Planet of the Blind

In her book Make Them Go Away disability rights activist Mary Johnson talks about the backlash against persons with disabilities that came on the heels of the Americans with Disabilities Act. While the pace of cultural change is fast and some of her book already feels like an analysis of the 90’s there is no doubt that her prescient and unblinking view of organized ableism in contemporary culture remains entirely and sadly up to date. One reads almost daily of children with disabilities who are subjected to unaccommodating educational experiences; of college students who need to file grievances or lawsuits against their schools because they’ve failed to meet basic minimum ADA requirements; of programs and opportunities for disabled citizens being cut from the diminished rolls of our nation’s remaining social services. It is hard in these times to find a bright spot even as the country looks to Barack Obama for hope and recourse.

But what does it mean to invest in a story? Over the past week I was with lots of talented writers all of whom had their own stories about what’s going on in the world. Many of them without knowing it are convinced the world is ending. This is not uncommon for artists–there’s a considerable history of apocalyptic stories that has come down to us over the millennia. (The Iron Age   Finns thought the sun was about to be stolen by witches and carried away to be hidden forever inside a mountain.)

If a scarcity vision is passively incorporated into the governance of thought then by turns one necessarily becomes what I like to call “sub cartesian” for if “I think, therefore I am” is the incitement of the Enlightenment,then “I Don’t Think, and That’s Enough” is the provisional epistemic nomenclature of a commodity driven amateur gloom –I’m thinking here of Hitler’s description of Germans with disabilities as “useless eaters”. There’s only so much freedom, so many apple pies, so many clean walks to the beach, so many books on the shelves–civics can’t be for everybody don’t you know? Didn’t your mother tell you?

When I search the bare, lamp lit and unfurnished room of my private beliefs I find that I do not believe that the end is coming–nor do I think that a de facto Hitlerite reaction is underway where pwds are concerned in this country. But I do think that this is a moment when the tribes of all disabilities must come together to fight hard for a single cause rather than defending the sectarian coverts of provincial argument. This is a hopeful idea. I hold on to this. I think Mary Johnson’s book needs to be read however. Its good to know who your opponents are.

SK 

A fellow blogger has written to say that he’s been posting about the inaccessibility of the upcoming inaugural events and that he’s received several hostile comments from bloggers who think that “the disabled” are just whining and should shut up.

Ableism.

Its easy. Its like drinking water. How simple this is.

Such people are actually furious about having to be sensitive about all the other identity categories. They hate having to think about the rights of children (you can’t hit them anymore); women’s rights (soon you will have to pay them the same as men); people of color (defenders of Don Imus or Rush Limbaugh, etc. etc.); forgive me–the list is huge. GLBT haters; ethnic baiters; people who hate the social contract hence they hate the poor. 

But you can still kick the cripples. Tell them to shut the hell up. Take away their accommodations. Shut down their social services even as you bail out the bankers; laugh at depictions of the blind as groping imbeciles on Saturday Night Live; handcuff those kids with LD who didn’t get the services they needed in the first place.

Glass of water.

Ableism is illegal and how they hate it.

In the meantime they take refuge in anonymous blog comments. Shut the hell up you people you! You war veterans; you parents; you children; you who are the friends of such people. This is America! Don’t you know there isn’t enough time to think about you.

Water.

Other people’s civil rights are just “whining” if you don’t believe in liberty.

That’s the final kicker. Ableists don’t believe in liberty at all.

They might as well hate the moon and the stars. The wind off the oceans. Perfect numbers. Silk worms and thermal dynamics.

But you see the point. They need to hate and the circle of liberated culture is   narrowing so terribly fast.

Cripples should stay home where they belong.

Why haven’t they learned that by now?

SK

We have received the following note from the writer Anne Finger whose memoir “Elegy for a Disease” we admire over here at the Blind Planet. I think her post needs no additional explanation. Here it is:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will award Jerry Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the upcoming Oscar award ceremony. Please join disabled people and our allies in protesting this.

Jerry Lewis’s MDA Telethon, rather than working for equality and social inclusion of disabled people, portrays us as hopeless, pathetic, eternal children. Lewis has said, “My kids cannot go into the workplace. There’s nothing they can do.” He has said that a disabled individual is “half a person,” and [If] you don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house!” His telethon reinforces the notion that cure and prevention are what disabled people need, not social change. The LBGT community has protested Lewis’s numerous anti-gay slurs–recently, he referred to cricket as “fag baseball.” Lewis has also stated that he doesn’t like women comedians because he thinks of a woman as “a producing machine that bring babies into the world.” These statements are de-humanizing; the one who uttered them should hardly be given a humanitarian award.

