Planet of the Blind

Yesterday I tried to help my undergraduate students see how important it is to entertain doubts about the rhetoric of national circumstance–not merely as a generally useful practice in our political lives, but as an exercise in intellectual honesty. And accordingly I talked to them about George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” where Orwell begins his narrative about serving as a minor British colonial official in the Far East with the memorable assertion: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

The essay as you likely know, narrates a young man’s tale of personal and cultural insecurity (the two are not the same) and unfolds a dramatic instance of hypocrisy in action. Orwell demonstrates his capacity for emotional candor describing how he shot a runaway elephant for no better reason than wishing to avoid the appearance of cowardice before a crowd of rural onlookers. The crowd consists of the colonized. He is the “imperial man” and the elephant, who is peacefully eating grass is the sacrificial victim.

“Shooting an Elephant” is about a great variety of things, most having to do with what we call nowadays by the inelegant term “arriving at consciousness” which means the first deep instance of knowing more than one kind of irony in a single moment, and in turn knowing that you have failed a human test. The failure comes when we know our motives are sullied and our actions are vain and theatrical. This is the material of tragedy if we don’t learn to give words to it. Orwell gives his cowardice the proper lingo. In his essay “Why I Write” he said that writers principally write for four reasons–the first two are easy, “getting back” at the adults who embarrassed us in childhood; and the love of beauty. But it’s numbers 3 and 4 that I wanted my students to see (Orwell): “(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. (iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

I couldn’t tell if they were seeing what I wanted them to see–that personal bravery and public bravery depend on the fierce desire to see things as they are and not in terms that we invariably prefer. I tried to use an analogy from current affairs–noting how the pundits on American TV have responded rather broadly to the death of the US ambassador to Libya by arguing that the Muslim world simply hates American values. “Isn’t it possible that widespread rancor against the US has something to do with the fact that we have killed over one million people in Iraq; that our drone assaults are largely killing civilians?” The truth should make one uncomfortable and one is best counseled to never forget it.

Of course this is an overdetermined way of saying one should admit his mistakes. Orwell:

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

1936

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Twenty minutes before the start of the half-marathon trail race, Zac and I sat in our car listening to National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. It had been raining for five days straight, the parking lot muddy, orange leaves blown down from wet trees. We sat in the car, heater and heated seats blaring, trying to soak up all the warmth we could before we started running.

On the news: Mitt Romney’s campaign had just released his previous year’s tax returns. Romney’s income topped $13.7 million. “That’s almost how far we’re going to run,” I said: one mile for every million dollars.

We started at the early start, the “slow man’s start” as another runner called it. Through wet woods, Zac and I pulled ahead of the crowd as we turned onto a trail alongside the lake. The wind picked up, huge waves cashing against the shore. It was beautiful: Lake Superior waves, white-capped, sandy trail, red pine trees. And then we passed the one-mile marker.

“One million dollars!” Zac said, then laughed like Count von Count from Sesame Street. And so a race day refrain was born. Every time we passed a mile marker, one of us would call out the corresponding millions of dollars in our best Count von Count accent—two million dollars! Seven million dollars! Mile by mile, we ran Mitt Romney’s annual income. Through rain and mud puddles, through several minutes of hail. Through two ascents to rocky peaks.

When we reached the top of the first ascent around mile four, we stopped, looked over the lake. Sunshine broke through the higher clouds, but wide bands of rain moved just below them. And then the second rocky peak around mile 10—10 million dollars! A man stood at the top blasting an air horn for encouragement. “You can do it,” he shouted as Zac and I slowed to a brisk walk, the rock face slippery from rain. “Thank you,” I said when we finally reached him. And we stopped again to look over the hills, bursts of bright orange and yellow trees, bands of darkened clouds. And then we started running again, the air horn fading behind us as the man yelled encouragement to other runners.

Mile 11—11 million dollars!—we returned to the trail by the lake, waves breaking so loudly I could no longer hear Zac’s footsteps. And I thought about Mitt Romney’s income, how in one year he makes more money than I will ever make. How unaware he’s been of his own privilege. How dismissive of those who make less than him—nearly all of us—how dismissive of those who are poor. Mile by mile, 13.1 miles, we ran a little less than his yearly income, called it out for the other to hear. Two and a half hours of hilly terrain, two rock ascents. Rain and hail and muddy, wet feet and cold-stiffened hands.

