The Big, Ugly Parade

A friend who is both a poet and essayist and who grew up in the southwestern desert regions of the United States once told me that When he was a kid he witnessed “first hand” an occurrence that the locals called “the parade of the tarantulas”—each year a single file line of big venomous spiders would walk down the main drag of town.

The line, according to my friend would stretch for miles. People would sit on folding chairs just to watch.

I was reminded of this yesterday while watching the so-called news channels. The Samantha Powers story was bringing both the spiders and the lawn chair lurkers right out into the open.

While Senators Clinton and Obama parade their followers down the street and the body politic and media bubble is caught up in the spectacle of hairy legs and fangs, no one is debating the real issues.

Does anyone care that 30 per cent of the nation’s honeybees have mysteriously disappeared and no one knows why?

As my friend

Lorraine

would say: “I’m just sayin’!”

S.K.

Dog Food for Everyone!

When I was around ten years old I used to play a game with my cousin Jim (who was just a couple of years younger)—a game we called "Guess the Taste" which required a blindfold and a can opener. Occasionally my sister would also join us. The person wearing the blindfold would have to eat whatever combination of "goodies" the director provided, and as you can imagine this meant that one or the other of us would wind up eating canned dog food with spicy mustard or peanut butter with garden slugs. It was a dreadful game but what made it endurable was that it was democratic. If I gave Jim a pickle dipped in kitty litter he would get revenge by handing me an Oreo cookie with a housefly inside. You couldn’t refuse to eat "the thing" as we called it. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I was reminded of "Guess the Taste" last evening while channel surfing. Suddenly, there appeared on my screen two overgrown ten year olds and wouldn’t you know it—they were playing with a can opener and a blindfold though of course they didn’t know .

The gassy, superannuated, and undifferentiated ten year olds were none other than right wing commentator Glen Beck and Harvard professor of law, Alan Dershowitz.

Glen Beck was saying that he counts as one of his friends a university president who reports that college professors are terrible people. Dershowitz jumped right in by saying that there is no more cowardly class of people than tenured college faculty and then he went on to say that most of them are aging liberals who harangue today’s students with political demagoguery left over from the sixties and these people will defend the rights of the very people who want to destroy our nation, etc. etc.. I think he also said something about how scandalous it is that the salaries of these professors are paid for by the taxpayers. (You’ve always got to make a bad taste even worse so the one with the blindfold won’t know what the original thing might be. But I digress.)

Heck. I’m not prey to the pretense that my views about the world are legion. My sense of humor alone assures that I’m mostly a lonely man. (For instance I think it’s funny that "Episcopal" and "Pepsi-cola" are composed from the same letters.)

I’ve been teaching in higher education for close to thirty years. My father was a highly successful college president. I think I can say with assurance that I’ve lived most of my life in the vicinity of American colleges and universities.

I have absolutely no idea what Glen Beck and Dershowitz are carrying on about. Professors are in my experience as uncategorizable as New York City cab drivers. Some are right wingers. Some are lefties. Some are drunks. Some are not. Some (like myself) love John Wayne movies. Some think "the Duke" was a fascist.

Beating up on "the professoriate" is as stupid and pointless as playing "Guess the Taste" except it’s even stupider since real ten year olds don’t pretend to moral or political superiority.

Colleges remain this nation’s leading forum for the free expression of ideas. Some ideas are better than others. Today, for instance, they don’t burn women at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts. Alright, I’m spray painting the lily.

Glen Beck is a smart fella. But really, c’mon. There are right wing professors who helped George W. Bush prattle on and on about the idea that global warming is a fiction.

As for Dershowitz: we know he will put anything on a fork if he thinks you can’t see.

S.K.

The Memoir on Steroids

The New York Times reports that there is a new memoir scandal afoot in American publishing.

At issue is the discovery of what appears to be an entirely fictionalized memoir by a young woman who purported to have grown up in foster care and then to have lived a sub-rosa life among teen gangs in Los Angeles. Like the scandal involving James Frey’s notorious false memoir it turns out that this gangland narrative is simply fiction. 

As a teacher and writer of literary nonfiction I want to hold my head. My first instinct is to feel alarm for the art form that I love. Literary memoir is a genre that could be irreparably tarnished by repeated disclosures that something smells rotten in Denmark.

I worry especially because as a teacher I aim to encourage younger writers to write sophisticated and brave nonfiction. I worry because we live in an era when commercial publishing is in serious trouble. I fear that the avenues for the publication of autobiographical nonfiction could be significantly narrowed by the kind of malfeasance we’ve been seeing lately.

What’s worse in my view is that the “trouble” doesn’t lie with the genre. Though it’s tempting to blame “the memoir” in much the way we blame major league baseball for the steroid scandal, the problem doesn’t rest with the “game”—the difficulty lies in the demand for instantaneous and sensational profits.  Commercial publishing is driven today by a relentless, starving shark: a shark like all sharks—its momentum driven by sensation and the promise of instantaneous rewards.

It costs too much to run a baseball team or a publishing house nowadays. So you have to get a juiced up superstar to break a time honored record or you need a shocking and quasi-lurid book to make fast profits. Today’s corporate business model is entirely built on fast quarterly earnings.

Book publishing wasn’t always like this. In the good old days publishers could receive tax credits for the unsold books in the warehouse. But in the Reagan “go go 80’s” the tax laws were changed and publishers found that they couldn’t afford to keep books in print. In turn, the industry went from “publishing” to “producing”—and until the incentives are changed this is the way it will stay with literature and with baseball. 

Memoir isn’t the same thing as a Hollywood “kiss and tell” story. While an artful memoirist may disclose painful or disturbing facts about the personal past, the larger aim of literary consciousness is largely concerned with ambiguities of all kinds.

