Category: Uncategorized

        Barack Obama’s selection of a certain (here to be unnamed) right wing preacher to lead the invocation at his inauguration is receiving all kinds of praise and blame and I don’t really know if I

 

care about the issue. In general terms I don’t think preachers mean a tinker’s tutu when it comes to life in the big world. I can’t get worked up about preachers anymore. They’re on my list of facts that exceed intellectual energy along with onion farming and hemp clothing. I just don’t have the time. It does strike me that no one should be surprised that Barack Obama has no taste in preachers. But I think we already knew that.

 

The thing that matters more to me than anything else at this juncture is the failure of the

United States

to champion universal human rights. Whether you’re gay or straight; abled or disabled; or whether you hail from historically marginalized and oppressed ethnic group we must address the use of prisons as warehouses for America’s poor; the horrific and life threatening conditions in facilities for people with mental disabilities; the desperate conditions of the elderly; the plight of poor women with children; I could go on and on.

 

I always liked John Lennon’s quote: “They keep you doped on religion and sex and TV…”

 

I hope the Democrats surprise me with a push toward human rights but I’m not holding my breath.

 

Last night I was momentarily uplifted by some discussions in the Senate about holding Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the

U.S.

adoption of torture. But I came to my senses. The Democrats always flirt with these things and then they go flat as ginger ale.

 

I’m slapping myself around and getting ready for post election disappointments from the Democratic Party.

 

In the meantime, while everyone is beating up on Bill Clinton for accepting 10 million dollars from the Saudis for his presidential library foundation I’d suggest that people stop to remember that that 10 million was American money in the first place. All Bubba did was bring it back home. Personally I say “more power to him.”

 

SK

        

 

 

 

My friend William Peace has alerted me to a tasteless portrayal of New York

 

        Governor Paterson on last Saturday’s NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live. Bill’s post can be read at his blog “Bad Cripple” and I urge you to see what he has to say about the affair. Here’s the link:

 

http://badcripple.blogspot.com/

I think blindness can be funny. For instance when traveling alone I sometimes walk into the Women’s Room. This is funny for about a dozen reasons but most obviously it’s what every fifth grade boy wants to do. Women, seeing a man with a guide dog stumbling into their midst are either amused or solicitously helpful or both. I don’t make this mistake very often and when I do I try to cover it with some of my own humor: “I said find the Grille, not the Girls!” I wag my finger at the dog.

 

But the SNL skit presented Governor Paterson as being severely unable to orient himself to public space; depicted him holding a script upside down; made crude use of his inability to focus his eyes. These are the old comic gags that rude French comedy used to employ back in the late middle ages. Starved for humor the locals would round up blind men and give them oversized fake spectacles and musical instruments that they couldn’t play as well as fake sheet music they couldn’t read.

 

I wonder if the folks at Saturday Night Live find “Step and Fetchit” funny? How about some buck toothed

China

men ruining your laundry? These are the stock figures of racist and able-ist culture and no one who owns anything like an education would judge this stuff worthy of a primetime television show or even in a frat house revue.

 

The terrible after effects are what most concern me. As I’ve said over and over on this blog and in public, people with disabilities remain disproportionately unemployed in the

U.S.

and caricatures like the stumbling and lost version of Governor Paterson do considerable harm out here in the world where real lives are in the balance.

 

NBC owes the good governor of

New York

an apology and they owe me one too.

 

Not ready for Prime Time indeed.

 

SK

So there I was yesterday morning awaiting a flight in the San Antonio, Texas airport when I became aware that very loud Xmas music was being piped all over the terminal—really loud; drop your suitcase loud; bug eyed loud; enough to drive you onto the runway.

Someone told me it was in preparation for the arrival of a flight carrying disabled war vets who were coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Imagine coming into a terminal on your newly crafted prosthetic legs and hearing Jingle Bells or Rockin’ reindeer. It was a sobering sense I had: we don’t know how to welcome the wounded so we aim for Burl Ives singing have a Holly Jolly Xmas.

I think were I coming off that airplane I’d feel even sadder. Call me a gloomy and unseasonable fellow if you want. But Xmas music is commodified treacle under the best of circumstances. It would be better to have a brass band. It would be better to hear “The Stars and Stripes Forever” or Sousa’s “The Thunderer” than “Frosty the Snowman” and I am not in danger of taking this back.

So I’m a sour puss. I can only tell you that the sugar plum fairy better get out of my way.

On the first day of Xmas Uncle Sammy gave to me

My discharge papers and a phat colostomy.
Etc. etc.

