The Life and Times of Sly Civilian

Like many of you all, I’m watching and waiting to see what happens in Burma. It’s a hope mixed with horror and fear, but it is still hope.

-sc

An open letter to the Most Reverend Katherine Jefferts-Schori:

I have come to understand that your grace has authorized a settlement by which the ECUSA is to stay in the global communion. While every Christian should hark to hear unity preached among us, I am concerned as to the cost. Specifically, the provision that will be no more queer bishops. This cannot be seen as anything but a retreat. But surely, your grace managed to get a concession that the opposition would cease their dehumanizations?

Your grace would surely avoid the folly of handing over moral authority to a group that has shown no caution for our dignity or even our lives. It is imaginable to me to be forced to discuss my adoption by God as if it is a thing to be debated. Foolish and ignorant of God, but imaginable nonetheless. The world has often doubted the grace of the Almighty. But the image of God is something else entirely. If we must debate whether or not we deserve to be, then we have sat down for dinner with wolves.

Can we indeed talk when the conversation is about the “manner” of our lives? In British euphemism, I fear we have lost the ability to actually speak of ourselves. Once we have conceded that it is a mere matter of personal habit, we have admitted that our race was in vain. The phrase defines our cause as subordinate. All the while, the schismatics press forward with a strange and alien notion of polity. The innovation of wandering bishops is far more poisonous than any scandal.

Finally, your grace, I plead to you that you have made an intolerable compromise. Indeed, your grace, I believe that your manner of life may be unsettling to the broader communion. You see, rumor has it that your grace is a woman.

In Christ,

-sly

The challenge, however, rests in persuading people that their grandparents, parents and they themselves have harmed their daughters. Moreover, advocates must convince a skeptical public that men will marry a woman who has not undergone the procedure and that circumcision is not necessary to preserve family honor. It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.

This, by the way, is the difficult and real work of reducing harm and eroding the support of a practice like FGM. It will not be stopped by the shallow and callous bravery of armchair neo-colonialists who demonstrate their commitment by signing a petition.

Legal bans mean little. The force of law does not immediate encompass the power of worldview. This is the long haul. This is the real task. It seems to be taking shape here in community organizing, sexual education, and the recruitment of allies. Now, undoubtedly, there may be some criticisms to be made here, and some might be impatient with this kind of gradualist approach.* But how many genital mutilations have you successfully stopped lately?

Last time out, I took some unholy flak for being some kind of moral weakling, unable to face up to just how wrong FGM is. My point is that my personal opinion matters very little. The ways in which we choose to deal with cultural change do matter. And the simplistic and colonial fantasy of a objective solution has only made things worse.

That’s not irony. It’s our moral culpability.

-sly

*For one, the article notes how reformers have to reassure folks that circumcision is not necessary to prevent homosexuality. I’m not entirely willing to bracket my communities right to exist, but I’m at least willing to discuss the relative levels of harm involved. I’d rather see the beginning of a more comprehensive sexual education model than find a sticking point. There is no obligation to view the currently effective as the long term goal.

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Today, a small town is being filled with witnesses who are there in body and spirit to see and to say the truth.

I cannot be there in person, but I feel the need to remind myself that the world of Jena is the same world that I inhabit.

Jena is not a southern thing. It is not a small town thing. It is not an accident. It is not an aberration. It is not anything other than the status quo, the enactment of racism through law.

Mychal Bell is one more in a long line of black men who have been sacrificed to our sense of law and order, caught up by a system of gesture, code, and power that enforces apartheid. From the Scottsboro boys, to Amadou Diallo, to Rodney King, to criminalization of poverty and addiction…

We are living in such world as Jena, where the codes are as strict as they are unwritten.

We must free the Jena Six.

Justice, and only justice.

-sly

Liza Sabater, who ought to know better, goes for the fail with her current entry.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong. So I won’t.

But thanks for making me sick.

-sly

The SO and I had been talking about some of this stuff for a while…when you teach in a troubled school in a tough part of town, you face kids with emotional and behavior issues. So autism and other “EBD problems” had been discussed.

But I started talking about the Judge Rotenberg Center, and her mood changed. Sharply. What had been an animated conversation turned very soft as I explained what went on there, and how so far, it has been impossible to stop the brutality.

