I won’t claim to have gotten my head around the ins and outs of the issue; there will be flaws – and perhaps serious ones – with the PC’s specific model proposed in the draft. One potential minefield is, of course, the question of just who should be covered. The broad principles, however, do indeed seem like a no-brainer, and the expenditure of an additional $6.3 billion annually on one of society’s most disadvantaged groups a very good use of money.

But the chorus of approval got me wondering. Even these days, $6.3 billion a year is a lot of money. There’s roughly ten million households in Australia, so the extra expense comes to around $630 per household annually. That’s $12 per week. And, ultimately, the households of Australia will pick up the bill.

So why is it that we can so easily we afford $12 per week to help the disabled – so easily, that there doesn’t seem to be any inclination for anyone in politics to quibble – and yet the costs of reducing greenhouse emissions are going to be so utterly intolerable that there will be a “people’s revolt”?

Please consider this a general thread on the Commission’s report. Are the various stakeholder groups pleased? For those of you living with a disability, or caring for someone who does, how does the Commission’s recommendations sound to you?

But there’s another reason. What’s on offer is bite sized policy, which at best only addresses a part of the problem. And that part is carefully selected on the basis of what electoral message it sends, not because it’s the highest priority in a time of fiscal stringency.

Take, for example, Labor’s announcements on mental health on Tuesday and disability today.

Funds for suicide prevention and supported accommodation and assistance to carers of children with disabilities are worthy. But they’re only a small part of the bigger picture. While advocates and experts in these policy areas always have a natural desire for more, it’s also the case that the ALP government once promised more.

We were to have a comprehensive national mental health strategy and a plan for national disability insurance was once touted as a centre piece of Labor’s second term agenda – a big social reform to rival Medicare.

The tragedy with the initiatives promised now is that they’re not even contextualised within a strategy for comprehensively addressing these serious issues of social care, and they’re not even the best way to get to such a strategy.

Elsewhere: Croakey on the mental health announcement.

Elsewhere: Mark at the ABC’s Drumroll.

At the San Diego Comic Con recently, Lacey Henderson got a fabulous reception from the assembled geeks for her portrayal of Cherry Darling with the machine gun leg from Grindhouse. Which kinda begs the question – although she doesn’t have the star power of Rose McGowan, wouldn’t she have been a better pick to portray Cherry Darling in the first place?

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/cherry-darling.JPG"

Image courtesy of Camps – used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.

What’s it like to have one leg?

What do you think? Can you imagine it? Do you just see the possibility as that of an absence, of being reduced to a disability, of being an incomplete person? Of having to “adjust”?

Somebody asked me that question in a bar last night – “what’s it like to have one leg?”

It’s a really difficult one to answer. I have one leg. I have a thigh – a residual limb – a stump – as well. It ends about 6 inches above where my left knee would be, if I had a left knee. I don’t. I have one knee, one foot, and five toes. That’s me. I don’t normally think of myself like that. As an “amputee”. Most of the time we don’t think of ourselves as a collection of body parts, unless one aches or pains us. We’re just hale and whole. So that’s how I feel. Because I am what I am. I am my whole body, and how I relate with my body to the world of objects. How it feels to be the subject of the sentences of my life that I write. And I don’t know how to be, or how to live otherwise. One day, I would like to learn how to live. Finally. What does that mean? Don’t we live each moment by moment, if only we are aware of it? And isn’t that how it should be?

And if I hadn’t lost my leg when I was young, I’d have been different. I don’t want to be different to what I am. I want to be what I’ve become. Through living, and suffering. And rejoicing.

This is a very free translation of Aeschylus from the Oresteia. It means a lot to me partly because it was cited by Robert F. Kennedy in the spontaneous speech he made in the ghetto the night Martin Luther King was killed. And partly because it’s so beautiful:

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Aeschylus meant the Gods. It should read, from the Greek:

Zeus, who guided mortals to be wise,
has established his fixed law:
wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
so men against their will
learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods
seated on their solemn thrones:
such grace is harsh and violent.

(I like that too. Grace that is harsh and violent pierces our hearts.)

And perhaps he meant the Gods with reason. Fate is something we make our own. And Kennedy knew it, and he lived bright and optimistic because he was marked by fate and nemesis and sorrow. Yet he overcame. Is that how we learn – at last – to live?

Sometimes I have two knees, two feet and ten toes when I have phantom pains. At least it feels like I do. But I can’t scratch the itch because this perception of embodiment does not correspond to my flesh. As it exists in the real world.

