Planet of the Blind

Thank God for my Friends

Who tell me not to despair, that America hasn't become a vast, anti-intellectual morass despite evidence to the contrary. Thank you my dear pals who remind me that America has always been a rude, rootin' tootin' frontier where the arrogance of the angry mob has often been successful, except to say that on occasion our nation elects Jefferson or Lincoln or the two Roosevelts or J.F.K.–that yes, just so often our better natures do prevail. Oh my friends from your lips to God's ears. May it be so.

S.K.

Yes, I'm a blind customer.

So it was a rainy day in Iowa City and I was late for a meeting and I ran through the wet streets with my guide dog and we got to the fancy coffee and take out food emporium just a little late. The people we were to meet had gone. Speaking for ourselves the guide dog and the man were drenched. I made my way to the coffee counter hoping to discern whether there might be another seating area where my friends might be waiting.Now here’s the strange thing (or one of them) about being blind. You can sometimes see just enough to know you are being dissed.

The girl behind the coffee counter stared at me. She just flat out locked her eyes right at me and she

did so as if I was a mannequin. The counter was high enough that I suppose she might not have seen my guide dog. But a customer, sighted or not should be addressed I would imagine. Was her silence a reflection of the fact that I was standing there and not making eye contact save that I was holding my head up and first in line and surely that ought to be enough for a minor acknowledgement? Yes? I decided to seek out the manager and to politely suggest that blind people are customers too.

Ah but the manager upon being ever so politely summoned was also rude. “Yes,” he said, standing suddenly in front of me.

“Hello,” I said, I’m Steve–what’s your name? He told me he was Jim but not without some radiance of malediction.

So I told him I’m not certain that the folks at the coffee bar know how to be polite to a blind person–and before I had a chance to continue he turned on his heels and muttered something about having a talk with them and he walked away as fast as he could.

So needless to say I’m not shopping anymore at the Bread Garden in downtown Iowa City.
IN my world view, two strikes and you’re out.

S.K.

What's Wrong with the Guide Dog Schools?

Note: I wrote this piece over a year and a half ago andI still think it’s worth reading, particularly if you’re blind and a guide dog user.

If you visit the blindness blogosphere you will quickly discover anecdotal postings about the failings of the major guide dog schools in the

U.S.

The reporting is of course subjective and the anger bubbles over into some pretty hard hitting assertions. One reads for instance that guide dog schools are patrician, dismissive of blind people in general, dishonest in their granting of services, even capricious—as you read these posts you’d be tempted to think you were reading about Oliver Stone’s version of the Nixon administration

I worked at Guiding Eyes for the Blind as the Director of Student Services from 1995 to 2000 before taking a job as a professor at The Ohio State University. I left Guiding Eyes because I was longing to return to college teaching. As it happened,

Ohio

State

was developing a new disability studies curriculum and I was offered the opportunity to be part of some exciting academic initiatives. Yet I left the world of the guide dog schools with mixed emotions. I consider the American guide dog schools to be remarkable institutions and I count friends among staff at many of the programs.

Still the blogs tell a story and I want to think aloud about what these narratives may tell us about the guide dog schools and the contemporary world of blind Americans. As they like to say in the public relations business: perception is everything.

It’s clear from the blogosphere entries that many blind people consider the guide dog schools to be out of step with the times. This may be an unavoidable offshoot of two factors: 1. Guide dog schools are essentially residential rehabilitation associations which are strongly reminiscent of 19^th century institutions; 2. as disability rights have expanded some blind people may forget that having a guide dog is not a right but a privilege: one that results from demonstrating that the client can look after a dog with discipline and adhere to the training principles that are essential to guide dog work.

These two factors appear to be irreconcilable until you consider the possibility that not all institutions are bad and that not all rules are devised to harm historically marginalized groups, even those who experience blindness or low vision. While many blind people argue that the guide dog schools are mostly run by sighted people and offer this as proof of a kind of institutional infantilization of the clients, its also true that guide dog schools are extremely interested in the views and ideas of their alumni. To read what’s on the blogosphere you’d imagine that the guide dog schools are operating as medieval fortresses with all the peasants locked up inside.

Still it’s true enough that the guide dog field should pay closer attention to important changes in blind culture. Many of today’s blind college students are not at all interested in taking time out from campus life to attend an isolated institutional setting.

Additionally it would be very useful if the guide dog schools stopped imagining that the provision of a guide dog is heroic work. Old fashioned sentimental rhetoric that still lurks behind some of the guide dog industry’s fund raising should be updated now that almost 20 years have passed since the ADA was adopted. Times change.

What’s wrong with the guide dog schools? Not much. But they need to pay more attention to today’s blind customers.

Fable

I was trying to stand for something so I talked in the streets. Strangers passed me on the sidewalks and they looked away as if I was a tramp. In these times men aren’t supposed to talk about civil liberties or human rights while walking alone on the ordinary thoroughfares even though this is the country of Jefferson and Paine and Frederic Douglas. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll get me one of those mobile telephones—not a real one of course, but one that’s been thrown away. And I’ll hold it next to my ear and talk about habeas corpus outside this Laundromat and people will say:”Ah, there is a man speaking the truth to someone unseen, but not to me—just the way we like it in

America

.”

Let this be a lesson to you brethren. My dead cell phone began vibrating and Lo, I received messages from the mournful dead. Naturally some were frivolous, dead people are jokers like the rest of us, so Ladislaw from an undisclosed Hansiatic city wanted to know how antinomianism is faring in Cincinnati and what can you say to a dead man like that?