Please sign a petition protesting this at:Jerry Lewis Protest and please forward this email to others. It has been less than a week since we put this petition online, and it has already gathered more than 1700 signatures–including that of Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer!

Thank you!

Anne Finger

If you have neighbors in your culture they will say there’s more than one way to skin the crow or the aardvark or whatever creature they’re likely to contemplate the skinning of and they will say this because they are related to people who said it and there’s no mystery to this. If your great great great uncle Tom Foolery said there’s more than one way to make pantaloons from clouds then your family would be saying this and chances are good that a whole nation of restless wanderers might be saying it. A phrase doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to have meaning insofar as the direct object is concerned. Obviously the skinning of crows is not a profitable industry and it scarcely leads to good eating. You skin a crow because there’s more than one way to do it. There’s more than one way to make pants from a rain cloud. (Best though if you have the rainy part on the outside, the fluffy stuff on the inside, etc.)

The reason some catchy aphorisms and divigations catch on is that they’re attached to living roughly. Skinning a crow is not to be undertaken perhaps but there are useless crows all around the maddening fields and therefore they make themselves available to the poetry of tough living and compensatory nonsense.

Local culture migrates when the aphoristic qualities of its poverty are useful in other towns. 

Otherwise a phrase stays behind like the armoire they couldn’t fit in the conestoga wagon.

This is why the rich have no poetry.

SK

Our friend Ruth over at Wheelie Catholic has a disturbing post with links to many sites devoted to reactions in the asperger’s communities and I urge my readers to see what’s going on. Briefly Evelyn Towry, 8 years old was judged by teachers and school administrators to be sufficiently out of control to warrant calling the police. As I say, you can read more about this apalling story over at Ruth’s site.

in Charles Dickens’ famous novella “A Christmas Carol” the ghost representing the hypothetical future   shows Scrooge two starving orphans hidden beneath his cloak. They are labeled ignorance and want. Or something like that. I could look it up but I’m not going to. My point in this instance is that our public schools are one vast unfunded mandate where children with disabilities are concerned. This fact doesn’t excuse the mishandling of Evelyn Towry’s situation but it explains how such an inexcusable and dehumanizing event can occur. Teachers don’t have enough classroom support or special education training;administrators who have little or no ability to fund anything imagine that the police are the only resort.

Abuse is abuse and young Evelyn Towry and her family are in my prayers.

S.K.

At his confirmation meeting yesterday on capitol hill General Erik Shinseki told senators he doesn’t understand why it takes six months for wounded soldiers to get their disability claims processed by the veterans administration. The very fact that a four star general could raise such a question speaks well of his listening skills and leadership. I believe that General Shinseki has heard the cries of our soldiers and their families and I think that by raising this bald and shameful question that he proposes to do something about the conditions that affect people who have given their full measure of courage and loyalty to their country.

Otherwise why raise the question? There’s no mystery really as to why the V.A. can’t process claims. There aren’t enough beds, enough physical therapists, enough psychologists and psychiatrists, enough neurologists, ophthalmologists, orientation and mobility specialists, prosthetic devices, nurses, medicines, outpatient services, vocational rehabilitation specialists–the list is a long one.

One shouldn’t imagine that the dire plight of wounded men and women awaiting help is simply a matter of a backlogged bureaucracy.I’d estimate that ineffectual administrators account for only 15 per cent of the problem.

The United States has underfunded the V.A. health system for over twenty years. And Lo and Behold! We now have a two war theater.

Adjusting to life with a disability is one of the harder things  to do. Having to wait with choked breath for any kind of help is tragic.

I’m choosing to believe in General Shinseki. I think Congress and the American people are doing so as well.

WE wish you well sir.

S.K.

Tooth ache. Cholera. No hehlp in sight.

Pale ministers with apologia. Crumbs on the table.

Houses asleep. The gibbous moon like a thumb.

Intellectuals sopping up milk with books.

Hostage children in each nation no matter the government.

Guided tours of old slayings in Dallas and Colombia.