Another way to put this is that the true writer of memoir doesn’t overcome anything. A true memoir isn’t a self-help book any more than a poem is a manual on how to build a boat.

Yet in  commercial culture the Reagan go-go 80’s lead to the “Oprah 90’s” and both circumstances call for a tabloid friendly form of personal narrative—what I have come to call the “memoir on steroids” which, like the suspicious record keeping in baseball is entirely a function of fast profits.

No one would say that the memoirs of James Baldwin or Mark Twain or Mary McCarthy were sensational narratives about overcoming a singular and crippling one-sided misfortune.

Don’t blame the memoir for contemporary greed.

S.K.    

From Where We Stand or Sit

Gordon Cardona lives in Malta.  He has been blogging about the
efforts of the Maltese Labor party to create a new institution for people with
disabilities and in turn, Gordon is arguing for getting pwds into the
community.

This issue of institutionalizing people with disabilities remains a problem worldwide. Here in the great state of Iowa there are people even as I type who are in hospitals who would like to be in their communities.

It is safe to say that people with disabilities are only as free as the civic “ethos” of their local communities.

One thing that Gordon’s post reminds me of here in the United States is that people with disabilities are equally ignored by the GOP and the Democrats.

Shuffle Shuffle, Drool Drool

Our friend Kay Olson over at The Gimp Parade has a post about two Hollywood casting calls that are looking for physically deformed or oddly shaped people for two upcoming movies: one about "the hollers" of West Virginia; the other having to do with Cormac McCarthy’s novel "The Road" which is a post-apocalyptic vision that features ghastly survivors.

Kay’s post Is "spot on" about the dilemmas of using real disabled people in exploited roles. Just so, she wants to see people with disabilities get the chance to play themselves. The problem is in the scripting of course. Nowadays Hollywood is a cartoon industry rather than a cinematic one. Film after film presents real life actors playing two-dimensional cartoon characters. Disney did this a few years ago with a version of "Mr. McGoo" starring Leslie Nielson. But you can find thousands of examples from "Pretty Woman" to "Edward Scissorhands" and beyond. The days when Hollywood jumped at the chance to film a complex novel featuring three dimensional characters are largely over. I saw only one such film making the rounds this past year. ("Atonement").

Physically challenged people are perfect for 2D roles because in the second dimension they are of course merely symbols for atavistic impulses like the belief that if you see a blind person first thing in the morning you will also go blind; or if you meet a little person you will be crushed by a falling tree. Or worse: physical difference means that you’ve been punished or rewarded by supernatural forces or the gods. This is the kind of stuff that continues to set back the public’s understanding of disabilities and I know whereof I speak for far more often than you might suppose I am accosted by people who want to pray for my recovery.

And why not? Film after film shows us to be in the hands of a twisted power.

I have the feeling that Karl Rove might have a new career in some of these films. He’s small. He has a funny looking head. He’s mean as can be. But I digress.

S.K.

Crimes Against People with Disabilities

Crimes Against People with Disabilities: A brand new blog and A Place to Tell It Like It Is 

In 2002, Professor Mark Sherry, then at the University of California, published an intriguing article about the grievous underreporting of hate crimes against people with disabilities in the United States.

The most important dimension of this piece resides in the FBI’s
suggestion that hate crimes against the disabled are statistically
negligible. The findings of an accompanying study by the UC Berkeley’s
program in disability studies suggest that police and law enforcement
officials are often reluctant to categorize crimes against people with
disabilities as hate crimes because officers aren’t sufficiently
trained to identify biased based crimes. Additionally, it is easier to
classify a crime as simple assault.

Alas, not much has changed in the six years since this article was
published even though disability rights advocates have continued to
point out the seriousness of this underreporting problem.

The aim of this blog is to give people with disabilities and their
fellow advocates a place to publicly record narratives of abuse against
PWDs. These narratives might be first person accounts or associated
stories drawn from the news media or the internet. They might be links
to blogs or links to announcements concerning public policy and law
enforcement initiatives aimed at addressing these problems. Other posts
might include articles or bibliographies about these issues.

Above all
else it’s safe to say that the gathering of this information will be
timely.

Cross-posted on Blog [with]tv

In Memoriam: Lawrence King

We at Planet of the Blind received the following e-mail from the
Society for Disability Studies. The post is by Professor Warren J.
Blumenfeld of the Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.  Since the
intersection of disability rights and all human rights is not far from
our thoughts I wanted to share Dr. Blumenfeld’s post with our readers.
We do so with his kind permission.

S.K.

In Memoriam: Lawrence King
By Warren J. Blumenfeld

Continue reading “In Memoriam: Lawrence King”

Listen to Steve's Interview on Iowa Public Radio's "The Exchange" with Ben Kieffer

Thank you, Ben Kieffer, for this opportunity!

                  


                      Fri 02/22/08
Real
Audio
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                    An interview with University of Iowa Professor Steve Kuusisto. He’s an author, educator and advocate for people with disabilities. Blind since birth he says sometimes even those working to help people with disabilities consign the disabled person to a second-class, defective status. That thinking is something Kuusisto is working to change.

Morning on the Bus

I rode the bus to campus this morning and overheard a conversation between the driver and a passenger. The two men talked ardently about the distinction between theology and religion or religious practice. The bus rumbled through corn fields and housing developments on a cold, snowy Iowa day and these two unassuming guys had a smart conversation about Zen Buddhism and the parables of Jesus and then, as the bus pulled up alongside the big shopping mall downtown they promised to get together for coffee. Some days it’s nice to live in a college town where everyone is most assuredly not what they appear to be. I mean that in the best sense. I mean this the way Walt whitman meant it when he said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." I wish more Americans had the luxury to live out their contradictions with curiosity and support from their neighbors. Why then we would be free of course. Why then we would be free.

S.K.