Disability life is transitional life, liminal, ironic, filled with contradictions. As Norman O. Brown put it: "Meaning is not in things but in-between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence." In this way, disability is meaning itself.

The Greek Chorus in my Head

I watched Joe Scarborough this morning for about five minutes. He was carrying on about how the muslim world hates us, reprising the conditioned American sophistry that “they” hate us because of our freedoms, our values, etc. etc. He got no opposition from his co-anchors, who indeed seemed comfortable with the opinion that America is somehow facing an unreasoned and implacable religious foe. In this version of the world the United States is presented as a nation bleached of a history–and in particular of a foreign policy that has repressed people across the globe. Scarborough doesn’t remember or view as relevant the overthrow of the Iranian government by the CIA and its subsequent backing of the Shah. Why would Iranians hate us? Because we love Jesus? Because we have a two party system? Hardly. 

Absent from the TV pundits’ assessments of chaos in the middle east is any recognition of recent war crimes in Iraq. We have killed over 1 million civilians in that nation but to hear Scarborough and Co, this is of no matter. We have pursued a policy of violence and destabilization in the middle east for 60 plus years and we now have the results. How convenient it is to blame religious fundamentalism. And how wrong. Fundamentalism is one aspect of a region’s outrage, but it’s not the driving force. The murder, indeed mass murder of innocent people stands at our doorstep. The sooner our nation faces this fact the better. The odds of this are slim to none. 

 

Micro Memoir 39

If boys be beaten with an elder stick it inhibits their growth. The boys in my dream were victims of old superstitions. Nowadays we call them Dickensian but that’s too easy. They were twisted, mal-formed, prematurely set on a course without hope. All this in a dream last night. And behind them, the spooling machines of the industrial age. 

Bread and Circuses

I used to believe that political lying was a matter of historical relativity–that in effect lying had always been central to democratic elections, and accordingly we shouldn’t’ be surprised by its prevalence. During the terrible Bush-Dukakis campaign, when Willie Horton was used by George H.W. Bush’s campaign advisor Lee Atwater as a semiotic fire alarm for white terror, I told myself this was in no way different from the caustic and ugly campaigning during the time of Thomas Jefferson. That was a good argument, and sufficiently contrarian to bother my liberal friends who felt the end of civil engagement was upon the land.

 

I was wrong of course, because I was willfully ignoring the big dog in the hunt: paraphrased from from Zappa, the big dog says, “politics is the entertainment side of the military industrial complex.”

 

This means that the lying is now more sinister than ever before. A thing to be remembered during this campaign.

 

Also to be remembered: a million dead Iraqi civilians. They are left out of the televised American political discourse about the unrest spreading around the middle east and north Africa. 1 million dead civilians. That they are not mentioned in our public media is shameful, particularly as these victims of in Iraq are never far from the minds of people across the middle east. The entertainment side of the military industrial complex wouldn’t have it any other way.

Disability: More and More Forever

” . . . The awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less.” Christopher Hitchens

[“On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part III,” Vanity Fair, September 2008]

 

I am in a hotel in Chicago, liminal with dyspepsia, American travel food being what it is, and I’m contemplating my own aging with alarm on the 26th floor of the Hyatt. My bad back won’t let me tie my shoes and the day has been more and more subtracted from less and less. I did manage to read an essay by George Orwell on the flight from Syracuse–his early remembrances of boarding school brought back vividly my own stumbling in the world of adult cruelty, for it warn’t no picnic being the blind kid in public school back in the day. Orwell saw early the preternatural sadism of his teachers. And so, reading him on the plane I felt that shy, unanticipated connection with another soul who managed to endure, even as the nature and meaning of that endurance was inapparent.

 

I’m in agreement with Christopher Hitchens’ observation. But I also see, via Orwell, that if your childhood was charged with conditional panic, “more and more, subtracted from less and less” was always the essential quality of being. From boyhood on, with a disability, one feels the electrolysis, the buzz of alarm at the core of the very minutes.

 

I still feel this. And now I have a backache to go with it. Less and less, but the soaring and anticipatory “more and more” was always the case.