"Still Crazy after All These Years"

My favorite cartoon.

"Yesterday we had a garden party," Maria wrote, "and I invited one of my clients, John, who is also becoming my friend as well. He sits in a $25,000 wheelchair, one he has used for 10 years."

Maria went on to tell me that another guest, a woman, approached John and asked, "How long have you been in the chair?"

"Oh, about a decade," John replied.

"Can you walk?"

"No," John said. "But I don't think about it. This is my life."

Maria wrote me, "I was so embarrassed by her question. This might be one to add to your dumb-ass disability stories."

Those of us who cruise around boob-high in the world have this sort of thing happen regularly. I hear it most often when, for example, I go to a doctor or dentist, or perhaps to a theater where I'm asked if I'd like to transfer to house seating.

Like John, I try brush it off, but my distorted view of the world demands that I use humor "I brought my own chair, Do I get a discount?"

Irony -- gentle sarcasm? -- can teach better than anger.

Then, of course, there is The Big One: the question of "Why?"

Ride around long enough and complete strangers will approach you with, "Why are you in that wheelchair?"

I suppose it is a query brought on by the perception of "otherness," only slightly different in degrees of boorishness than, for example, asking "How much did you pay for that dress?" or noting out loud "You need to lose some weight."

Depending on my mood -- and my sense of the motive of the questioner-- I ignore the question or engage in a bit of straight-faced surrealism. "It is a condition of my parole for my fifth jaywalking conviction."

I told my friend Maria the only dumb-ass comment that seems unanswerable is "I'd rather be dead than have to use a wheelchair."

I've never been able to understand whether that's meant as a positive comment on my endurance or a negative comment on my psychological stability.

Non-accessible, at Least for Me, Fun

There are apparently limitless ways to entertain oneself in New Orleans, one of which was to sign up for an air-boat tour of the swamps surrounding the city. Alas, air-boats are not wheelchair friendly, but my wife and son were ready and willing.

The pilot of their air-boat was a certified merchant marine captain whose family owns the 4,000 acres of swamp available for the tour. He was a native Louisianian, a man whose great-great-etc. grandfather was a French fur trapper and explorer who married into a local Native American tribe.

Funnily enough, when discussing his ancestry, he noted that the description Creole had come into disrepute in some quarters as a racist term. I had always thought that Creoles are a mixture of European, Native American, and African heritage, but apparently that's not so. In any event, Cajun is still acceptable.

The pilot noted that his fleet of air-boats -- and almost every other available air-boat -- had been put to use scouring the swamps for debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The clean-up took months, and thousands upon thousands of man hours labor.

The alligators living on the family's swampland lived as alligators are meant to live -- that is, they are not "farmed" for meat and hides. The one exception to their wild life is being trained to approach the air-boats to be fed ... marshmallows. The training begins when their but hatchlings, mere inches long. The largest to approach the boat was about ten feet from nose tip to tail end. What a measly marshmallow might mean to a beast that size, the pilot didn't say.

Alligators, though, are the most primitive of creatures. The pilot said they live only to eat and lack any sort of maternal or parental instinct. If the female loses too much body fat in brooding her egg clutch, she is likely to eat the hatchlings.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. -Olin Miller

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

I do. I loved the city. And oddly the old settlement above the mouth of the Father of Waters is relatively wheelchair-accessible. We stayed downtown, a block off Canal Street about two blocks north of Canal's intersection with Bourbon. Looking east from our hotel balcony, we could see almost all of the French Quarter.

New Orleans is a big city, with all the good and bad that implies. There were street hustlers -- some with bargains like chilled bottled water for a dollar -- and some simply begging. There were the sad relics, homeless perhaps, many displaying signs of mental illness -- one spinning restlessly around a light pole; another squatting, mumbling and holding out a plastic cup. But the people were remarkably friendly and open, invariably polite and smiling.

It's a place I wouldn't mind living. There were apartments and condominiums for sale, although it would take a significant amount of money, no doubt, to add an elevator so that my wheelchair could bypass the stairways. I loved the Quarter. Residents strolled the streets, some walking dogs, some seemingly headed toward the business district across Canal Street.