I remember when I was 14 and I had cancer and the surgeon told me my leg would be amputated. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. What would it feel like not to have two legs? How much did I want to wiggle my toes before they were gone? How much did I want to walk along the beach and feel sand between my ten toes? Is it about numbers?

But the question – What’s it like to have one leg? – after 18 years – makes no sense to me. Sometimes – most of the time, I have a C-Leg, which unlike your leg, cost me USD40,000. I wake up in the mornings and hop over to where I can fit it onto my flesh. But it’s not me. It’s a prosthesis. At my most naked, I interact with the world without it, and when I interact with the world with it, I never feel like it is me – except when I do because it becomes a habit, an easy gait, a step I take.

But I don’t feel like I’m an incomplete person.

What I do know – and this goes for all of us, whether or not we’re four-limbed – is that the experience of my life is written on my body, and writes my body. And I am my body, and it is me – complete. As I know it, and reach out with it to touch the world, so does it become me and my world.

Descartes’ Cogito gives us an incomplete fantasy. Only. We act as if we have an essence – a self – separate from who we are in our embodied selves. But we don’t stop to think that we display emotion with our bodies. When we’re tired, we feel tired. If you prick us, we bleed. When we’re happy, our whole body feels alive and we have a spring in our step. But we claim that we can see and understand the world as if that weren’t the case. As if we could escape from our experience. As if our bodies were a prison, and we could float free. As if one day, we could download our consciousness into a computer. Think about it. Think about what makes a lived in body, a face with a few crows’ feet around the eyes, more attractive than a teenager’s, whose visage has yet to register too much sorrow, but also too much joy. Think about how sterile a computer generated image of a person is. Are you your gravatar? Are you just text? Compare Lara Croft to Angelina Jolie. Do not think that you want to live forever – think more about how you want to spend the time you have. And live it. Think of the weariness of the thousand year old vampire. Undead. And if we want to live on, our tradition tells us that our bodies will be resurrected. Transfigured, but recognisable. Do you love an essence? Or do you reach out with your touch?

Merleau-Ponty wrote – “we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world”. Think about that. And feel it.

What’s it like to have one leg? I don’t know. I just know what it’s like to be me.

At first I felt shattered, lost. But every day is better. I have walked behind the sky… Sometimes, at night, I hear a voice in my head. Is it me, Kim? Is it true that the beyond – that everything beyond – is here in this life? I can’t hear you. Who’s there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

[adapted from the film Nadja]

In illa tempore. In that time. We live in the eternal already, if we only knew it. In saecula saeculorum.

As we grow older, we walk along the same steps. We tread the same paths. We settle into the same groove. But we don’t have to. We can embrace our ghosts, and what life and the world has written on our body. And remember the touch, and the voice, of those who have gone before. Transcendence is experience. Experience is transcendence. This life is all – bare humanity, to be embroidered and stitched together as we will. And then we let go, to join the ghost who walks alongside.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

How many legs walk the path? Would I still be me, if I could tickle you with all ten toes?

As we walk through life, we shed skins. We write knowledge and pain and love on our brows. Sometimes we lose a part of ourselves, only to find it. And as we walk towards the light, increasingly ghosts go along with us. Until the End. This should not be cause for fear or fantasy. It’s just living. It’s our choice whether we learn to live. Finally.

I have heard the mermaids singing…

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown black
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

But Jesus was a sailor, then, when he walked upon the water…

Quod scripsi scripsi. Quid opus et verbis?

Then, after serving his time, he finds the inner strength to completely turn his life around. He recovers from his disability and goes to university where he earns both a degree and the love and respect of a very admirable woman. Eventually he becomes both a very successful and highly regarded public administrator, and a father to two small children who sets a shining example to other men through his engagement with his kids and his sharing of domestic duties with his partner.

The man in the story is Michael Coutts-Trotter, who has been appointed Director-General of the NSW Education Department. His appointment has been controversial for two reasons, only one of which can be regarded with any respect. There has been some discussion about whether his qualifications specifically in relation to education are better than those of some others who might have been appointed to the position. I make no comment on this matter other than noting (a) that it is a legitimate issue for debate and (b) that it is not this issue which has attracted the attention of the NSW Liberal Party and its bloviator mates such as Gerard Henderson. The NSW Liberals & Co. are equalled only by their US Republican compatriots in the dark art of trawling the lower depths of the human soul in the quest for political advantage, and so they have made an issue of the tragic teenage past which Michael Coutts-Trotter has transcended in his adult life. According to Henderson:

Well, everyone is entitled to make good on their past and so is Mr Coutts Trotter. But, the question is whether you should put someone who has a conviction for drug trafficking as head of the Education Department, and I think that’s most unwise. I mean, Alan Bond has done his time, but I don’t think anyone would make Alan Bond head of the Treasury Department… I think, on this occasion, the Iemma Government in New South Wales has crossed the line of acceptability. It’s unacceptable to appoint someone with a drug conviction as head of the Education Department. It is unacceptable to appoint someone who has an allegation of domestic violence to the ministry as was the case with Paul Gibson.

