Planet of the Blind

Whether you know it or not this is Blindness Awareness Month. Let’s get right to it. Blindness is a disability. It involves eyes. Awareness is from the late Old English gewær “watchful, vigilant,” from Proto-Germanic *ga-waraz (source also of Old Saxon giwar, Middle Dutch gheware, Old High German giwar, German gewahr), from *ga-, intensive prefix, *waraz “wary, cautious,” from PIE root *wer- (3) “perceive, watch out for.”

Awareness among the sighted means keeping your eyes peeled lest you run into a blind person which wouldn’t be good.

In the old days if you encountered a blind person, especially first thing in the morning you had to run to the woods, find a tree with twin trunks sporting a hole between them, gather the rain water found there–then find a black cat, cut its fur, burn it, and mix the ashes with the spunk water and rub it into your eyes. This would forestall becoming blind by association.

(See the Oxford Encyclopedia of Superstitions.)

Be aware.

It’s Blindness Awareness Month. Do you know any blind people? Do they make you uncomfortable? Do blind-deaf people make you really really uncomfortable?

Let’s not hire them. I don’t think there’s enough spunk water and cat ashes to go around.

According to the World Health Organization there are “at present at least 2.2 billion people around the world have a vision impairment, of whom at least 1 billion have a vision impairment that could have been prevented or is yet to be addressed.”

The truth is the World Health Organization doesn’t know how many blind people there are–the “at least” is meaningful both as a nod to the lack of quality data and also as a confession of sorts: we have to guess at the number of blind citizens both globally and in the US.

Stealing from Al Gore the blind are an “inconvenient truth.”

According to the American Foundation for the Blind 75% of the blind in the US are unemployed.

While statistics are hard to come by students with disabilities who matriculate to colleges and universities are far more likely to drop out than their peers.

I thin we should rename Blindness Awareness Month.

Let’s call it Blind Pride and Global Employment Month.

I’m not fond of awareness unless its attached to action.

The last few days have been a nauseating slumgullion and there’s no way around it. From a barbarous faux debate to super spreader GOP events to the medical emergency affecting Trump–every bit of national news has been dreadful. Worse is the full knowledge that there’s no decency in the Executive Branch or the GOP portion of the US Senate. We’re forced to watch a dystopian cartoon about “the Donald’ while millions of Americans are struggling without money to pay the rent, buy food, or obtain medical care. We’re drinking from a vomitorium of Trump’s design, a Romanesque tankard filled with scabs and excretions unseen since the Middle Ages.

In the midst of all this I made the mistake of watching “Ratched” the Netflix “prequel” to Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” which is ableist pornography of a high order and just stir in homophobia, racism, eugenics, and you’ve got something even Kesey would disdain.

All I could think after watching several episodes of “Ratched” is this is the kind of thing a nation of self-contempt ridden cynics will watch without judgment. “It is what it is.”

This is the season
When I think most

Of my mother
Who drank herself

Into the grave.
Others greet red leaves

With tourism
Or wistfulness—

Longfellow
For dummies

Hot soups…
But I see her

Gasping for air
Clutching a lead pillow

To the open wound
In her chest

Death’s trusting child.
“Art is the child of nature

In whom we trace the features
Of the mothers face.”

See the bare trees.

I am a sinner. I’m loaded with envy coveting my neighbor’s ox. As of today I’ve not murdered anyone. My occasional acts of adolescent thievery were minor.

Having cleared the decks let me add I’m appalled by covid virus schadenfreude of any kind. If you think it’s funny that Donald Trump has the virus then it follows you think anyone with whom you disagree should suffer unto death.

Don’t start up with your would you kill Baby Hitler nonsense.
I’m talking here and now.

I despise Donald Trump and the greasy minions who work for him.

If I don’t believe in the death penalty (and I don’t) how can I suborn comic resentment to a position I don’t hold?

Another way to think of it: Putin wishes death on his opponents.

Don’t be like Putin.

The news media is reporting on Trump’s illness as if he was the president. Putin is president. By proxy. Bzzzz.

Trump runs nothing. His only job is to shout divisive horseshit. He can do that in the hospital. As any nurse will tell you, that’s what most patients do.

Now Steven Miller can get down to business promoting every toddler Nazi he can find.

Well, there it goes, my last brain cell. Bye bye! Bzzzz. Move over Emily Dickinson. I’m hearing flies.

**

Back to Emily.

Because I could not stop for Covid
He kindly stopped for me…

Do you think Trump will read poetry at Walter Read?

**

I so wish him good health. I wish everyone good health.

**

Back to Emily.

“I’m Covid! Who are you?
Are you Covid, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.”

**

Jokes aside Emily Dickinson wrote: “How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

Let us hope Trump arrives at a place, a state where thought is divested from hatreds.

There’s a pithy sentence deep inside Stephen Eric Bronner’s book on Camus:

“Realpolitik is not always incompatible with ethical ends; Hans Morgenthau and others could oppose the Vietnam War without supporting the terror of Ho Chi Minh. ”

Excerpt From: “Camus: Portrait of a Moralist.”

One forgets how hard Camus fought colonialism–a fight which earned him contempt from Sartre and so many other communist sympathizers in France. But ethical ends require knowing what not to support no matter your polemics.

So I’m thinking of this upon learning Donald and Melania Trump have contracted Coronavirus. I know what not to support which means I won’t cheer at their misfortune. I will wish them each a speedy recovery, knowing they’d never do the same for me.

Camus:

“Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events. ”

Excerpt From: “The Plague.”

Covid is now the very tissue of Trump’s existence. What will he do?

I can condemn his politics and not celebrate his misfortune for it is ours.