One native told us that Canal Street was meant to be a canal, one to bring goods up from the river front. It was far wider than any other street, and according to our new friend, Canal became the dividing line between the French and the Anglos once it became a street.

A tourist favorite in the Quarter, of course, is Jackson Square, faced on its north side by St. Louis Cathedral. If it is, as history has it, an artists' venue, it seemed an amateur's one. I saw nothing I would buy, although we did do the obvious: sit at an outdoor table at Cafe Du Mond sample the legendary beignets. The plate seemed piled extra high with powdered sugar, but the beignets, crispy and golden on the outside and cloud-like within, made the digging out worthwhile.

And then there is the Garden District, so named we were told by the guide because the lots on which the mansions rested were so large as to require the employment of a gardener.

Most of the French Quarter was undamaged by Hurricane Katrina, and the Garden District showed little effects either. The area west of Canal Street, mostly filled with businesses, hotels, and a large architectually jarring Harrah's Casino, if damaged, has recovered; in fact, many structures there were being modernized. Further west is the Warehouse District, an art and performance center, which runs until walled off by Interstate 10.

The Meaning of Words

I have used a wheelchair for nearly fifty years now, rolling out of the dark ages before the Rehabilitation Act, the ADA, and the Olmstead decision. In that time, I have come to believe that three primary factors confront those of us with disabilities.

• Money. Few with disabilities have the resources to afford the appliances and assistance that would make for a more sophisticated life.
• Class. Since most people with disabilities are relatively poor, we face class discrimination as well.
• Fear. The fear of the other, exemplified more than once to me personally when I have heard "God, I'd kill myself rather than spend my life using a wheelchair."

For years, I have written about "accommodation" -- the use of government authority to force changes that will allow people with disabilities to integrate more completely, more fully into society.

Today, however, an acquaintance and fellow disability rights activist may have changed my mind about what I want for me, and for every other person facing discrimination.

Here are the words of Lawrence Carter-Long.

"Not to get too Luntz and Lakoff here, but people think of issues in frames. The words we use to describe access can either rein force negative frames or facilitate more positive meanings.

An accommodation, given the nature of how the word is both used and understood, implies extra work; a hardship. No matter how we attempt to spin it, pressing for an accommodation reinforces two negative frames 1.) a good deed is being done which reinforces the charity model and 2.) some degree of hardship to those given the task of accommodating inherently burdensome disabled people given the context.

Using the very word implies non-disabled people have to modify or adapt to satisfy us and is, I suspect, resisted because of the conflict it creates.

If we take the same concept and begin to frame it as an expansion however, we open up the space in which we all think about what it is we're actually trying to do ... a benefit rather than a burden."

"Ditchkins! You Ignorant Twit!"

The more I think about this book, the more I believe that if anyone is interested in the spiritual, in the mystical, and in how those qualities apply to reason and logic, it is a book worth buying -- "buy," because it's a book to be read, and re-read ...

REASON, FAITH, AND REVOLUTION:
Reflections on the God Debate
By Terry Eagleton
185 pp., Yale University Press, $25.00

Terry Eagleton opens his defense of humankind’s God-search with “Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs.”

Be you evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline Protestant, Orthodox Jew or Reformed Jew, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, or even a theo-centric Muslim, you might sigh and wonder what sort of ally has enlisted in the defense of the divine.

• Read the entire review here.

The Bridges at Toko-ri

I first saw The Bridges of Toko-ri when I was a teenager. I was youngster who felt himself small and unimportant, and I was the sort of callow romantic who sometimes imagined himself celebrated for what he was not -- a hero. Even a dead hero in a cold, muddy ditch in a war-torn country a half a world away.

I remember being entranced by the cool blonde beauty of Grace Kelly, admiring William Holden, and laughing at Mickey Rooney. And I remember the F9F Panther jets flashing across the Technicolor sky to light up my soul with a passion I couldn't explain.

I wanted to take my heroic fantasies to the air. I wanted to be a military pilot, but, as with many youthful enthusiasms, passion outweighed reality. It did in this case, at least, for I was too blind to see that my poor eyesight and thick glasses would keep me out of the cockpit.