And this is partly what scares me about a Romney presidency: how little he understands of the run, the fight, of working hard long after you want to stop. How little he understands that you can work harder than you thought possible and still struggle financially. Still never reach the middle class, let alone millionaire-hood. And also, this: how little he understands of beauty: an autumn morning’s rain, sun rising over a lake, pine trees and gnarled roots and sandy earth.

 

 

I remember waking early and looking out the far windows of my little room, and because my eyes were not any good I surmised–guessed at the waving of the curtains. This was easy to do as they rippled like flags and I could hear the swaying of the pine trees. To this day I love that room. I believe I wake some mornings expecting to be there.

 

 

This is a proposition about life, mirror in hand, part of the tree behind you.

Mirror in hand, part of a tree, the top? Surely it’s not the roots, 

Just the middling trunk, a sad and slow becoming.

I wanted drama as a boy, climbed the oak, cried out 

that I was king–don’t know if kids climb 

oaks these days–suspect it isn’t so; 

suspect many things, mirror in hand,

highlighting rooves, the haycocks, stoic fences,

parts of things in the glass, 

the rest all up to luck.

 

 

 

Governor Mitt Romney’s recently revealed remarks at a fundraiser demonstrate a remarkable detachment from reality — and a profound misunderstanding of the challenges faced by everyday Americans, including people with disabilities.

Governor Romney’s comments are troubling and wrong in two major ways:

First, it is simply not true that 47% of the American public pay no taxes. In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 61% of Americans who pay no federal income tax are instead paying payroll taxes (Source:http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505). These are not folks who want a handout. Belittling low-income workers for paying payroll taxes is simply insulting. 

Second, by characterizing those who do not pay federal income tax as people who are not willing to take responsibility for their lives, Governor Romney has (whether he is aware of it or not) leveled a tremendously unfair charge at a  group that makes up a large part of that category: people with disabilities. Accusing Americans who either cannot work or cannot find work due to a serious disability of having some irreparable character flaw is beyond insulting: it is callous, narrow-minded, and silly. 

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted when discussing proposals to change the tax system to force low-income individuals to pay some federal income tax:

“The remaining 17 percent [of Americans who pay no federal income tax] includes students, people with disabilities or illnesses, the long-term unemployed, and other people with very low taxable incomes.  To make these people pay federal income taxes, policymakers would have to tax disability, veterans’, and similar benefits or make full-time students and the long-term jobless individuals borrow (or draw from any available savings) to pay taxes on their meager incomes.” (Source:http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505)

If this is the mindset Governor Romney would bring to the negotiating table as president, people with disabilities now have even more reason for concern than they did last week, when the Romney campaign was merely ignoring them while proposing massive cuts to Medicaid. Now, it appears that active disdain could be driving those bad policy proposals. 

People with disabilities are not looking for a handout. What’s more, the benefits they receive are not handouts. Those benefits are an indispensable system of services and supports that allow people to live in the community, to go to school, to maintain friendships and be near their families, and, yes, to train for and apply for jobs so that they can achieve the goal of independence and self-reliance that Governor Romney claims to value so highly. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have a very clear vision of what that goal means to millions of people with disabilities, or what it will take for many Americans to achieve it.

Governor Romney has reduced millions of people facing real challenges to a caricature. He says they fail to take responsibility for their lives. We say he doesn’t understand the true meaning of the word responsibility — which, in the America we know and love, means backing each other up, helping each other improve our lives and improve our country, and not allowing any of our fellow Americans to slip through the cracks in the system. 

Governor Romney has clarified this debate and shown his true colors. It’s not a pretty picture. 

We shouldn’t stand for it. We should fight back. 

You can start by learning more about what President Obama is doing to fight for people with disabilities: http://OFA.BO/ARsQ3b

It’s quite a contrast.  

 

 

I care what people think of me, but I do not always care. A proverb might be attached: sings to the wind, sings to stillness. Something like that. A student put me in mind of this, asking me how I keep myself buoyant (my words) in a world of endless disappointments (my words) and I said that in my experience those who do not like you would never have liked you, and so what chance do you have? You simply make the music that is your life. I’m always making analogies, not only because that’s what writers do, but because for over a hundred years the thinking of our thinking classes has been infused with metaphor, whether you’re a poet or not. So religion is about ideas of god, science is about wish, far more than scientists will allow, and art is what you make of it. And that’s a fancy way of saying you can’t please everybody.  