SK

The Road Ahead? Screw the Old Folks and Their Gimpy Pals

If you’re wondering what’s up with the social services scene in these United States you can read this sobering article from the right wing Wall Street Journal which doesn’t usually bother with the Dickensian people—prefering all largesse go straight to the bankers, the CEO class, etc.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714130153442755.html

The road ahead is to put the elderly and the home bound disabled into the streets while we throw obscene trillions at the corporati.

President-elect Obama is sitting behind the Truman desk on this one. The old folks and the severely disabled can’t wait long with winter upon us.

I say we could do with at least two less crappy car makers. Maybe Detroit could in the future be a museum kind of like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Human dignity matters Mr. President-elect.

Don’t drive too much in the middle of the road Sir.

SK

December 3, 2008

International Day of Persons With Disabilities

This Wednesday marks the twenty-sixth International Day of Persons with Disabilities.  The 2008 theme is The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Dignity and justice for all of us.

Around ten percent of the world’s population live with disabilities. Like our own ADA the UN Convention on Disability promotes and protect the rights of persons with disabilities.  However, all over the world, persons with disabilities continue to face barriers to their participation in society and are often routinely denied the right to participate public and economic life.   Legislation alone can not ensure rights without the commitment of individuals to translate law into custom and practice.   This International Day for Persons with Disabilities is a time to make a renewed commitment to these principles of dignity and justice.

Ohio State Departments, Programs, and support units can mark the day by adding a link to the University’s  Access Concern Form  to their web sites.  It is easy to do – just cut and paste the code     into to your web page.

Links:

UN: http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?navid=22&pid=109
Form: http://ada.osu.edu/access-concerns-form/index.php

WE live in a fly over state. NO one comes to Iowa unless he or she is a politician or a poet. You can go down to the local café and find Mike Huckabee eating eggs over easy. You can go to the pub and find a poet from Ireland or Iceland or Chicago. But otherwise this is a closed state. Relatives don’t come here for the holidays.

Iowa is Irkutsk. It’s the prairie. There’s wind out here and then it starts snowing as it did last night. We’re now off limits until late March. It’s time to break out the macaroni and cheese. Time to bring the fire wood into the house. Maybe bring the pigs into the house. Hell, bring everything inside. It’s time for Noah’s Ark. Time to hunker down and read conspiracy theories for the rest of the winter. It’s time to “go gruesome” as the sleet strikes the windows. While the tuna casserole bakes at 375   degrees we shall consider the Kennedy assassination. If Oswald acted alone I’m Donald Trump. Time to read dark novels. The Brothers Karamazov for the 17 time. Snow hits the roof and we’re thankful for the five pages of human mercy in the Brothers K. We would read Dickens but he’s too cheerful. Next to Dostoevsky even Bleak House is cheerful. Isn’t that damned casserole done yet?

ON channel 57 they’re showing Hannibal Lector for the millionth time. He’s about to eat someone. Now there’s a commercial for a new kind of mop. We might as well mop the kitchen while we’re waiting for old Hannibal to eat a man alive. When will the casserole be done? Did we get the grit out of the corner by the door? Did I just hear the first snow plough of the season? Are we ready for this? We’re crazy already and it’s just the first day of snow. Thank God! Here comes Hannibal Lector with a spoon.

The local TV station talks about the snowfall county by county. Iowa

has more counties than Irelandand the weather girl visits every one of them. No one can pronounce these counties. Each time it snows one discovers new and hitherto unknown places. They got four inches in ParacelsusCounty. The sun will never shine there again we’re told.

We would like to go to the movies but all the flicks are Disney or they’re about vomiting teenagers and we conclude it’s better to stay home. We think about ordering Netflix but instead we just go to bed. Wind buffets the north side of the house. The dogs snore companionably.

It’s only 120 days until the thaw. Where’s Dostoevsky? How did my book get in the refrigerator? Is it really only day one?

 

SK   

        

                

There comes a moment when the meeting breaks up and the faculty is done with the formal business. The department chair doesn’t have a gavel but he waves a sheaf of papers and thanks everyone for coming. This is when it always happens: the faculty locks eyes collectively and start talking. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in this warp of ophto-centrism but it’s a routine fact of life. I’m on the “outs” unable to join a conversation. I sit for a time at the edge of the room and listen to the admixture of talkers—a vocal arrangement that’s part driven by familiarity and part by the myriad disasters of the super-ego; part collective relief now the official business is over, part diminuendo of sorts—like cocktail party chatter, a kind of spoken card play. Bridge.