To say I loved airplanes is a spare description of my obsession. Better to say airplanes consumed me. I sketched out their images on my school notebooks. I collected magazines with airplane photographs. I assembled countless models of my favorites. My dreams soared as I read about aircraft, talked about them with my friends, and attended every movie that promised to give me wings -- The High and the Mighty. The Strategic Air Command. The Flight of the Phoenix.

And most of all, The Bridges at Toko-ri, one that fed my reveries of glory in the skies and a tale that still resonates after nearly five decades.

It is the story of Lieutenant Harry Brubaker, a World War II naval aviator turned influential civilian lawyer. It is 1952, and Brubaker has been called back to active duty and sent to fly bombing missions in the forgotten war, the Korean Conflict.

I was growing up in the shadow of the Brubakers of the world, almost every one a veteran of World War II or Korea conflict or both, veterans who rarely talked about the terror that had stalked them through the skies or the lonely battles in muddy ditches.

Brubaker was my hero, a familiar face in the world in which I lived. He had the same intense, electric smile as a friend's father, a navigator on long-range bombers. His uniform jacket was flush with the same sort of decorations as the paratrooper lieutenant who lived upstairs.

And so, with my quarter and my free Saturday afternoon, I sat, watching Brubaker's death, caught up in the illusionary romance of war. And I believed.

Nearly half a century flew by before I saw The Bridges at Toko-ri again. Late one afternoon my wife was tuning across one of television's classic movie channels. "Isn't this the movie you told me about watching when you were a kid -- the one you said you watched three times in a row?"

There was Brubaker, flying his jet from the aircraft carrier Savo Island on dangerous raids deep behind the Communist lines.

Brubaker, rescued from the cold Pacific waters by Mike Forney and Nestor Gamidge after his jet flamed out.

Brubaker, the admiral's favorite, shot dead in a muddy ditch by North Korean soldiers after he crashed his plane during the dreaded raid against the bridges at Toko-ri.

I am older now, jaded, and I have learned few real heroes are framed in Hollywood film. All the same, I carried images from that old film into my sleep that night, and I dream of my youth among warriors, but I have also lived long enough to learn there is no romance in a hero's death, no matter how noble. Brubaker served and died, a parable on film.

Writing, Rejection, and Too Lazy to Submit

I must have ten essays I could market, but I don't. Well, I do, but only intermittently. And it's not because I fear rejection. It may be simply because I'm lazy.

The situation was far different when I first began writing, most significantly because so many publications then didn't take email submissions. Then I was more focused, especially on the arrival of the mail carrier. I enjoyed writing a submission letter. Maybe the yang to my impatient yin enjoyed the anticipation.

But publication are on board now, and Crueleditor DeVille can zap you with a rejection before you've finished the pint of Cherry Garcia you bought to celebrate the upcoming publication credit.

Writing is a tough town. Just ask my friend Karen. An editor emailed Karen a rejection accompanied by one of the editor's own essays. "Why buy your stuff when I can write better?"

Karen was blue. Karen descended into a funk. Karen cast doubts on the editor's ancestry and threatened to cross state lines to inflict bodily harm.

"Blow it off," I emailed in my best supportive voice. "I can think of ten rejections better than that. Or maybe it's worse. Whatever. You know what I mean."

"Can't neither," she e-pouted.

"Can too."

• - "I could write better than this without using vowels."
• - "Was your monitor on when your wrote your essay?"
• - "I'm sorry. This doesn't reach our target reader. Most are can read."
• - "Rehearse this line: 'Do you want fries with that?'"
• - "Your comma count exceeds our quota."
• - "I doubt you have literary skills sufficient to write a check."
• - "I read this to my assistant, and he asked me if I were hallucinating."
• - "Stop your attempts to duplicate the 1000-monkeys-with-typerwriters experiment."
• - "Do you realize this piece has subtracted from the sum total of human knowledge?"
• - "Authorities notified. Your arrest imminent."

Confucius Say, "Reciprocity!"

Want to take a step toward improving your writing? I know one technique that works. Join an on-line critique group and apply a bit of ancient wisdom.

You can find it in the Bible -- "He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully."

Or you can look to wise old Confucius. When a student asked for a guiding principle by which to live, reduced to a single word, the master replied, "Reciprocity."

