Planet of the Blind

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.

SK 

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.

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.

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.   

How Many Stories Am I Holding Up?

The film "Blindness" which is now in theaters offers the latest instance of what scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called "narrative prosthesis" where in effect, disability is used as an artificial device to help what is otherwise a weak story line.

Blindness remains a frightening disability in no small measure because the literal condition, the disruption of the physical eye is invested with outworn symbolism that still resides in what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the cultural subconscious. People may know next to nothing about eye diseases but they know deep in their bones that there's something suggestive and darkly portentious about the blind.

In literature and film the blind have often functioned as a form of narrative prosthesis: their presence in the story is designed to deflect the reader's attention from the fact that the narrative is essentially uninteresting. Stevenson's "Blind Pew" is a classic example of the technique. Aside from evil blind figures there are hundreds of stories in which a blind man or woman is victimized. Never mind that blind people are no more likely to be victimized than anyone else--the imagined scenario is all that matters. Fear sells a bad story every time a strong imagination isn't doing the typing.

For more information about how the blind community is responding to the film visit this excellent link at the American Council of the Blind:

http://www.acb.org/press-releases/press-release_Blindness_the-movie.html

There are of course real lives in the balance. As I have said many times previously on this blog the unemployment rate for the blind remains unacceptably high in the United States and around the world. The film "Blindness" or the execrable novel that birthed it are guilty of false disability figuration--aesthetic choices that can only further harm real people.

S.K.

ADA Alive and Kicking

Yesterday the U.S.Senate Passed the ADARestoration Act.

See this article at Civil Rights dot org:

http://www.civilrights.org/library/features/024-senate-adaaa.html

If you are a person with a disability or you’re a friend or family member of a pwd you will be disappointed by some of the compromises that came about during the long struggle to introduce, debate, and pass this legislation. Yet it is undeniably true that the act, which President Bush is expected to sign into law, will reinvigorate civil rights protections for people with disabilities who may experience discriminatory actions by employers or yes, even educators.

If you were channel surfing yesterday you would not have seen any coverage about this remarkable triumph of bi-partisanship.

But there it is.

I for one will be popping a cold bottle of Italian fizzy water.

S.K.

The Chapman Family and Some Thoughts on Our Conditions

I woke in the small hours of the morning and felt the blue planet working in the first light. Felt my heart beating with its Zen obedience. Felt sand in my eyes. Thought about the moment in Huckleberry Finn where Jim tells Huck about what its like to be ridden by a witch all night like a horse. It was 4 a.m..

I turned on my computer and went to the blog of William Peace, one of our best disability rights bloggers in my humble opinion. Over at Bad Cripple I read before dawn about the plight of the Paul and Barbara-Anne Chapman family. Bill Peace has written about their experience of discrimination at the hands of Canadian immigration authorities and I urge you to read what he has to say.

Briefly: the Chapman family has twice been denied entry into Canada because they have a disabled child.

Remember that it was before dawn when I read about this matter. I recall that I was looking for something like confirmation. That is, I’d hoped that by reading Bill’s blog I might find some pre-sunrise lift. And that’s exactly what I found though not in the way I’d imagined.

People with disabilities are routinely denied rights of access; rights of inclusion to be more precise about the matter.

Just last evening I was talking with a friend who knows a doctor who is trying to build an eye clinic in Tanzania because (as I currently understand the matter) women with cataracts are perceived by some to be "possessed" or to be witches as it were, and apparently, so I’m told, its considered to be an appropriate measure to murder these blind women.

I sat at my computer in the pre-dawn roseate light and I found myself grieving for the human race.

Yes, like a Jim in Twain’s novel, we are ridden by the forces of enslavement. Oh I do not say this lightly.

Canada’s argument for keeping the Chapman’s out of the country is that their daughter might well require medical and social resources.

If you parse that argument to its core, what it means is that they don’t accept the Chapman’s daughter who has a disabling condition to be eligible for citizenship.

Ergo: she is the equivalent of the enslaved person who is at best a kind of property.

The "broken body" lacks true economic utility. It should be kept in a warehouse.

I’m sure that Canadian immigration officials would recognize Adolf Hitler’s assertion that the disabled are just "useless eaters."

I was fully awake after reading Blind Cripple. By God I was talking to myself before the sun was up.

S.K.

Your Blind Reporter

Once, in

London

I found myself at Westminster Abbey and standing by the gates as the Queen was going in.

As I walked through the crowd people stepped out of my way because of my white cane—and so of course I kept walking toward the sound of bells.

Here is the truth of the matter: the queen of

England

has flat feet. I heard how she walks.

The bells of the abbey and the stubborn feet of royalty make a strange syncopation I tell you.

The queen’s feet were like wet bread and the bells made a music of stars laughing because stars over London can laugh sometimes.

S.K.

Hanging with Dignity

Alright, I'm in the woods and my "dial-up" connection is tenuous at best. "What," you might ask, "Have I been doing?" In the spirit of full disclosure I have been kissing my rock and working on an odd little book for the AARP--a "how to have fun" kind of book that is designed to promote the art of conversation. Asking me to write a book about conversation is a silly thing since I'm able to talk to a pine stump with mutualism intact. I am sufficiently self-delusional enough to believe the stump is correspondingly gratified. One lives by the myths that get the job done. Last night I talked to a water spider down on the dock. He was about the size of a hockey puck and he had variegated and complex gray hairs. How do I know that? Oh don't ask.

