Planet of the Blind

Rudely Lucky

I am a lucky man because I own several rotten wood piles and an abandoned outhouse.

Yes. I’m a New Hampshire land owner and Jeezum Crow I have some God Awful things out in the woods.

I have a discarded septic tank that looks like a Soyuz space capsule.

I have a shaggy carpet of moss and a migratory flock of wild turkeys to stand on it.

I am in these ways what you might call a wealthy man.

Last summer a raccoon took up residence in the septic tank. I nicknamed him Yuri for obvious reasons.

I track the weather in New England from Iowa City. They say that today will augur fierce winds and heavy rain and I hope that my dear old outhouse will endure.

I am mindful that if my only worry is the disposition of my abandoned outhouse I’m in good shape.

I hope Yuri is okay.

Summer is coming.

A man’s thoughts turn to his outlying septic tank and spiders, mushrooms, loons, and cinnamon ferns in sunlight.

The Psychopathology of the Rotary Telephone

I recall it as an imperial thing: heavier than an encyclopedia, squat as an animal.

I remember fearing it somewhat. When I picked up the receiver there was a woman’s voice—a dark inquiry from a stranger. She said I shouldn’t play with the phone.

Now, in my fifties I dislike the damned instrument.

I see college kids walking all over town and chattering into cell phones. They seem to be nothing more than mannequins granted the gift of speech.

I understand everything!

We require the fearsome Operator more than we knew.

In the good old days the Operator kept our conversations honest and short.

Honest and short! Imagine!

Yes and in the good old days one had to have a reason for placing a call.

I heard a college student on the bus just the other day telling her friend: "I’m on the bus. I’m eating popcorn on the bus. I’m going home on the bus."

God help us!

I dial an imaginary phone with my index finger.

S.K.

Victor Mature Has a Bad Hair Day

A Queen with rubies and a man

In a tunic swap hormones

Til they spin like dancers and Lo!

Its a short life pure hypnosis…

Love—no love—troubador scarves—no

Matter—lovers go.

“I cannot fail but for your honesty.”

“I have loved you for years.”

“I’m home today, washing my toupee in Woolite.”

“Give me a call…”     

S.K.

Local Weather

It’s raining now but it ain’t raining in my heart.

My heart owns a unicycle.

My heart, that puffed up tropical bird…

Yes, there are these steep mathematics of aerial longing…

Butter your bread child.

Half a cloud, a quarter of a cloud, then sunlight above the fountain

Where the mermaid statue

Shows off her sparkling breasts…

What? No mermaid bosoms in Iowa City?

Check mate Mr. Duchamp, caught you looking!

S.K.

Track 61 Revisited

The Today Show this morning featured a story about the abandoned train siding located under New York City’s historic Waldorf Astoria hotel, a section of rail known as "Track 61".

Because American news shows are largely "info-tainment" this story was presented as a piece of espionage: this site has been secret for decades—hidden from the public; never discussed; "hush-hush"; and these assertions are partly true. What is a partial truth?

Invariably a "partial truth" is a narrative about disability. The "track 61" feature this morning is no exception.

The rail siding beneath the Waldorf was built for wealthy hotel guests in order that they might arrive directly at their lodgings without having to leave their private railroad cars.

During President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration this private section of track was converted to an accessible rail platform, complete with a freight elevator that could accommodate the president’s automobile.

President Roosevelt could in effect depart his rail car by using his wheelchair; transfer to his Pierce Arrow convertible; drive the car aboard the elevator and then roll out onto the streets of Manhattan.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin appeared briefly during the Today Show segment and pointed out that the president didn’t want the public to know that he couldn’t walk. This is partially true.

F.D.R. was in fact "out of the closet" about the fact that he had polio. He championed the search for a cure for the disease and promoted the rehabilitation facilities at Warm Springs, Georgia. The Roosevelt’s played a major role founding "The March of Dimes". Yet despite his public acknowledgement that he had an illness, F.D.R. felt that it was imperative that the public imagined that he could stand on his own.

Nothing would have been more politically damaging for F.D.R. than to be seen being lifted in and out of his car or being helped to his feet by the secret service.

The president mastered the art of shuffling forward while wearing painful iron leg braces that held him severely upright. He used the prodigious strength in his upper body to move these metal leggings forward.

The crucial component in this ruse was that the president would never be seen needing assistance.

The "Track 61" site was one of many special rail platforms constructed in order to stage manage the president’s arrivals and departures.

This is a story within a story within…

The rail siding beneath the hotel wasn’t a secret. The elevator that could lift the presidential car was a secret.

