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We wrote about Toxic Schlock at NBC just a little while ago and now we’re disposed to do so again. As a blind person who has a sharp sense of humor I wish to set the record straight though I shouldn’t have to. Blindness is in fact funny. But its not funny if the humorous treatment deprives the blind of intelligence. And that’s what this blog finds so objectionable about the recent bigoted burlesques at NBC. Let me for the sake of argument make an analogy. If Saturday Night Live had presented Tina Fay as Sarah Palin and, yes, for the sake of the comedy payoff had Fay-as-Palin appear on the news segment and lets say that as she was attempting to talk she suddenly opened her blouse   and began breast feeding a baby–and as she was doing so she lost the ability to make sense, thereby reinforcing the old patriarchal stereotype that women can’t be women and think at the same time, well I think its safe to say that millions of TV viewers would be repulsed. Fay’s version of Pailin was funny because it stuck to Palin’s politics. Period.

Yet these recent NBC presentations of blindness have been entirely predicated on the notion that the blind are clueless buffoons. What’s worse from my perspective is that I heard from a former graduate student of mine that a notable disability studies scholar remarked recently that the SNL skits about Governor Paterson were just fine–as though “the disabled” should be as ready and willing to submit to humorous treatment as any other group, etc.

To which I say: “Ah but Grass hopper! You leave out the distinction between bigoted humor and sophisticated wit. No one would find a black face minstrel show to be in any way funny. No one would think my example above viz Sarah Palin was in any way justifiable. Nor would a person of common sense believe any of it was funny.”

That’s what I would say to the disability studies scholar for whom blindness (about which she knows not a whit) is funny no matter how its presented. I can scarcely go on. And why should I? The 30 Rock episode presented a blind woman as entirely unable to perceive her surroundings. How shameful. And what sophomoric writing! Yuck!

S.K.

I remember the first time, when I was very young, when my mother said, "Connie, don't point.  It's not polite."  I think I was pointing at someone in a wheelchair.  I don't exactly remember the conversation that ensued, but I remember the underlying message: people with disabilities are really no different than the rest of us.  We all have lives; we all have purpose; we all experience joy and disappointment; we all have feelings, and no one likes to be pointed at.

Shame on the folks at NBC and 30 Rock for pointing fingers last night. (As if this wasn't enough)  The depiction of a young woman, a blind young woman out on a date with one of the characters on 30 Rock (I don’t watch it enough to know names) was just appalling.  

Here’s the interesting thing: I didn’t even hear the dialogue last night.  OK, I heard one line.  I had just turned the channel and my timing was such that I saw a lovely young woman, carrying a cane and being guided through a building.  I heard and saw just enough to realize that this woman was being guided through the building but was being mislead to thinking she was being escorted into a restaurant.  I heard the young lady say something like "funny, I feel like I've been walking in circles…"

Just then my daughter called and since she means more to me than a television show, I turned down the volume.   What I saw happening on the screen caught my attention however, and what I saw came through loud and clear.

The writers at 30 Rock took a character, a woman who happened to be blind, and poked fun  – and pointed fingers -  for a laugh.  Millions of laughs, I'm sure.

I’m not amused.  There is a reason why disability awareness and sensitivity training programs have been developed over the years.  But clearly the power players at NBC and 30 Rock have yet to pass around that memo.  And why should they.  Pointing fingers is good for business.  And so much fun.

While not blind myself, I live on the Planet of the Blind.  And not only do I live there,  I work there too.  I have conversations with parents of young children diagnosed with inherited blinding eye diseases.  They are desperate to find treatments and cures for their children.  I sometimes feel compelled to tell them that with proper support and education, their children will be just fine.  But they are afraid….

Why wouldn't they be?  After all, popular culture is still pointing.  And laughing.