 

My disability can produce routine states of loneliness. I’m unable to join the room though my only problem is seeing or not seeing. Sighted people are neurologically wired to look into one another’s eyes. Then, liking or not liking what they see there, they talk like espresso drinkers.

 

Instantly I feel a wash of loneliness. It’s the kind of loneliness one finds in certain poems by Lorca. Paths overgrown with brush appear. The heart feels it is a little island in the infinite. Worse: I’m thrown back into a childhood experience of solitude. I’m once more that blind kid living at the end of the dead end road.

 

This happens at the end of an ordinary meeting. It happens at the conclusion of a public assembly when the audience gathers in the aisles or in the foyer to talk about the ceremonies. It happens at the intermission at the concert hall.

 

I’m used to this. I’m not without the correspondent balances of brain jazz and. tom foolery that define the inner life.

 

But it’s lonely for whole moments. I will never be able to do anything about this. I can’t get up from my seat and walk into a cluster of unidentifiable people—elbow my way into a klatch of talkers. Nor can I just sit there at the edges of the talk. So I get up and walk outside with my dog.

 

Yes this is a small sadness. It has no serious relationship to large sadness which is grievous and virtually unendurable. I’d say what I’m talking about belongs in a category of miniature isolations like the ones that the elderly know or the parents of teenagers who are deemed ignorant and superfluous by their once loving children.

 

My father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He used to say “upward and onward” when far down in his inner life he was suffused with this condition I’m now calling the miniature pony of solo despond.

 

We just get on with it.

 

We keep our powder dry. We save our complaints for something big.

 

I’ve always loved the joke about the parents who have a son who after the age of 2 when most kids start speaking remains strangely silent. They take the boy to doctor after doctor. The specialists say there’s nothing wrong with the boy. Meanwhile he doesn’t speak. Until one day when he’s around 8 years old he says suddenly “The toast is burned!” His mother drops to her knees, grabs his hands, says: “Oh you can talk! You can! Thank God! Tell me, why did you never say anything before?” The boy looks at his mother and says: “There wasn’t anything wrong until just now.”

 

 

SK

    

Riding in a Car, Winter

 

The clouds were shaped like presidents;

            A friend said snow was coming.

I said the presidents were shaped like clouds;

            A standard

For political life …

You said the houses were closed against winter

                        Like granaries—only Odysseus

Has the key. I wished the story of hunger

            Could be funny—just turn a phrase—

The rich have all the cake; the poor run off

With the keys. The startling thing

            About the sky in northern latitudes

Is the tendency to see scripture 

In the mackerel and mare’s tails—

                        So there are gods under every leaf.

Stories circulate. Plain men starve. 

The clouds resemble waves

            Returning from far shores

Where money is useless.

The clouds were shaped like presidents;

                        A friend said snow was coming.

 

S.K.

     

I don't imagine that people have been losing sleep over my apparent disappearance from the blogosphere these past weeks but I do want to explain "the dilemma"as I've come to know it. If you are blind or visually impaired and you use screen reading software to interact with computers andwebsites you discover over and over again that your ability to negotiate these machines and environments is very fragile. Recently the folks  at Type Pad adopted a new posting site for their bloggers and I found that this newfangled site didn't work with my screen reading software. This is of course a boring story and if yu're blind like me you know that it's also a never ending story. But I'm now back in business having upgraded my screen reader to a newer version.

Now that I'm back I really ought to have a great story to tell. I was under the earth with the sun for company–both of us in hiding in due appreciation of an old Scandinavian folk tale. We were rescued at last by a iron monger poet who could recite all the poems of his people going all the way back to the day the earth rose from the back of a turtle.

So being away wasn't so bad. I can report however that both the sun and the iron moner had bad breath. Cosmic breath. Even Paracelsus would have found it hard to hang with those guys.

S.K.

    Does poetry make anything happen? Auden said no but who would argue that America is no better for the publication of Leaves of Grass? Who would argue that the wide readership that we have seen in recent years for novels by Toni Morrison or the popular poetry of Bily Collins has not made our nation a more reflective and discerning place? Poetry will not influence a tyrant beyond the arrest of the poets but it may influence what comes after. Last year the University of Iowa Press published an astonishing collectonof poems that were written by the captives at Guantanamo Bay. We stand today in the expectation that this prison will be closed and that the individuals who have been detained there will at last be accorded their human rights under the bylaws of the Geneva Convention.

Poetry is slow. It is generally the case that the human conscience is steadfast though it lacks initial speed.