But my dead phone received some very serious dead calls. The best was from a long dead caller who asked to remain unidentified. He wondered why capital is not re-invested by the most successful capitalists and pointed out that Dick Cheney has moved his money to

Dubai

. “Reagan is here with us,” said this incognito ancestor of someone who could be my neighbor. “Reagan just keeps asking, “How can they screw up my trickle down idea so aggressively?” And none of the dead have an answer for Reagan. The dead don’t understand greed either.

Continue reading “Fable”

Old Fart Eats His Own Tail Like King Salmon

My friend Bill Peace is right: today’s college students are working harder outside the classroom than ever. Many are holding more than one job while taking full course loads. In turn their professors who are charged with providing post-secondary educational course work are frustrated by the many ways today’s students seem to vanish from classes or vanish in conditional ways. My post below raises the thorny issue of “post-ADA” students with disabilities who don’t seem to have the insane work-ethic of their “pre-ADA” professors who often really did have to shoulder whole mountains in the bad old days when accommodations and social acceptance for pwds could be severely conditional at best.

And so I am an old fart. I like to think of myself as a scarred and dented King Salmon who has learned how to bounce off of the rocks and keep on going. In fairness to old farts everywhere and in further latitude to disabled students, I think most students today are reading less and asking fewer tough questions both of themselves and of the faculty.

“Ipse dixit,” says the old salmon. “Ubi sunt?”

The other salmon eye him from a safe distance before they swim away.

S.K.

Class in Ten Minutes

I have a class in ten minutes–and so I’ve got to be fast. I’m 53 years old and went to public school and then to college in the years before the ADA. Like all pwds in my generation I can report that geting an education was quite hard and that accordingly I found myself working even harder than my classmates.

Nowadays I see many students in higher education who, knowing they have accommodations and rights, will appear to use disability as a factor when explaining why they are doing less work.

Obviously this is a dreadful generalization. But I swear I’ve been watching this development over the past 8 years and I see that pwds who are teachers and professors may have to stand for renewed rigor in new and unexpected ways.

In haste this morning I’m hoping to start a little dialogue with burning sticks…

S.K.

Born Rich and Squishy

I continue to marvel at the appalling acceptance of the McCain campaign’s repeated assertions that “with Sarah Palin, parents of special needs children will have a great friend in Washington” etc. blah blah blah. For some good writing and other blog references on this disgraceful misrepresentation of Palin’s record I recommend William Peace’s blog “Bad Cripple” at:

http://badcripple.blogspot.com/

I believe that the lives of real parents and the problems that their very real “special needs” children face daily are so complex, fatiguing, socially driven, and seriously in need of assistance that I can’t accept the simplistic manipulation of these problems by a cynical political campaign.

As for John McCain: just look at his woeful record when it comes to supporting the health care of veterans.

For my money the telling thing about the McCain-istas utilization of “special needs” is that the term is divorced from the broader denomination “people with disabilities” which means that the right wing base of the GOP can rest easy that no one at McCain-Palin is seriously proposing anything that looks like a real social program. “Special needs” means sentimentality only. “Hey Muriel, that little special needs baby they’re holding up sure is cute!” Ah, but who in the GOP wants to think of a lifetime of physical and social struggle to get accommodations and an education for that special needs child?

I like the word “squishy” for this kind of neo-Victorian sentimentality. Translation: it’s at once soft and dead.

S.K.

Of or Pertaining to Neruda

In the garden of earthly delights

Where sumac and cinnamon ferns

Exhaled like birds or animals

Where odors of humus and granite

Seemed things one could live on

I saw myself

Walking for the long, mineral

Chain gang of the dead,

As if there among the trees

They had elected me to live

On their behalf, upright, lonely,

Oddly bruised,

But walking swiftly

The live one who carries inside him

The carved Russian dolls

Of all the dead.

I went alone in the late October night

Toward a copse where the last sun

Streamed through branches,

A caprice of twilight,

Walked with my head up,

Shoulders squared

Like any living person

without a proper country

& who in turn

Hears the live one

And the dead ones

In the poor drums of his shoes.

S.K.

What Double Standard Are Yu For?

What Double Standard Are You For?

One can find over at Lance Mannion http://lancemannion.typepad.com/ some of the most trenchant writing about the decadent anti-feminist and racist symbolism that’s being employed by McCain-Palin as this presidential campaign enters the home stretch.

Decadence as a literary term means the adoption of old ideas and manners—the trotting out of tired material. Writers who do this hope to God that their readers will be sufficiently uninformed about literary history that they’ll fail to notice the mediocrity of the enterprise.

Lance Mannion, being a literary writer, sees how the McCain-Palin crew is working the engines of decadence for all their worth. I particularly like Lance’s observation that by associating Obama with the Weathermen—a radical group that most Americans probably can’t remember, the McCain campaign hopes to implant the idea that Obama is a direct descendant of one of those other “hard to remember” groups from the 60’s—the Black Panthers. You see the drift. If you’re using decadence and your audience likes it well you can just employ as much phoney symbolism as you like. There’s no bottom to that ditch.

Lance’s most recent posts are the best things I’ve seen on this nauseating and dangerous enterprise.

In the meantime I find myself growing more alarmed and humorless by the day. Last night I watched with horror as Minnesota Republican RepresentativeMichelle Bachmann asserted on the Chris Matthews Show that liberals in Congress should all be investigated to determine whether they are supporters of

America

. See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/

Fascism relies on decadence both in art and in its symbolism. In turn I’d like to suggest the re-application of the dunking stool for Rep. Bachmann.

S.K.