CK

I’m in Chicago at the national conference of the Associated Writing Programs which is the big jamboree of all the college and university creative writing types and shortly after checking into the Michigan Avenue Hilton I took my dog Nira outsideand while Nira was sniffing a stone urn that surely once belonged to Conrad Hilton himself a stranger approached out of the gloom and asked me if I’ve ever heard of a  Conure. I was with my friend, the writer  Ralph Savarese who stood to one side dressed in a body length down coat that he’s justifiably proud to own for the man lives in Iowa and who wouldn’t want a down body closet after all? The stranger was preternaturally happy, filled with urgency, the kind of excitement one remembers from certain school chums who couldn’t wait to tell you what they saw in the woods. But the stranger last evening who was clearly “my stranger” had seen my guide dog and was enraptured not by the dog but by the ancient human village of totem animals and their place in our souls. He talked about his minature parrot who rides his shoulders, cleans his ears, talks to him with child-like affection and sleeps under a tiny counterpane of Kleenex tissues which the man lovingly arranges around the bird’s sleeping body. Apparently the conure sleeps on its side like we do. This fellow was like a certain kind of man they still speak of in Finland–a kind of forest lunatic who has found himself in the city and can’t figure out how to talk to people. City people are in a hurry. They are pushing through the fuses of getting and spending. But this man was in love with something unambiguously good and for a brief and unforseen moment he had by the grace of guide dog Nira a small tribe of animus friendly types outside the monolithic, even Czarist  Hilton in a cold city in winter. The whole thing felt to me, brief as it was, for we smiled and thanked him and walked briskly into the wind–the whole thing felt like Chekov meets Carl Jung.

No one who has read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ever forgets the images of Victor Frankenstein combing the charnel houses for body parts–this is one of the top ten literary scenes of the past two hundred years along with the sinking of Melville’s whaling ship. Shelley writes in Victor’s voice:

“Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me –a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.”

 

By way of a strict analogy the Republicans in the House and Senate are equally fascinated by the body parts of the U.S. economy–and like Victor they can’t conceive of the pieces as anything that’s deserving of what we might call a holistic vision. having killed the damned thing with malice aforethought, for indeed the whole plan from Reagan onward has been to eliminate the middle class and return us to the 1870’s–the GOP is now fingering the disfigured “bits” and arguing that if they could have just a little more time they could prove their vision for America.

God Almighty! You’d think that having destroyed the greatest economic engine in the history of the world in a comparatively brief quarter century would bring just one Republican House    member or one Senator “up short” but the lesson of “Frankenstein” is that a vision that’s driven by abstraction rather than a pragmatic concern for community is its own reward and its owner shall possess no dramatic irony. They hold up the wormy feet and the severed hands and denounce any spending that might put some blood back in the veins of the American worker or families. The heartlessness of their rhetoric is the most astonishing thing of all.

 

Astonishing unless you see them at last for what they are. They are little Victor Frankensteins with no shame or hope of feeling.

I was mindful of these thoughts when I saw that Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snow decided to get out of the Charnel House and wash their hands.

 

S.K. 

 

Our friend Leslie B. writes of her friend who is trans-gendered and visually impaired:

“…But it does get tricky. I have a friend who is trans-gendered, and, darn it, she still looks and sounds very much like a guy dressing up to look like a gal. Add to that the fact that she’s partially sighted, which means that she probably looks more like she’s sniffing bras in a store, rather than looking at them, and you might notify security about her, too. And she’s just trying to be who she is. She’d prefer it if she didn’t make people around her uncomfortable, but she’s not going to let their uncomfortable-ness stop her from doing what she has a right to do.”

 

I hear  Billie Holiday and surely these matters of dignity and freedom couldn’t be stated more clearly. (Though the English professor in me hastens to point out that Leslie B. wants the word “discomfort” and not the brutal coinage “uncomfortableness” which sounds like “Bush speak” and we don’t do that over here on our small beach blanket.)

Gadzooks! Visual impairment is vastly misunderstood all on its own. Factor in your trans-gendered body and you’ve got a performative panopticon straight out of the brain of Jeremy Bentham and god almighty the cadres, nay “legions” of unthinking scrutinizers are likely poised to march you across the Bridge of Sighs with no questions asked.

It ain’t nobody’s business if I do.

Having said this its a matter of medium irony if I say that folks with low vision should try to admit their difference and carry a white cane–not merely because the world of automobiles and the rat race can be dangerous, but because though blindness is a scary semiotic abstraction its far better to be freed at last from having to explain your residual vision to others.

That too is nobody’s business.

And sometimes, nay, even more often than sometimes, people will help you.

 

Okay. Let us eschew abstractions. Let us be richly and strangeley human.

 

S.K.