 

It is a sobering moment when you first realize that the educated in the US are afflicted by self-loathing and self-doubt to the same degree as your butcher. Talk subsumes surprise all too often, and a grey formalism mixed with gall settles in. You see it in university professors but also in bureaucrats and business people–a vague, unspoken sense that wisdom is not enough in a life. It’s as if the nervous self-awareness of adolescence has become permanent for millions of people; growth has stopped; and so the millions live in thrall to sad confirmations. You can ask why this should be the case and according to the province of theory you’re in, you will get different answers depending on whether you’re reading Osupensky or Marx or Alan Watts. What matters is that one is surrounded by idio-pathic zombies, which is of course why zombie games are so popular on mobile devices.

 

And so I don’t care what people think of me–I’m a person with an evident disability living in a civilization that sentimentalizes disabilities. The blind man who climbs a mountain can dine out forever giving talks about inspiration–talks that tell millions who live in thrall to sad confirmations that their lives could be bigger if only they dared live bigger. I have a general disdain for these sorts of talks, and in truth would rather have a colonoscopy without anesthetic than listen to the treacle that far too many celebrities with disabilities willingly toss at conferences and conventions. Inspirational speaking is always missing the point–that life is life, and lived with better ideas it’s a better business. Life is not cavalier emulation. It’s something else. It’s perhaps nothing more than a flaunted non-sophistication that finds honest satisfactions. And it’s about inviting your neighbors in, after you’ve swept the house. If you’re going to emulate someone, emulate the teacher who read a book all weekend. 

 

Meantime, I don’t care if I’m not liked. Oh I grieve over it a bit. But what I want isn’t personal. I’m not indifferent to the peculiarities of the world, the one we’ve made. I’m angry that Lockheed Martin can advertise weapons of mass destruction on my television. I’m angry that young people are being told their votes don’t matter; that people of color in my country are being prevented from voting because they don’t have driver’s licenses; I’m wildly angry that my nation has killed a million citizens of Iraq for nothing more than a bullying neo-conservative idea that we could export democracy at gun point. I’m angry that the old damage of American imperialism is so poorly understood by my neighbors, many of whom honestly believe that muslims hate America because we’re Christian–failing to realize that our foreign policy has undermined the dignity of human life in a large part of the world for a generation and that human beings have a good grasp of what has been happening to them. I wake up angry. I go to bed angry. And in the meantime I walk about. 

 

I live in the communion of words with my firm shoulder blades and half groomed head and I read as much as I can about liberty and I say what I must. 

 

If you have a disability you see almost daily how many have learned the language of shoulder shrugging. If you work at a university you see professors who shrug–they’re my pet peeve–the ones who don’t want the students with disabilities in their classes. And the administrators who make it hard for faculty and staff with disabilities to do their jobs–I can’t stand their shrugging. The latter especially as it’s loaded with double talk.  

 

So to that student who asked: I think of the static from the remorseless sun and keep shining. 

 

 

 

    

 

 

It was a gloomy day and I found myself reading Matthew Arnold. I wanted god and love and  knew both to be evanescent, and I also knew (as I’ve known since adolescence) that both are simply ideas. And so I thought of Matthew Arnold: for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…

 

One may go on: Arnold’s god was the product of a cartoon where the old testament meets the new testament and creates a granitic and loving deity who can only be envisioned by intense meditation. Thinking of this late in the day encouraged my sadness. Oh the sad retreat of the Sea of Faith; the mordancies of knowing what imagination can and cannot do. 

 

I thought today how Arnold presages Stevens in his tough minded insistence that poetry stands for something. 

 

And in the meantime I played with dogs, wrote a book review about disability and American history, affirmed the rightness of a film under production about autism and poetry, and ate, standing up, half a burrito. 

 

I did not go to the ocean. It was in my head all day. 

Gore Vidal on the academic American novel could just as well be describing the state of the Romney campaign:

Maximum entropy is that state at which no heat/energy enters or leaves a given system. But nothing known is constant. The Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to be absolute: everything in time loses energy to something else and, finally, drops to zero (centigrade) and dies or, perhaps, ceases to be matter as it was and becomes anti-matter. Question: to anti-matter are we anti-anti-matter or no matter at all?

When I saw “the video” of Romney talking to his private donors club (the 47% video) I thought, “he’s in his laboratory.”