Finally, she said something welcome but unexpected.

“I think I just realized why it’s so important for you to read those blogs.”

More than once, I had been reading and she had begun to close my computer, not so subtly reminding me that I could be paying attention to her and not that. And it sometimes had grated her that I’d been willing to spend our limited time together doing work that wasn’t strictly necessary. I doubt I have a total free pass here, (nor am I seeking one) but it was a reminder that this information, these connections…matter.

I’m going back to school…and it’s tough on me right now. I’m listening to other people introduce why they care about classes that talk about marginalization and what’s wrong with the world. And I’m struggling to fight back the overwhelming sense of cynicism I feel about such declarations, about them, their motives, and ultimately….my own.

…

Back to the happier bit. We reprised this discussion later, when she was telling me about how a class she was taking (at a progressive school of education) had shown a video from Autism Speaks. And I went full bore in to “Not This Shit Again” mode and started showing her some stuff at ballastexistenz that challenges that kind of rhetoric.

She recognized it immediately. “This was the other source they used for the class.”

I’m still angry as hell that a school that claims to be at the vanguard of education would even give “equal time” to such viewpoints…in a show of the continued downfall of objectivity into amoral neutrality…but I was just so relieved that one of these online voices that I hear had made it into the world on its own.

This is why I read. After everything, I still have the crazy idea that it’s not too late to change the world. Perhaps I’m most drawn to this story in particular in proving that is that it has nothing to do with any of the mumbo jumbo that I have picked up as the language of my profession. I don’t mind speaking in post-modern, but I still have a soft spot for Orwellian honesty.

So I just wanted to say thank you.

You’re why I read.

-sly

That’s the title of a course that starts today, where Sly will learn more about how a pattern of oppression becomes a political economy, a way of doing things that supports society in which it occurs. The way racialized thought becomes the socio-economic instituion of slavery…the way fear of the disabled becomes institutionalization. Prejudice gets systematized, and then things get really scary.

Just as a quick note, Samhita writes about Western companies advertising for gender selection in Indian media. She’s under the premise that it’s problematic because it both expresses and substantiates a claim on the value of the lives of those being selected against, girls.

But she’s mistaken. It’s just mothers who have decided that they do not want to enter into a binding relationship of care with a child who will require more resources to raise.

And that’s totally okay.

-b

The anti-telethon blogswarm is up, and y’all should go read.

I’m still going at shakesville, trying to explain why eugenic selection is a bad thing. Turns out, it’s a pretty hard sell.

Some of the brilliant arguments I’ve gotten so far include…

But….it’s HARD!

As if the worthwhile was ever easy. The whole argument at hand digs me so much because it assumes the status quo, and moves from there. Ethics is the imaginative and theoretical practice of constructing a just world, from drawing board to implementation.

And we have an accredited member of the field go an assume that disabled children are a burden? How tediously boring, how utterly lazy! If i wanted warmed over prejudice, I’d have stuck my head out a window. Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought their job was to work for a better world, not settle for the shit we’re in now.

And while I have spent much of my time in refutation of additional and related arguments that have come up, I wanted to be clear that I think the original article reflects poor scholarship. I’m not worked up because I’m scared of the brilliance of Prof. Lindemann’s argument. My reaction is along the lines of: “Oh, not this shit again.”

Occluding one’s field of inquiry so that all we can look at is all predetermined is just bad thinking. Of course, mothers should not be obligated or coerced into a relationship of care that they don’t want to enter. Duh. But the entire argument hangs on a “can.”

“Because this care can consume even more of the mother’s time, energy, money, and emotional stamina than would the care of a healthy child, and because many seriously disabled children will never outgrow their need for it, women should not be forced into the special relationship that requires them to provide it.”

Oh, no, this isn’t about sending a message that we’re a burden. At all.

It “can” be more difficult to raise a child in all sorts of circumstances. But apart from eugenic movements, there have been few proponents of recommending abortion in these situations. It’s the “ism” not the person. You don’t solve the problem of a person, you solve the systems and prejudices that make their life difficult or marginalized. Ask why it is, not wash your hands.