The siding has remained hidden from public view because subsequent presidents have reserved the option to exit the hotel through this underground egress.

In the meantime, New York City has fought long and hard to prevent people with disabilities from having easy access to the subway system. How sad to realize that we’ve known how to do this since the forties. How sad to sense that at least in part this secret might well have been furthered by a city that didn’t want to invest in disability accessible subways.

As they say in New York: "I’m just sayin’"

S.K.

What If?

I walk around just as any pedestrian walks save that owing to my blindness I manage each day to get lost in "soft" ways—to borrow an Irish term. The Irish say that it’s a "soft day" when it’s raining ever so gently.

This morning I was softly lost in a drugstore in Iowa City. I was on my way to the office and I found that I really needed some over the counter sinus medication and I made a little detour into the CVS Pharmacy that’s adjacent to the university’s main campus.

I managed to get lost in a way that most people won’t recognize, which is to say that I found my way correctly to the proper area of the store and I even managed to get the attention of a pharmacist who was able to help me with my purchase. All of this was plain vanilla.

Then a young guy started talking to me. He liked my dog and just wanted to chat. And soon I was talking to him about his Ph.D. in physics and his course of study.

Even this isn’t really about getting lost—conversation is after all a form of cultured distraction and Thank God for that!

This young fellow is working on semi-conductors—chiefly in the area of maximizing their energy efficiency.

And I got lost not because of the technicalities of what he was saying but because I began thinking about how much money the current forms of assistive technology cost and how in turn if we could make a leap to more efficient forms of micro-processing we could by degrees imagine a leap to a new kind of technology that would be customizable and affordable for blind people and others who have disabilities.

I was talking this afternoon to a fine gentleman who sells pocket pcs for the blind and we agreed that the cost of the product we were discussing is very dear.

Current technology that can really help the blind and visually impaired costs a lot to manufacture and to sell.

Why should this be so?

Why can’t we start customizing technologies out of the box so that specialized applications are no more expensive than mass production devices?

So today I got lost not because of my blindness but because the literary writer in me wants to know how to make a leap of engineering and of physics.

I’ve been walking around in the soft sensibilities ever since.

I think we are very close to some significant leaps forward. I may be feeling a bit like Lana Turner, waiting to be discovered in the drug store.

S.K.

Have You Heard? Laurie Rubin

Through my volunteer work at [with]tv I've had the pleasure and the privilege of *meeting* (in cyberspace) and corresponding with Laurie Rubin. 

Laurie is an accomplished Mezzo Soprano.  Listen to this CBS interview I just discovered and you will learn more about this "world class opera singer" who has "performed in the White House and in some of the worlds finest Halls..."

(Photo description: Laurie is on stage performing in her New York recital debut with pianist David Wilkinson.  Wearing a teal evening gown, she looks quite beautiful.  She's standing in front of a grand piano; David is wearing a black suit.  We can see the backs of the heads of her audience in Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, March 2004.)

Laurie has released a CD of art songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Hahn, Bizet, Copland, Rorem, Harbison and some beloved Yiddish pieces with pianists Graham Johnson and David Wilkinson on the Opera Omnia label.

"Faith in Spring" can be purchased via this link on Laurie's web site.

A music critic I am not but I know what I enjoy, and Steve and I enjoy listening to this often...

Laurie, we look forward to the day when we can actually experience your musical gift in a live performance.  We'll be keeping our eyes on you!

Till then!

~ Connie

Cross-posted on Blog [with]tv

The Bright Side of Life

Lately this blog has been rather serious given the erosion of civil liberties in these United States and the associated articulations about those cultural "engines" that have helped to make the weakening of our constitution possible. There is of course nothing funny about these matters.

Still, I was imagining our family--a weirdly Finnish and patriotic group--Lutheran, polite at least in public. I got to wondering what it would have been like if the former King of Sweden had somehow found himself sitting in my family's kitchen. Here are the results of that exercise:

The King of Sweden came over for dinner. He had trouble arranging himself at the table because Scandinavian royalty wear complicated undergarments which makes sitting rather challenging. We tried to make him feel better by saying that we once had the Pope over to our house and he also has difficult underpants, etc.—but we were just making that up because of course we wanted the king to feel better. My family is nothing more than a group of "enablers" as they say in pop psychology.

But really: the king looked awful. Like most northern blue bloods he had a papery, thin skin and there were hundreds of spidery veins wear his hair should have been and God, he could really sweat quite profusely. Add to this the fact that owing to his underpants he couldn’t sit up straight and owing to these same factors he couldn’t sit still, and you have a good picture of the man’s general condition.