I had my belief in that principle reenforced after I began devoting quality time to participation in The Internet Writing Workshop. The IWW works via email and includes multiple critique lists -- fiction, nonfiction, novels, poetry, script, prose, young adult, practice, and teen writing -- plus a general list discussing writing. The genre lists generally are restricted to submission and critique postings only and have participation requirements.

Writer critique groups have been around for a long time, mostly meeting face-to-face. That still may be the best place for a beginner who wants personal interaction. Or, if you're a writer who has time for chit-chat, donuts, and coffee refills, you need a face-to-face group.

But, if you want a critique group that gives back in full measure the energy you devote to it, I suggest you find an on-line critique group. The more you participate, the more your writing skills will improve. That's Confucius and reciprocity, and it's also a measure of John Lennon's instant karma. The IWW, for example, has hundreds of members worldwide. Post a submission on-line anytime of the day or night, and there are usually enough people monitoring that you might see several critiques within hours.

And there are these points:

• a sophisticated and eclectic membership
• effective moderation
• a protocol that makes certain your work is secure
• participation requirements which prevents lurkers, which in turn means submissions are being seen only by those with intentions to critique work posted

You can find details about The Internet Writing Workshop here.

.

Bald Could Be Beautiful, I Suppose

A few years ago, my wife and I were out for brunch when we met the man with the ultimate comb-over.

Women laugh at comb-overs, but a guy knows when something runs, you chase it. At that time, I was in the race myself. And I'm no fool. I knew was searching too close to my ear to find hair to cover my dome.

My wife was less subtle. "Keep parting your hair like that, and you'll be combing your armpit."

But the guy with the comb-over had defied the laws of physics. He had parted his hair at the back of his neck and directly over each ear. The long cultivated strands were woven in odd shapes and met atop his head.

My wife looked at this disaster, glanced at me, and lifted an eyebrow -- an elegant comment on male vanity.

Okay, at that time, sure, a walk on a windy day was a hassle. A little breeze, and one rope-like strand of hair would blow up, flutter about, and then flop on my shoulder like an irate squirrel.

A toupee? No thanks. Let's be honest. Even if I could have afforded the Rolls-Royce of rugs, I would have been hauling that high-dollar hairpiece atop a face reaching the end of factory warranty.

So what to do?

Pay attention, for one thing. I should have realized the armpit part comment was a clue. And I should have remembered what I learned in my first month of marriage -- a decision delayed is a decision made. By my wife.

A week after we had watched the guy in the restaurant, she sat me down for a trim. The clippers hummed. Scissors snipped.

Suddenly … "Oops!"

Six magnificent inches, trained to provide an acceptable illusion in the mirror, now covered my lap. I think I heard them scream.

It may have been me.

"Sorry, babe." she said. "I slipped."

I believed her. Then. Color me gullible. But she knew where she was going, and she was in a hurry to get there.

"Lookin' shaggy, lover," she said a week later. "Time for a trim."

I should have realized then we were too far along on the journey to Mount Baldy to turb back. But I'm good at accepting the inevitable. So what if I get manipulated? The only thing I never seem to learn is that it's a waste of time to object.

"Can't find the scissors," she said. The clippers were topped by a suspiciously short blade guide.

One thing certain, I would never find those scissors.

Silence. One of us was praying. Her arm slipped around my neck. She rested her cheek against the top of my head.

And then clippers clattered to life, and she buzzed me down to a modest reflection of Michael Jordan.

"Oh, babe. That's sexy," she said, kissing me on the ear.

Since that day, I have been a bald -- but perhaps no better -- man.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: A Review

This month I reviewed Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution for the Internet Review of Books.

In that book, he takes on the evangelical atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. The book isn't an easy read, but it is worth the effort.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
(The Terry Lectures Series) (Hardcover)
by Terry Eagleton

Buy This Book! Or Maybe Not ...

Or click on the cover image, get it for less than half the amount asked by the used book seller, have it sent to me, and I will autograph it and mail it to you.

Seller: allbooksweb

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Shipping: In Stock. Ships from FL, United States. International shipping available. See Shipping Rates. See return policy.

Comments: May contain some shelf wear. Amazon A-to-z Guarantee purchase protection. Great customer service!

Do Dogs Have a Conscience?

This fellow is "The Doctor," informally called "Doc" or "Sissy Boy." The latter appellation comes about because he is afraid of his own shadow.