The man who sells umbrellas on 42nd St. in quick rain has kind eyes.

A friend has survived his heart attack and we feel we can go on.

There’s a painter I know in London

Swears he’s painting under his eyelids–

No one has seen him in public for awhile.

Got the blues but hang it all Robert Browning

Got to take the dog out

Talk pretty to the unaffiliated innocents    

Without whom, no poetry bus.

My friend and fellow disability rights blogger William Peace has a couple of posts over at his blog “Bad Cripple” which outline the apparent massive indifference of the Obama people and the Congressional transition people when it comes to assuring that the presidential inaugural events will be accessible to people with disabilities. In short: the official line is “stay at home” and one might as well add the phrase: “you people.”

Bill points out that he tried unsuccessfully to attend an Obama campaign event and you can read more about that over at his site. What’s clear is that whether we’re talking about campaign events or public ceremonies the de facto operating principle where ableist planners are concerned is to say “this isn’t our responsibility” –a time honored matter where disability and access are concerned no matter what the venue.

So there’s a gap between campaign positions (Obama has affirmed the rights of people with disabilities) and the facts as they appear on the ground. The ground of course is where pwds have to live, work, navigate, and prosper just like all citizens.

When you really think about it, leaving disabled people out of the planning means that the planning is guaranteed to be nothing more than a factory issue Pamplona style running of the bulls in which no citizen is treated with dignity. Or to spin this another way: if you’re making the transportation and the seating accessible you’re also creating dignified human spaces for all.

But the worst thing about this story is  the cavalier rhetoric of the transition officials. Stay home means just what it means. And its demeaning as she goes.

SK

Can you read poetry if you have no moral base? By reading I mean of course that one carries away the aesthetics of the matter. I don’t just mean the shapes evoked by images or the sounds but the grains of philosophy–the hard to define   reasoning that both the poet and the reader must do whether they like it or not. Frost says famously at the end of a very famous poem: “And that has made all the difference” and we understand him because we too must make incontestable moral choices each and every day. Frost chose to write narrative poems about his rural neighbors thus giving them places in the Parthenon of American culture and if you think that’s too imposing a figure let me add that Frost’s poems are the most widely read poetic works of the 20th century and that’s a matter that isn’t going out of fashion anytime soon.

But if I were a bad man would  I read poetry? This is a silly question of course. I am a flawed man but I believe in the social contract; demand equal rights for all. What kind of a question is this? I might as well start talking about what the next life will be like. But wait.

You see the thing is I’m a neo-Platonist. I think art should delight as well as instruct. By “delight” I don’t mean things have to be cheerful. Substitute if you like the word “engaging” or “puts a spell on you” and that’s just fine. But art instructs because it demonstrates the mind working at better solutions than mere sensation. What does it mean to be seeing, hearing, eating, loving, worshipping, fighting, running, birthing, standing alone? What does it mean and how did the meaning arrive?

When works of art deliver something like a partial answer to these mysteries I’m grateful to the woman or man who took that path. The smaller man inside me is instructed. He’s reassured there’s a reason to all this navigation and itching and circling we do down here on this planet.

Stalin famously enjoyed playing a gramophone record of wolves howling. He’d make his guests dance to the record and if they didn’t dance they’d be killed if not in that moment then surely the next day. And the guests danced over and over as Stalin turned the crank and watched them with his feral eyes.

Safe to say he didn’t require poetry. He knew it would complicate the minds of readers; knew that poets had to be stopped. The immoral mind discourages choices and all complexities.

Several years ago I was invited to meet with men in prison, “lifers” all, most of them in jail for having murdered someone; all of them were now raising puppies for a guide dog school in Ohio.

These men wanted to meet a real guide dog user: a blind person who was out in the world and traveling and who could talk to them about the end user’s experiences.

What I found was a room full of men with a shared passion for doing something that was arguably good, unambiguously good. They were pouring out their hearts and souls to their puppies and to each other and then to me.

Criminal acts do not invariably derive from immorality. Complexity and beauty can be in the most unforseen places. I read those good guys a poem about my first guide dog Corky which describes how she guided me around New York City.

No one knows at face value who is moral or who lacks all redemption. That’s why we read and write the poems; why we keep with whatever troubles our assumptions.

“See life steadily,” said Kenneth Rexroth . “See it whole.”