Just FYI the water spider doesn't believe that the movie "Tropic Thunder" is worth two flies since it demeans consciousness in all its forms. My spider also said that he once went on a vacation with Robert Downey Jr. and although he's sworn to secrecy about the matter he can report that Mr. Downey can really hang from a web. Oh don't ask.

I don't like the pejoratibve use of the "r" word any more than I like the ugly employment of other slurs and I freely admit that in a free society one must be allowed to create drivel since this is the admission price for free expression. See Plato. But I don't have to like it. And in case anybody wonders if I've changed my tune over the years all I can say is that when I was a college sophomore and first saw Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" I was pretty darned uncomfortable with his use of the "n" word throughout that flick--even as I understood that satirical comedy aims to make a democratic hash out of every form of imbecility.

I don't like the "n" word and I don't like the "r" word though I will defend the right of imbeciles to say what they want. The larger trouble is that Hollywood has such a miserable track record when it comes to depicting people with disabilities and so the further imposition of demeaning language into an already impoverished cultural misapprehension of cognitive disabilities is unfortunate.

If you protest Dreamworks use of the "r" word you will look thin skinned and humorless. If you don't protest it you are in essence lying down under a heavy blanket of cultural abjection--a matter made all the worse by the erosion nation wide of public school programs for kids with learning disabilities.

So while I have a spider to talk to, and a rock, and even a beloved yellow Labrador for Heaven's sake, I'm not a "happy camper" when I think of Mr. Downey Jr. or the pettifogging cold blooded roaylty at Dreamworks.

I say this as a person who in public school was freely called "retarded" because I couldn't see.

Once, about twenty five years ago, and for no obvious reason, I was invited to dinner with a famous Irish classical musician. We somehow got onto the topic of "the Kennedys" and this world renowned performer said that he'd once shaken the hand of one of the Kennedy brothers--though I don't remember now which one--and he said that he felt a "large, soft, pillow-y hand that had never pulled a potato!"

Well that's esentially what I think of Robert Downey Jr. Save that I'm thinking of his head. There's a head that's never been troubled by Donizetti's "Requiem" or Boolian algebra, or much else that stands beyond the vodka shelf over at aisle B.

As for Dreamworks, am I the only one who thinks their pixelated dopey cloying sub-Cartesian two dimensional cartoon allegories for grownups are the epitaphs for critical thinking? Okay. I do sound like Neil Postman. Yes. And I never liked Disney either. I do however like Kate Smith. I love it when she sings "the oceans flecked with foam" and I guess I better stop there.

S.K.

Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles Update

Tropic Thunder: What you can do now.
August 12, 2008

Dear Family and Friends of the DSALA:

There has been a tremendous outpour of support for the DSALA's efforts in regards to concerns over the DreamWorks film "Tropic Thunder" and the affects the language in the film will have now, and in the future, on individuals with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Twenty DSALA members joined a group of 200 in a protest Monday night inWestwood, CA across the street from the Gala Premiere of the film.  We were joined by Special Olympics, The Arc, TASH and more.
·    Thank you to all who came out.
·    Thank you for the volunteer support in our office during this time.

Many of you who were not able to attend the protest or assist in the office have asked what else you can do.  Here you go!

Go to a new website set up by Special Olympics and sign up on their site to pledge your support to eliminate the demeaning use of the "r-word."  The more who sign up the better, this site will assist us in putting pressure on decision makers in the media and elsewhere.  Please forward to all you friends and family and have them support the cause as well.

Take advantage of The Arc website addressing "Tropic Thunder."  You can catch up on all the articles and download their chapter "Action Kit" if you are planning a protest event of your own.  You can also check their list of upcoming protests to join.  Their calendar is being updated by the minute so keep checking back.

LINKS:

Disability News: Boycott Expected,    Roundup of "Tropic Thunder" media protest covered,  Groups Weigh Boycott of "Tropic Thunder"

       
    

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Every now and then we receive interesting electronic bulletins from groups and organizations around the planet and this one, from the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center in California struck us as being quite timely. The goal of the legislation mentioned below is to make it possible for people with disabilities who are currently being institutionalized to return to their communities. Apparently Sen. John McCain doesn't approve; Sen. Obama is a supporter of the plan.

From the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center Newsletter - July 17, 2008

THE TOP STORY OF THE WEEK

Denver ADAPT met with the Republican presumptive presidential
candidate John McCain at a Town Hall Meeting today. Six members of
ADAPT, including teenagers from the Summer Youth Program, sat in the
front of the auditorium to listen to McCain's policies for his
administration. When he took comments from the audience he handed the
microphone to Dawn Russell. She explained the legislation called the
Community Choice Act and asked him why he was not signed on. Mr.
McCain stated he would not support the legislation. He then offered
several poor reasons for his decision and ended by saying we would
have to let the voters decide that one. Having recaptured the
microphone he did state he supported the ADA, but had no interest in
hearing that the ADA was entirely different from the CCA.

ADAPT encourages you to attend McCain's campaign events and continue
to challenge him to support the CCA! Show him disability rights
supporters across the USA believe in real choice, believe in CCA and
believe he needs to do the same. CCA supports family values, it
supports putting control in the hands of the individual instead of
Government, it supports states' ability to use limited Medicaid funds
for community services which people prefer and which are more cost
effective. These are all consistent with Republican values, as well
as consistent with American values.

Presumptive Presidential Candidate Barak Obama has signed on as a
co-sponsor to the bill already.

Brought to you by the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center

Http://www.deafadvocacy.org

S.K.