Doc is three. He is 99% house-trained. His lapses come when he is nervous, displayed by watering the tail of the vertical blinds on the door to the deck and when he is not kept on a regular schedule. Luckily, the errant little pile is deposited on 6-square feet of ceramic tile surrounding the interior of the front door. He must have a potty break before bedtime and immediately after breakfast.

This morning, however, breakfast completed, Doc encountered what country folk call a "toad strangler" -- heavy, heavy rain accompanied by strong winds -- when I opened the back door. He stood. And waited.

I said, "Head on out, Doc. Do your business." He responded by looking over his shoulder.

I busied myself with sprucing up the kitchen, all the while leaving the back door cracked so that he could venture out into the thunderstorm to accomplish his business. Minutes passed, and I began to move about more, venturing to the computer with a fresh cup of tea, picking up newspapers, all the while watching Doc. He would stand near the open back door, his shoulders hunched his ears laid back, every molecule in his body crying out, "I don't wanna ... "

Finally, he retreated to the bedroom and crawled on his blanket. I watched him sleep for a few minutes, and then I moved to a different part of the house carrying dirty laundry to the utility room.

When I returned to the bedroom, Doc was sleeping peacefully away in the same spot, but then as I rolled back to the kitchen for another cup of tea, I spied it -- The Deposit. On the tile surrounding the front door.

Sometime when out of my sight, Doc has slipped quietly into the front room -- and past the open door leading to the deck and the back yard -- and refreshed himself in warm, dry confines of his ceramic bathroom.

Here's an interesting take on the matter from the New York Times ...

Dr. Horowitz found that behaviors associated with the “guilty look” — slinking away, ducking the head and dropping the tail, among others — occurred regardless of whether the dog had disobeyed or not. Instead, what was important was the owner’s reaction. There were far more “guilty” behaviors when the owners scolded the dogs. The findings are published in the journal Behavioral Processes.

What's interesting to me in relation to this morning's incident is that Doc displayed the "guilt behavior" before he violated the rules (as he understands them).

Rage Against the Machine

A fellow blogger, Wheelie Catholic, wrote an interesting piece about a "wrongful birth" lawsuit filed in Oregon. Her thoughts are linked to Beth Haller's blog, Media dis&dat

The short piece asks several intelligent questions, but they are related to the practical influence of disability on individuals and families, and the responses a humane society should make.

However, to when we speak out on issues like this, we are "raging against the machine." The "wrongful birth" mindset implies that disability is not a condition to be compensated for, but rather the declaration that a particular human life was an error.

And we "rage against the machine because, unless people have experienced disability in their lives, whether personally or through a friend or relative, they see disability as totally negative.

There is an additional factor: the disability experience must be a positive one (i.e., the person with a disability must be happy, and preferably accomplished and productive).

Otherwise, disability is a negative, one to be prevented by abortion, infanticide (thank you, Professor Singer), or euthanasia (over to you, Dr. Kevorkian).

To declare otherwise may be choosing to speak against the tide of history, against the utilitarian concept of 9-out-of-10 Down Syndrome children being aborted, against unacknowledged sex selection by abortion, and against the dark promises of genetic manipulation.

But we speak for all that makes us human.

Appearing in The Camroc Press Review

A whimsical little piece about food -- and love -- was published today at The Carmoc Press Review, whose editor proudly claims to be "besotted with microwriting."

Find "God's Little Cabbages" at this link.

Mud in the DSL Line, and the Necessity of Code Number Identification

I don't quite understand the life of alternate reality, the need to be in a community sorting through a virtual world. I know that such life intrigues children as old as 25-or-30 years of age, especially male, especially male, especially those lured into the halls of World of Warcraft.

And for a reason I cannot explain, the activities of two who play in this house causes our DSL line to be clogged like a bathtub wherein a Golden retriever is regularly scrubbed.

I have no real complaint. There's a simple remedy: unplug all wires leading to the DSL modem; let it sit idle for a minute; return the wires to their proper sockets.

WoW muck flushed!

DSL has spoiled me. More than a decade ago, I clung to an online presence through a 2400 kps telephone modem, fighting dropped connections and slow-loading images.