I want to be liked. I bet you do too. I bet this causes you a good deal of distress in the viscera. It sure does with me. I have to stand up on occasion and say something in a professional setting that invariably puts me at center ice as the hockey people would say. In such moments I need to hold an opinion, to declare that a job candidate is insufficiently probative and perhaps even egregious within a circle of ideas and this is not fun for me. What's worse is that I can't see the people I'm talking to. I may disagree with them–or with some of them–but the hardest part is the "not seeing" for indeed most human beings convey their tribal concatenations with small facial gestures. And I, windy boy up on my soap box fail to know if any are in my tribe. Sometimes after the meeting a colleague will come over and tell me that he or she found something of what I said to be useful and by God then I'm the small boy who has been set free through a gate. I'm back in the field where I'm breathing in the open.

This is the sad thing about the matter. I want to be liked and become so tangibly mired in my blindness I can't stop worrying inwardly about the matter. It would never occur to me to think privately "who gives a tinker's  damn" for I'm softly, shyly mourning the lack of the tiny facial tics of tribal ceremony. That loss is a lonely place. One that the blind are deeply inured to but only "just so" as our pal Kipling would say.  

The condition I'm describing is one for which there is no solution. The blind often find that the only quasi-solution is to barge into a conversation among the sighted, a response that can be misinterpreted as egoism.

We convey so much with our glances, wandering fingers in air, eyebrows, the parenthesis of smiles or the moue of approbation. Perhaps I should make a set of flash cards and wave them like the old fashioned news boys. Perhaps.

This is Professor Plum. Someone hit me with the lead pipe in the library. I was reading Duns Scotus when they conked me on the old squash and upended my teacup.

Now that I’m properly two dimensional I’d like to clarify a matter that some readers of old Plummie’s post over at Blue Girl have apparently misunderstood. In A Short Essay on Enmity my bosom buddy and doppelganger Professor Spruce Grove (for that is what “Kuusisto” means in Finnish–that barbarous language…) wrote about how its high time the old boy should take up the study of hating people.

Professor Spruce feels that political hatred and the atavistic “fight or flee” neurological highjacking that’s responsible for everything from road rage to the soapbox perorations of college faculty offer a cathexis of emotions. In short: one would be misreading him to assume he’s arguing that hate is a simple matter devoid of thought.

He does argue that the end game of hatred offers the excuse to stop thinking which is of course the subject of our next course: “Advanced Enmity: Religions, Radios, Republicans and Reactionary Movements of the Left” –a course not to be missed since it comes with 3D glasses and lobster bibs.    

Spruce (or “Cousin Sprucie” as I like to call him) argues that hatred operates like a baseball infield. First someone feels properly harmed or cheated; then they imagine (because they have a big honking brain) that the people in the next neighborhood are the guarantors of their unhappiness . This, as it turns out, is almost always untrue though every group hosts its own advanced haters–so yes there are lopsided post-cognitive practitioners of advanced enmity in the house next door or across the river. Now we’re at Third Base: Big Brain creates a cymbolic and abstract group of people to be properly demonized. And the third base coach looks quite a bit like your average demagogue–a little out of shape but still wildly gesticulating because its hard to get the game out of one’s blood.

Its only in this last phase that hatred offers the opportunity to stop thinking. Hatred is in this way precisely the opposite of love which is why Robert Mitchum has Love and Hate tattooed on opposite hands in the original version of “Cape Fear”.

Spruce believes that all marginal groups have a rich petri dish.  They have all the nutrients necessary for growing the symbolic codes that are a requirement for handing over one’s will to the coach at third base.

Spruce doesn’t think that last sentence was very good but he’s transmitting his ideas to me via blue tooth and he’s not a very good typist.

The only thing worse than playing Clue is playing Dead Clue.

 

Yours, PP per Spruce per Kuusisto

 

 

In her Today Show Interview the mother of octuplets who all told now has 14 children vows she’ll “stop her life” for her children apparently believing that being the mother of more than a dozen small and smaller kids is a kind of Zen exercise.

 

All I can think is that the probability is rather high that these 8 babies may well have varying disabilities including “retinopathy of prematurity”–a form of blindness that I also have.

Being the mother of children with disabilities will require Nadya Suleman to start her life and start it and start it over and over like kicking a motorcycle.

 

This is a serious business. One wonders if anyone and I mean anyone is telling her where to learn about parenting children with disabilities?

