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.

Fable

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. 

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.

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.

 

The TruthAbout Sarah Palin and Special Needs

 

AlaskaDuring last night’s presidential debate John McCain repeated one of the oft-pronounced assertions of his campaign: namely that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be a great supporter of special needs children should their ticket be elected. IN point of fact Gov. Palin has a woeful record of budget slashing for educational programs for kids with disabilities in Alasaka

 

For more information on this matter check out this post on MOMocrats.

 

I am perhaps too sentimental when it comes to old fashioned images of horse drawn sleighs and farmhouses decorated for Christmas but my sensibilities as a disability rights advocate are sorely abused by the kinds of falsehoods that John McCain and Sarah Palin are employing by suggesting that the Alaska governor is a genuine disability rights advocate. Nothing is so false as this canard and I point it out because this claim by the McCain team uses disability as a “feel good” opportunity—and alas the good feelings are entirely unwarranted.

 

S.K.  

Don't Hold Your Breath for Human Rights

What does it mean to witness if you’re an artist? IN the 1980’s the poet Carolyn Forche associated the craft of poetry with the political act of becoming a moral witness. Forche’s work in the arts of poetry and political witnessing lead her to edit an important anthology of political poetry which remains the standard volume on the matter.

I remain troubled by the absence of moral conversation in our current presidential campaign. IN fact it’s possible I think to view the antics of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a kind of anti-witnessing. She has recently been attacking Senator Barack Obama for having raised the issue of our military’s frequent involvement in incidents that have led to civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Obama was citing the U.S. military’s own findings that suggest that a lack of troops on the ground in Afghanistan has caused the U.S. to rely on air strikes against suspected Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds. In turn more civilians are killed than might otherwise be the case.

Senator Obama’s assertion was not unpatriotic or "anti-military" as Sarah Palin has loudly claimed, but rather an assessment drawn from our own top military leaders. It is fair I think to remind ourselves that in general terms the U.S. military does not like to kill innocent people. If you are on the left you may well laugh at my assertion; if you’re on the right you will quite possibly sneer at anything the military has to say—after all, that’s what the past 8 years have been about eh bien?

And so in this instance I am a witness to a mealy mouthed and unethical attack by Sarah Palin on the decency of our own military. And as seems to be the case so often, she is willing to confuse the messenger and the message for political gain while ignoring the real human rights issues.

And that’s my point of course: there have been no human rights issues in this campaign. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll hear about human dignity and freedom tonight.

S.K.

Note It in the Log

Just moments after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg Captain Edward Smith told first officer Murdoch to "note it in the log"—a command that presumably linked the idea of posterity alongside the written word. & of course the Titanic’s log went down with the ship.

"Note it in the log" is such a serious tip of the hat to faith. Write a sonnet. Someone will be around ages hence to read it.

Where do sonnets reside? In books. & books live in the libraries. & libraries depend on funding. & funding depends on the global economy.

Note it in the log

& I saw no difference between the right wing of the GOP as its membership sought to derail the bailout of Wall Street & their disdain for books. They’re all so busy imagining the rapture they don’t have time for sonnets or your child’s education or anything that might look like the future. Of course they’ll say they don’t think the government should save private capital. But that’s not their real objection to the emergency legislation being debated now in Washington. The ultra ultra right wingers of the Republican party believe this world is mostly toast. They also think they can take their money with them to heaven which of course looks like Dubai.

Note it in the log, Mr. Murdoch.

S.K. .

Thinking of Atticus Finch

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that: "many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling passion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same to dispassionate observers, bu his proneness on all occasions to suspect or accuse

others of it. ..."

Lately the air waves in America have been echoing Senator McCain’s assertion that Senator Obama has injected race into the presidential campaign. Enter Coleridge: you don’t have to look too deeply at McCain’s protestations to see a latent and pejorative utilization of racial figuration. The image of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, two young white women, presaging the appearance of a larger than life black man is a carefully constructed semiotic reenforcement of old fashioned white fear. Has anyone forgotten Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird for god’s sake?

By pretending that the Hilton-Spears ad is just a simple "celebrity" alarm about Obama the McCain campaign can divert attention from the haunting and racially motivated visual symbolism in their phony commercial.

I hope that Senator Obama can survive this ugly Karl Rove sponsored attack and that the American people will listen to what he has to say with keen attention.

But in a nation where some 40 million people can’t read I imagine that visual literacy—the ability to analyze imagery—is even less in evidence. Karl Rove and company know this full well.

Obama’s best strategy is to use his warmth and his sense of humor whenever possible. Ronald Reagan and JFK were witty in the face of adversarial attacks.

No one will sensibly suggest that John McCain is witty.

S.K.

What Now, Captain America?

                                    --after the Finnish of Pentti Saarikoski

God said to Satan:

“Bow down in remembrance of me.”

Satan said: “But you are

a mathematical proposition

Or else you’re nothing

& either way—just for the sake of argument,

Abstractions are graven images.”

God punished Satan by making him the commandant of Gitmo.

Pages turned on calendars of mankind.

The wicked prospered beyond their wildest dreams.

& Satan climbed in and out of human eyes

& his footprints felt like nothing more than sand. 

S.K.

The Party's Over

My father used to say that the trouble with the Republican party was its generalized contempt for the labor movement. He was not original with this but today, thinking of him and of the current flap over George W. Bush’s characterization that recent economic problems in the U.S. occurred because "Wall Street got drunk", I’m mindful of how intellectually bankrupt the G.O.P. has become. Now that there’s no labor movement to kick around, and now that the middle class has been damaged beyond recognition, now that most of the wealth has been sucked out of the republic by the top 3 per cent of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, now that this money has been transferred to Dubai or the Caymen Islands, well, it’s clear to me that the final insult to America is that the plutocrats will trivialize the entire collapse of the financial infrastructure of the middle class. I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. I really am. Wall Street got drunk and now it’s having a hangover. What a simpering, cynical ass you are, Mr. President!

S.K.