“If everybody sprang up out of the ground full grown, like mushrooms, as Hobbes famously fantasized, then the care of people with disabilities would presumably be impersonally provided, perhaps by a state-run health care system or by private organizations instituted for this purpose. ”

This, her further hypothetical, is even less imaginative. Even in the allegedly perfect world of Hobbsian self-independence, persons with disabilities are still being “cared for” by grey buildings and the charitable-industrial complex. Well, pardon me, but fuck that. I didn’t show up for the beatific vision to see a land of institutionalization.

Everyone requires things to live. Painting your necessities as normal, and our necessities as burdens is a normative decision. An unjustifiable normative decision. We all require care. We get sick, we age, we become disabled, we are born that way. We all require care, and either as a society we can face that reality, or we can wallow in our delusion of autonomy, letting the whole world sink around us. We proclaim the immorality of those who flounder right up until the moment that our heads disappear beneath the waves. It’s wasteful. It’s stupid. And it’s immoral.

We can give to each other what we need to live lives of moral agency, physical dignity, and social relation. Or we can keep the status quo.

How’s that for a binding relationship of care?

-sly

That’s not eugenics. It’s choice!

Holy shit, this is immoral.

As I wrote of Singer previously, when you travel down this path, you have to ask if the world is made for you. Is the world comfortable for people like you? Is it safe? Is it just? If the world is made for you, then perhaps it makes sense to turn it away from the lives of others. But if it is not, then i suggest that you join all of us for whom it is not made, and make as much common cause as you can.

Throwing up terms such as “clouded”, “frustrated,” and “un-realized” to describe the lives and potentials of those with disabilities, Singer engages in a dilettante’s defense of genocide, a casual argument for the annihilation of countless people. What is a frustrated life? To be queer in a straight society? A woman under pressure from a patriarchal culture? To be a person of color in a white dominated world?

Living as a person in a “world system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are directed away” from you? (Bhabha, LoC, as always) This world is not made for a person with disabilities, and the structure of the assumptions of society enforce an exclusion that is both casual and active. The stairs to a courthouse bar access just as much as the prejudice one might encounter within. This world is not made for a person with disabilities, and I will tell you that this is a choice. Is the world made for you?

The rest of this post is from what i commented there.

First, let’s blow the “it’s the mother who bears the burden” argument away. It’s hardly her sole domain, and it’s insufficient to mention parents who aren’t the birth mother…assuming that there is one.

Further more, since when was the responsibility of a child solely the domain of parents? What parent of a able bodied child doesn’t get tax breaks, the offer of public education, opportunities for insurance for their child. etc.. I’ve been in NYC this past week, and there are billboards all over about the summer meals program, to let parents know that food subsidies are available at public schools for their kids. As insufficient as many of these supports are, they reveal a recognition how ever slim, that the work of raising children is communal. No child may be left soley at the discretion of those who raise hir. The existence of a child is one of stewardship, the guard and watch of one who will become a agent and self unto their own.

So why don’t we offer respite care? In home nursing? Support for caregivers?

That certain lives are marginalized or made difficult is not an ontological fact. It is a social reality created by the choices we make and don’t make.

There are plenty of genetic conditions that America makes difficult…but with most of them, we have at least begun to realize that there are social choices afoot. Incorrect ones, that assign difficulty and stigma unjustly.

Disability is social. Not medical.

We could choose to make it easier to live for these people, support their families in loving them.

We choose to call them burdens, and call their lives expendable.

What does that say?

-sly

I could go an quote the whole thing, but really.

The link is at http://blog.canigetawhatwhat.com/2007/09/01/antifeministwatch-2007-ana-marie-cox/ if you care to follow it, I’m sure you’re all bright enough to blame the correct parties and change that one around. I’d do a ref no follow, but i forgot how to turn off trackbacks, and i don’t care to get half of twistydom rolling in here like I got last time. The stats are good for my ego and bad for my soul.

It’s funny, I tell you. Not only funny, but feminist. It is liberating to women to mock a woman for doing “empowerful” things like flirting with a camera.

This is because if a woman ever acts in a congruity with perceived stereotypes, that is “fun feminism.” And Fun Feminism is wrong. Very wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it is entirely justified to cast them deeper into the pit from which they came.

But Twisty is a serious feminist. Who just happens to be funny, not fun.

Also, Wonkette is an ass slut and an enemy to the revolution.

-sly