My wife was even more frustrated. I was besotted with the fledgling Internet, and I kept the line tied up so much she could rarely call home while elsewhere. We soon had a second telephone line installed.

And with that, I soon found the second line, unlisted and known to none of our friends or family, was only one digit different from that of the local pizza restaurant.

I'm a patient sort, but I also am the sort never to pass up a chance to make a little trouble. It took me only about twenty wrong numbers answered before I hatched a plan. Finally, one day as I sat reading, the line rang on the small telephone set I had connected to the computer.

"Identification number, please," I said.

"Is this Pizza Palace?"

"This is a secure line!" I responded. "No code names. Identification number sequence only, please."

"I'm just calling Pizza Palace."

"No names. No names! Identification sequence immediately!"

"What? Who is this? I'm calling Pizza Palace!"

"Identification sequence, please. This is a secure line. This call will be terminated in 10 seconds with your identification sequence!

"All I want is to do is order a ... "

Click!

The only bad thing about that sort of practical joke is never being able to see the look on the face of the person, nor to hear how the whole silly affair was explained to friends and family.

Pack-ratting Drivel in Left-Handed Imitation of Ashliegh Brilliant

Even though I don't think I'm interesting enough to Twitter, I did give into the Facebook craze. As a writer, any "social networking" works, I suppose.

Facebook has its Tweets-equivalent, a little box that asks "What's on your mind?" A FB'er fills the blank space with this, that, and the other, and it's distributed to Facebook "friends." The little ditty is then distributed in the network looking something like "Gary Presley washed the dog."

The problem is, at least for me, I never have much on my mind -- at least anything I want to express to friends as something important. I made a few Facebook broadcasts, but then a sense of my own ridiculousness took over, and I began incorporating puns, cliches, malapropisms, and assorted other nonsense.

Today it occurred to me I should have saved them, which I didn't, but I did go back through my "profile's" archives to find these ...

Gary Presley ...

• ... went on a wild goose chase, and now he's eating crow.
• ... knows he should take everything with a grain of salt, but he actually prefers balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
• ... knows when going gets tough, the tough use four-wheel-drive.
• ... has learned never to judge a book by its cover; better to appoint an attorney and convene a jury; otherwise, the verdict will be overturned on appeal.
• ... stopped believing in animal testing when his dog failed her driver's license exam.
• ... says give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll want a bass boat, a pick-up truck, and end up with a honking big carbon footprint like the rest of us.
• ... knows when he gets his Irish up he rarely gets off Scot-free.
• ... owns several genuine imitation original copies of some seriously funny Microsoft Works that he received as a free gift in a package of jumbo shrimp.
• ... wonders if Euclid demanded three squares a day.
• ... believes Isaak Newton realized the gravity of the situation.
• ... wouldn't beat a dead horse of a different color, but he's always willing to seize the bull by the horns and try to teach an old dog new tricks.
• ... knows at the end of the day he has to drink the kool-aid because he didn't leverage mission-critical real-world assessment-driven paradigms into his next level decision-making.
• ... got down off his high horse and let the cat out of the bag; sadly, he overlooked the pig in the poke.
• ... can't eat humble pie because the cat's got his tongue.
• ... knows the economy is unstable because he only gets a penny for his thoughts but he has to put his two cents in when he wants to say anything.
• ... wonders if something is tough to swallow only if you bite off more than you can chew?
• ... wonders why things that are as easy as pie aren't always a cakewalk.
• ... stepped up to the plate while the iron was hot and swung for the fences but, alas, he was behind the eight ball.
• ... had a theory that he might be indecisive until he realized he might instead be fond of ambiguity.
• ... knows there is an elephant in the room because there was a window of opportunity.
• ... knows a fool and his money are a blessing in disguise.
• ... believes it's the cat's meow that every dog has its day even though many folks thinks that's a horse of a different color.
• ... thinks every dog has his day, but he may be barking up the wrong tree.
• ... has applied grease to his elbow, has his eye on the ball, put his ear to the ground, and his shoulder to the wheel.
• ... is a vegetarian because he likes to count his chickens before they hatch.
• ... cannot decide whether to let the cat out of the bag or sleeping dogs lie.
• ... cannot decide whether to let the cat out of the bag or sleeping dogs lie.
• ... wants an omelet for supper but he's afraid he'll get egg on his face.