 

Well of course its too early since the children aren’t ready for the kinds of developmental diagnoses that will confirm or dismiss the evidence of disabilities.

Yet the likelihood is very great that Nadya Suleman will be looking after children with compound physical problems.

Does Ms. Suleman know about the National Association for Parents with Visual Impairments NAPVI?

Does she know about online resources like Special Child?

How about Rights and Responsibilities of Parents who have children with disabilities?

Perhaps more than anything I worry that Ms. Suleman’s poor judgment will leave her children at a supreme disadvantage throughout their lives assuming as I must that they may well have disabilities. Our culture is judgmental in such neo-medieval ways about people with disabilities–will the poor judgments of their mother and the uncomprehending actions of her doctors put the children in a lifelong position of abjection, a position that might be worse owing to matters that are entirely beyond their control?

I certainly hope not. I’m praying for all concerned. I hope, as all people of faith must that my prayers have outcomes beyond my wildest flights of optimism.

 

S.K.

Our friend Leslie B. comments on our post The Fetishist Goes Cold Turkey and points out that my attempt at humor is misplaced. I wrote in the piece  about a man who looked disarmingly like the elder Einstein who was fingering brassieres in the lingerie department of J.C. Penny’s. The  narrative was designed to make all 3 characters look vaguely silly–the narrator is presented as being pompously and intrusively performative and his friend is adolescent. The old man resembling Einstein never gets his say and he is patronized and presented as a fetishist.

If I had stopped at the incongruity of a man who looked like Einstein among the push up bras I’d have been okay. If I had let him speak for himself there would have been a story. Instead  I failed to find out what the man was doing there among the bras and I made up a story about him, even unto depicting a horrid latency fantasy from his childhood.

Leslie B’s larger point is that even if the man was a brassiere fetishist –“so what?” If I’m a human rights advocate then how can I konk a person who’s doing no harm with the same shallow brush strokes that so often are employed in bad representations of people with disabilities? (The Saturday Night Live skits about Gov. David Paterson come to mind.)

She is right. I presented Einstein’s doppelganger as a lurid and creepy figure and in so doing replicated the kind of thing Jerry Springer does. Springer displays men who wear baby clothing while his audience hoots and snarls. He pushes uncomprehending serial divorcers onto the stage and leaves out their personal stories of abuse and affliction.

Inviting cheap laughter is a low art. Knee jerk assumptions are employed against people with disabilities and I used the same trick.

I stand corrected and I’m taking my lumps.

S.K.

I received an e-mail this morning from a friend who was planning to attend an international conference in Auckland and with just days to spare before he was scheduled to depart he’s received word that the conference has been canceled. My friend, who is a junior faculty member–nay, an adjunct professor, is “out” the cost of his plane tickets. Who knows if he will soon be out of a job?

News flash: the world economy has collapsed.

This still feels like news here in the United States for the coverage on CNN, MSNBC, and the 3 networks has focused on the “drama” of the stimulus package but in doing so has presented the story as a mere soap opera, as if they’re covering the Paris Hilton arrest: “Will she come out of her house and submit to her handcuffs in front of the hordes? Will she weep on cue for the cameras? Will her attorney drop the “F bomb” for our sport?”

Even as we watch the U.S. economy “bleed out” we’re treated to the inane ET branded speculations about whether any member of Paris Hilton’s family will greet the sheriff.

But at this point its clear that the pending stimulus package isn’t even a medium sized bandaid for the shuddering economy and its additionally clear that the only people in America who aren’t terrified of what’s happening are the news producers, that intra-ophthalmic class of celebrity chasers–the same people who unblinkingly brought us the Iraq war because, after all, the whole thing was an episode of COPS. The Marines would burst in with the embedded media at their heels and we’d find Saddam in his underwear with his Weapons of Mass Destruction piled up in the double wide.

IN narrative poetry there’s always a moment where the poet says “Ah but you want the truth dear reader” and the test of the poet is how artfully he or she can pull off that trick but the truth mostly hurts and trickery or no, the fact is that the GOP isn’t signing on to the stimulus because they don’t want to be in the same room with the corpse.

The Obama team hopes they can hit the economy with the paddles and get it to breathe.

The GOP is gutless and cowardly and un-American but that’s not really news. Hmmm. How about this? We’llcount on the press to  imagine we’re all in Beverly Hills.