with disabilities who have managed to graduate from high school find its very difficult to locate transition programs designed to help you get a higher education.

They will discover all too often that applying to colleges and universities remains a crap shoot when it comes to accessing effective programs that really take disability seriously.

Here in Iowa City the local school system has seen a considerable influx of families who have moved here from Chicago, many of them looking for access to special education for their children. The Iowa City School District most likely would earn a C plus when it comes to adequately provisioning programs and services for students with learning disabilities. But that C plus is far better than the miserable climate for LD kids in Chicago.

President-elect Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a dreadful record when it comes to special education. The Justice For All carries the discouraging history of budget cuts and legal obstacles that Mr. Duncan presented to the special needs children of Chicago during his tenure as CEO of the Chicago Public School System.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century students with disabilities of all kinds are in peril. Only 15 per cent of students with disabilities graduate from four year colleges. 70 per cent of pwds remain unemployed in the U.S.

Why would the CEO of the Chicago public schools cut the budgets for special education and then resist the justifiable legal action calling for the restoration of that funding?

Arne Duncan wanted "top end" results. The American predilection for the quick fix is ingrained in every facet of our social lives from the auto companies in Detroit to Wall Street to your local school board.

Arne Duncan was able to improve reading and math scores in Chicago while slashing services for the children most in need.

When his selection as Secretary of Education was announced pundits on the TV networks sagely confirmed the wisdom of the choice. He got the reading scores up and he managed his budget.

The only trouble? He didn't manage all our children's futures.

People have migrated to Iowa City hoping desperately that they'll get a new deal.

My friend Lennard Davis who is one of the leading scholars in the area of Disability Studies has observed that the diversity minded folks in higher education are often opposed to including disability as a form of human diversity in academic culture. Lenny explains this peculiar circumstance in his book Bending Over Backwards, a collection of essays about disability and culture. Here's a quote:

"Indeed, in multicultural curriculum discussions, disability is often struck off the list of required alterities because it is seen as degrading or watering down the integrity of identities. While most faculty would vote for a requirement that African American or Latino or Asian American novels should be read in the university, few would mandate the reading of novels about people with disabilities. A cursory glance at books on diversity and identity shows an almost total absence of disability issues. The extent to which people with disabilities are excluded from the progressive academic agenda is sobering, and the use of ableist language on the part of critics and scholars who routinely turn a "deaf ear" or find a point "lame" or a political act "crippling" is shocking to anyone who is even vaguely aware of the way language is implicated in discrimination and exclusion."

If the issue of exclusion was merely a matter of being left off the reading lists in higher education one might argue that the extraordinary number of first rate memoirs and novels with disability themes that have been published in recent years will take care of the matter in due course. Books like Nancy Mairs Waist High in the World or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are remarkable as much for their poetry as their embodied narratives and you can easily build your own lists of associated literary texts without too much difficulty.

The odd thing is how the diversity minded folks in higher education privilege essentialism and normalcy at the same time. By essentialism I mean the symbolic construction of ethnicity or sexual orientation as a de facto co-efficient of marginalization and exploitation. One is exploited and excluded because being black or Chinese-American or Latino or gay is to be trapped in a reductionist category of representational language that is subborned by the figuration of cultural privilege. "Talking back" to a hegemonic culture is to reframe the terms of the debate but not to alter the nature of identity. In social terms this process of debate strives for equal but seperate identification.

A different way to put this is to say: "I will be equal in my rhetorical place but insistent in my nurture of exclusion." I make no claim or argument for or against this position and merely aim to point out that this dualism of identity exists both inside and outside of higher education.

Disability troubles this dualism because people with disabilities want to claim rhetorical equality in much the same way that other historically marginalized groups have done while simultaneously rejecting the social construction of normalcy–that is they reject the static idea of the body as a marker of any kind of cultural identity. The scholar Rose Marie Garland-Thompson calls those who embrace the healthy body as their primary marker of identification "normates" –a term that carries something of the futility of their position for the human body remains "normal" for merely part of a life and even this is conditional as luck and circumstance will surely dictate.