Help Fight ALS

Another writer, a friend by the name of Dawn Goldsmith, is involved in The ALS Association Florida Chapter's quilt raffle. Tickets available online or by calling 888.257.1717.

The issue is especially important to Dawn's husband's family.

If you would like to read aa review of an interesting memoir about ALS read Karna Converse's review of ...

WHEREVER I AM, I’M FINE:
Letters About Living While Dying
By Catherine Royce
273 pp. Xlibris $19.99

• ... at this link.
  

• And read Carter Jefferson's short memoir piece about the author at the Camroc Press Review.

The Profound Truth of the Susan Boyle Saga

Two comments about yesterday's post discussing the New York Times's essay, Desperately Seeking Susan, by Ricky Jay suggested that I hadn't revealed the "profound truth" missed by Jay.

I had written about that truth in an earlier post, which mulled over the general surprise when a frumpy woman arrived on stage only to be greeted by laughter and doubt. Once her angelic voice was heard there came calls for her to have a a make-over. Obviously her choice would be made based on how she has internalized reactions to her appearance over her lifetime.

At bottom, though, a "make-over" in this context means to re-style one's appearance in order to conform to society's idea of comeliness, or normalcy. In the context of disability, that's something that people with visibilities disabilities cannot do.

Two of Jay's other references -- Mathew Buchinger and Thomas Quasthoff -- were also people with visible disabilities, which meant the evolution of his argument into a rumination on "15 minutes of fame" left most readers with the idea that Boyle, Buchinger, and Quasthoff relevant only in the sense that their talents gained them notoriety.

I say instead that their notoriety is enhanced, their talents celebrated more elaborately, at least initially, because their appearances lowered expectations. Each was prejudged as less than.

Boyle, who reportedly has a learning disability because of a problem during birth, is closest to the norm, closest to being able to disappear in a crowd, but that she was greeted with snickers illustrates also that prejudice because of appearance doesn't always relate to disability.

Ask any significantly overweight person.

The profound truth Jay missed, to me, is that the wisest among us should sit quietly and wait for character, intelligence, and gifts to be revealed without prejudgment, without undue expectation, with understanding that we are all flawed creatures who might best serve one another with kindness, compassion, and empathy.

Otherness, and Fifteen Minutes of Fame

There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times -- Desperately Seeking Susan, by Ricky Jay -- discussing the Susan Boyle saga.

What is interesting is that Jay writes, "Because of their appearance, both Buchinger and Ms. Boyle were saddled with low expectations. This can work to the performer’s advantage: lessened anticipation coupled with high ability can bring on an exponential acceptance."

The Buchinger he refers to was Mathew Buchinger, who in 1726 performed in Scotland. He played musical instruments, danced, "and performed conjuring tricks ... "
"Buchinger was 52 years old, 29 inches tall — and, he had neither legs nor arms."

Jay then goes on to note "Thomas Quasthoff, the magnificent contemporary German singer whose physical appearance somewhat resembles Buchinger’s (he is a phocomelic thalidomide baby), also provoked low expectations."

But even though he goes on to note that, "It is not only physical appearance that colors our expectations, but also class, education and location ... " Jay weakens his observation by refusing to see the power of the lesson to be found in the issue of "otherness" -- that is, discrimination -- and instead limps to a conclusion built around the cliché of fifteen minutes of fame.

A performing cycle that once could have taken years is herein reduced to days. She’s unknown, we’re surprised. She’s embraced, we’re disenchanted. She’s the runner-up ... next?

Too bad Jay does not recognize that he wrote past, and thus buried, the profound truth to be found in the Boyle saga.

• Read the essay in the Times here.

Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution

I've been reading, and writing a review, of ...

REASON, FAITH, AND REVOLUTION: Reflections on the God Debate
By Terry Eagleton
185 pp., Yale University Press, $25.00

... for the June issue of The Internet Review of Books. Eagleton writes plainly, but his arguments are complex, a tightly knitted garment woven from threads of mysticism and strands of liberation theology. What's most intriguing to me as I am finishing the book is his argument that atheists and agnostics have too much faith in reason.

Watch for the review on June 15th.