As a child of alcoholics, as a disabled man who was bullied on the playgrounds of boyhood, as a grown cripple who’s received plenty of abuse in the workplace, I shivered during Tuesday’s presidential debate. I know millions upon millions of my fellow citizens also had ice-water in their autonomic nervous systems.

Donald Trump was like a classic family abuser: cruel, loud, aggressive, raging, disloyal to truth and nuance, and unconcerned about what the neighbors will think, even with all the windows open.

I wanted Joe Biden to say that dignity, truth, decency, and a Scout’s concern for others was the matter at hand–that the absence of these qualities in Trump is directly harming the nation, and indeed harming all nations. I wanted him to drill down on Trump’s behavior rather than calling him a clown. Dignity, truth, decency, and a concern for others would mean we honor our allies, affirm freedom, defend science, assure that the vulnerable and the weak have access fo health care and food; that children are not kept in cages, derided access to their parents; would mean that we’re concerned about the environment and have plans to protect the planet. Dignity, truth, decency, and a Scout’s honor.

This morning George F. Will has written in The Washington Post that there should be no more debates during this election cycle. I agree. I think we saw everything we need to see two nights ago. As a friend once said to me during an Al-Anon meeting, “you can’t change your drunken parents, you can only cleanse your mind and cherish the truth.” When living with drunks the truth means you’ve decided to no longer live in the dramatic narrative they write with their delusions and bad behavior. A drunk will tell you that the fire in the kitchen was an act of God or an excellent thing wince he never liked the wall paper to begin with. He won’t say he started it.

My grandfather was a Finnish Lutheran minister. I try not to sermonize even though I know it’s in my blood. I too am a fallen man. I too make mistakes aplenty. But when you aspire to dignity, truth, decency, and a Scout’s honor you’re also demanding something of yourself–critical irony, emotional intelligence, the ability to stand back and assess what you’ve been about and acknowledge how you can be better.

The drunk isn’t concerned with this. The bully, the wife beater, the bad boss, the sociopath next door wants his every vicim to roll over and cover her head. Trump wants America to roll over and cover her head. He’s no clown.

I am of the opinion that Donald Trump won the debate last night. I’ve watched “Morning Joe” and read the papers. Lots of people are using nuance and scruples to analyze what happened in Cleveland. But the proof of Trump’s victory is in today’s headlines–“Rage on the Stage”; “Debate Disgrace”; etc. Trump’s goal is to turn people off, keep them at home, cast doubt on the very idea of democracy. If the headlines are any indication (and they may not be, I’ll concede…) then “the Donald” succeeded last night.

In order for my dark suspicion to be wrong we’ll have to see a vast turnout for Biden. Like all bullies Trump’s rules “are” the rules and on the debased playground that’s taken the place of civic engagement only a large moral posse of good kids will be able to stop him.

I was beaten on the playground as a kid. I know plenty of women who have survived abusive relationships with men.

I’m still shaking today.

If enough Americans want their democracy back we’ll get it back.

If Trump succeeds in destroying all public confidence in our national decency and the fairness of elections then he becomes dictator for life.

Yeah, I’m shaking. I know you are too.

The one thing I take comfort from is that “the proud boys” sounds like a toilet training celebration at the day care center.

In November of 2008 I spent a week guest teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Idaho. I was accompanied by my aging guide dog “Vidal” a yellow Labrador retriever who’d retire the following month. He was still a good worker and a boon companion though straight off I found he was a vehicle for rubicund creationists who were holding a mini-convention in the Best Western. You know this hotel: a pasteboard phantasm of breakfasts, carpet deodorants, bad plumbing, a cocktail bar straight out of “Breakfast of Champions” with faux paneling and lava lamps. And the creationists who admiring Vidal would step in front of us to ask if I understood the earth is only 4,000 years old? “Nice doggy, nice doggy, sir, do you know the earth is only 4000 years old?”

Cheapness in architecture means you can’t get three abreast in a corridor so Vidal couldn’t find a way around creationist one who for the sake of nuance I’ll call Decimus Tite Barnacle. “Well, you know, ” I said, “I’ve things in my refrigerator that are older than that.” And Old Decimus wasn’t having it fir he proclaimed this was no joke and I said, “excuse me but doggy gotta poo poo” and shoved him aside. This was day one in Moscow, Idaho; hour one. The first ten minutes. Outside was no better. The town smelled of rotting plants.

The students and faculty at the university were marvelous. We had lively, imaginative, and altogether useful conversations about writing, life on and off the pages, good books to read, the uses of curiosity. I loved everyone I met who had even the slightest interest in writing. And then there was the Best Western. Each night I’d return to a cloud of disinfectant spray, drunken creationists, overly solicitous waitresses in the grim dinette who thought that being blind I might need spoon feeding and who said “god bless you darling” when I’d ask for a fork.

Of this waitress clan I’ve met many and let’s not be sexist some are men, though yes the general “prole” nature of the thing is the thing, barbers, doormen, cab drivers, the maitre de, all believing the blind man is going to come apart like a bad banjo right before them and so they radiate a good natured panic at the sight of you.

At the university they thought I knew a thing or two. In the hotel I was a lost lamb of god.

By day two I was informed that the odor on the wind was rotting potato plants. Vidal and I walked up and down and he scented the air and my sinuses filled and we discovered that every third storefront in town was some kind of Christian venue–reading room, fortress, safe house, donjon, turret, bunker, for some of them were below street level like tattoo parlors. Yes and there were despoiled Christians outside each establishment who “loafed” as Walt Whitman might have it but they had no love in them and would step into our path and say things like: “You know Jesus is watching you, don’t you?” Or, “What did you do in your past life to wind up this way?” The stink of a million potato plant corpses like a sand storm.