But by rejecting the static symbolism of the body as having a significant cultural meaning people with disabilities scare the other alterities half to death. If disability is a social construction and nothing more then it follows that racial or gendered identities can also be collapsed. The utopian position that differences are devoid of meaning beyond their historical claims of oppression is a protean dialectic that bothers those who need a stable form of normalcy against which to position their claims for equality and their claims for exclusion.

The irony is that people with disabilities are more progressive than many in academia when it comes to deconstructing the relationship between the physical body and the cultural nausea of embodiment yet they are shut out of the diversity dialogue at their respective colleges and universities because the culture of embodied diversity is deeply troubled by their kind of difference.

Accordingly at all too many campuses disability is remanded like a habitual scofflaw to a purely reactive position–non-academic, rehabilitative, often poorly funded and directed, inchoate and driven by the threat of lawsuits rather than by any visionary ideas. IN turn "real" people with disabilities are not only shut out of the rich diversity cultures of their respective colleges but they are provided with grudging and ineffectual support services.

This isn't the case everywhere. Noted exceptions in the United States include Syracuse University, The Ohio State University, the University of California–most notably at Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

I have grown to believe that difference as weighed against normalcy, whether that's whiteness or physical prowess or heterosexuality (just to name a few of the usual suspects) is a quaintly 19th century position–a "hand me down" from the age of empire and industrial nation states. I am in no way unique for saying so but I point this out because I sense that the stability of normal bodies (whether literal or figurative) is rightly more a matter of celebration than distress. Unless you're a "normate". If that's the case then you have something that's poorly designed and which you will want to protect.

S.K.

The photo below was taken by Mr. Lance Mannion, "international blogger of mystery" and it depict my guide dog Nira seated alongside a facsimile of Fala, President Roosevelt's famous dog. There is a hand, mne, entering the frame and urging Nira to look at Fala but she's more interested at this moment in Mr. Mannion who was telling her about canine ad presidential history. She's a true student Miss nira.     

 

I was visiting my inlaws with my wife Connie when my dear friend Mr. Lance Mannion asked me whether I thought that F.D.R. was a voracious reader or (as a new biography suggests) not much of a reader at all. "Aha!" I said for I am always talking like one of the Hardy boys (Frank I think) "Aha! I know Jeff Urbin, the educational director at the F.D.R. Presidential library. Let us call this good man and wish him all the season's felicities and beg of him the truth in this important matter." I actually said something like that because I am Frank Hardy.

Both Lance Mannion and yours truly are among other things ardent fans of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and accordingly the question about our favorite president's reading habits had to be answered then and there. Of course I had to take time out for a piece of mince pie and a game of "pass the pigs" with my family but the next morning I gave Jeff a call. As luck would have it Dr. Urbin was in his office at Hyde Park and he was instantly able to answer our question and even better, he invited us to visit him at the library that very day.

And so it came to pass that Lance and my guide dog Nira and yours truly found themselves at Hyde Park where Nira was thrilled to see a stuffe replica of Franklin and Eleanor's famous dog Fala standing inside the main doors of the visitor's center.

If you click on the above link to Lance Mannion's blog you will hear of the decided results of our collective investigation into the mystery of F.D.R.'s literary avocations. Hint: he owned 20,000 books, a number that will exceedthe height of the Empire State building by twice should some compulsive actually stack them but let's hope no such plan emerges anytime soon.

Lance has a great photo of Nira and Fallah and I hope that he posts it on his blog.

If you are in the vicinity of Hyde Park anytime soon I urge you to visit the fascinating exhibit they are currently showing about F.D.R.'s first hundred days in office. The shiveringly apt comparisons with our present historical moment are obvious.

If I'm Frank Hardy then I think Lance is Joe. We are chums. It was good to take a turn in our runabout and investigate the mystery of the presidential library. We owe Jeff Urbin our collective debt of gratitude and here's hoping for the advancement of a ne New Deal for our nation.

By turns I was amused t hear last niht on the Rachel Maddow Show that the GOP is calling President Bush a socialist. They of course want the Old Deal e.g. "The Gilded Age" and I think it's safe to say that they've had it for the past decade and, as muy uncle used to say: "C'mon kids, the show's over and the monkey's dead."