I hasten to add that we didn’t feel smug about this situation. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of ill fitting garments in our family. And certainly one or more of us has sweated at table.

My grandfather looked in the Finnish-Swedish dictionary to see if the Swedes have a word for "wedgie" for in this way he hoped to tell our guest that it was alright if he wanted to use his hands.

The long and short of the matter is that the Swedes have no word for "wedgie" and we weren’t about to make one up.

After the king was gone we gleefully imagined euphemistic terms that we might have tried on the king.

"I see, Your Highness, that you have a Goat in the Garden! Please, feel free to use your hands."

"A long fish sometimes requires ten fingers, eh Olaf?"

As I say, we had the general decency not to laugh until the King was safely in his carriage.

Our family has good manners where the nether parts of Nordic royalty are concerned.

S.K.

Of Literacy and Gibberish

People all across this country can’t parse sentences or write them and those who "can" partake of literacy seem to deliberately avoid the obligation to do so. Everyone is allowed to think in fragments.

When I was younger I read Neil Postman’s book entitled "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and thought that the book’s central assertion that Americans have been badly damaged by their collective abandonment of reading was too extreme. Ah but my cautionary and altogether youthful idealism was too much the stuff of the greenhorn. After two George W. Bush administrations, after the feckless reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by the newYork Times, after the wholesale destruction of our nation’s Bill of Rights—I can only conclude that we are fit to sit tightly in the dark and utter low gibberish.

What, you may ask keeps me above the water line of sanity? I have this unshakeable optimism that the people of my nation want better lives for their children and grandchildren. I take comfort from the knowledge that the two finalists for the Democratic presidential nomination are a black man and a woman; I am uplifted to see a blind man (who also happens to be African-American) serving as the governor of New York. I see progress in many sectors. I do.

Still, if the news industry is going to talk endlessly about Jeremiah Wright then I want them to talk just as openly and with the same degree of umbrage about the homophobia and zenophobic ideas of the Rev. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson—both of whom have vulgar and un-American ideas of several kinds. The press has for far too long given ugly preachers a "pass" when they’re on the Republican side of the ticket.

How do preachers with ugly ideas or politicians who use fear and demagoguery to capture votes get away with it? Because the press won’t make a bi-partisan stab at the matter. If we want to stand for values we have to live them. Amusing ourselves indeed.

S.K.

The Big Picture

I don’t believe in identity politics anymore.

I gave up on the idea that my disabled identity was in any way singular when my nation began bombing Iraqi children and civilians with a slogan for god’s sake: “Shock and Awe”.

We have destroyed Iraqi hospitals, neighborhood housing, electrical generating plants, and all with the goal of devastating every woman, man, and child in sight. As a human rights activist I realized that the Pentagon’s campaign meant that I couldn’t spend any additional time imagining that my disability is a meaningful category of humankind.

I used to think otherwise. I liked imagining that being blind I was oddly singular in terms of suffering. Blind people are more likely to experience unemployment than the general population. I have experienced at various times the degradations of social services and food stamps.

Nowadays I see that my hardships are part of a generalized policy that’s aimed at putting as many people into straightened circumstances as possible.

While western leaders talk about installing democracy in the middle east they unleash terrible violence on that very region and create disabled soldiers and civilians with astonishing efficiency.

The Iraqi people who suffer disabilities as a consequence of U.S. foreign policy are out of luck. Veterans who come home to the U.S. with disabilities are only provisionally better off—depending on where they live they may or may not get good medical and rehabilitation treatment.

So I’m an angry blind dude who believes that we are living in inhumane times and that the American people are not sufficiently disgusted by the spectacle of what nowadays is called “collateral damage”—as if a slick euphemism can disguise the fact that we have been maiming innocent people as a matter of policy.

Don’t tell me that the children of Iraq are the same as Al Qaeda. Don’t tell me that we can’t look after people who are the victims of war. I won’t believe you.

I see disablism and ableism as constituent components of a larger and terrifying inhumanity that is repugnant. Human rights cannot be sequenced or sub-divided anymore. The dignity of all life depends on this principle of unity.

I suppose I sound like Eugene Debbs. I’m sleepless when I think of the suffering of others. I really am.

Am I still fighting for disability access? You betcha. But I want to be at the victory celebration where the elderly and the young, the trans-gendered or gay people, or those who emigrated from Mexico are accorded equal dignity. I’m chilled to the bone by the corporate fascism that seems to have clouded our age.

S.K.