There are a number of points to be made in response to this sort of thing.

1. We should be deeply disturbed that Australia’s most prominent Liberal-aligned intellectual can’t see the difference between an orphaned teenager who goes amiss in tragic circumstances and then develops a psychiatric disability from which he subsequently recovers and builds an exemplary life for himself, and grown men who, when in positions of responsibility, knowingly and wilfully commit gross crimes of dishonesty and/or violence.

2. The authentic Christians among us will be disturbed that the Conspicuous Christians of the NSW Liberal Right have such an idiosyncratic interpretation of Christian morality. There is the preccupation with enforcing the secondary Christian virtues in relation to the “sex, drugs and rock & roll” suite of issues whilst blithely disregarding the primary Christian virtues of love, charity, social responsibility and non-violence as they apply to issues like the IR laws, global warming, the war in Iraq, welfare “reform”, indigenous rights, refugees, etc. And then there is the most un-Christian judgementalism of their treatment of Mr. Coutts-Trotter, the presumption of the right to damn the man for all time, and the rejection of the central Christian focus on the capacity of all human beings for redemption.

3. Once again we see the monumental intellectual inconsistency and moral hypocrisy of mainstream conservative opinion on the issue of drugs. The biggest, most destructive, illicit drug trade in Australia is not heroin, ice or ecstasy. It is the sale of alcohol to under-age and intoxicated purchasers. It has been estimated that half the liquor sold in the United States is sold to under-age or intoxicated patrons. As statistics show that Australians hit the stuff harder than Americans, it is plausible to suggest that the than half the liquor sold in Australia is sold to, and more than half the money made from its sale is taken from, intoxicated and under-age customers. Are the grown men and women who ply this trade held in the same execration as hapless teenage smack pushers? If Michael Coutts-Trotter were a publican who took a very liberal view of what constitutes intoxication and who was a poor judge of people’s ages, or was the CEO of a brewery or distillery, would the NSW Liberals be demanding he be banned for life from holding public office? More likely they’d be fawning over him in the hope of a five- or six-figure donation to party coffers.

4. Finally, this case once again calls for us to think hard about the way we think about substance dependence and those of us and our fellow citizens who suffer from this disability. Conventional morality (including religious morality) regards excessive consumption of, and addiction to, intoxicants as a moral failing to be denounced, rather than (as I have cast it here) a disability or a health problem to be addressed rationally by medical and psychiatric science and by well-designed public policy. However, certain kinds of substance misuse and addiction are rife amongst the conventionally and religiously moral. (I am reminded of the night in December 1994 when a friend and I had to rescue a paralytic Catholic hospital chaplain from staggering under the wheels of traffic in a busy inner-Brisbane thoroughfare, and then half-carry him to the hospital to spend the night as a patient.) This means that many of the conventionally and religiously moral have a bad case of guilty conscience about their own weakness for booze, fags, pills or whatever, and this unresolved guilt is then projected censoriously and unforgivingly onto those whose “sin” of substance addiction takes (or, in Michael Coutts-Trotter’s case, took) an unconventional form such as shooting smack. If we were to all get into the habit of thinking of substance dependencies as disabilities or illnesses to be treated, rather than sins to be (selectively) condemned, the debate about drugs and their consequences, and how public policy should attempt to deal with them, would benefit greatly. And there would be one less sleazy nook in the lower depths of our souls for the NSW Liberals and US Republicans to plumb in their quest for political advantage.

The latest entry in the culture wars comes from QUT academics John Hookham and Gary Maclennan, who wrote an op/ed in The Australian yesterday, which in true Donnelly-esque style, was recycled in the same rag as news.

A PhD student’s TV comedy about disabled people has sparked outrage from senior academics and prompted an investigation. Michael Noonan’s thesis, “Laughing at the disabled: Creating comedy that confronts, offends and entertains”, has been attacked for its reality TV-style depiction of two intellectually disabled men interviewing locals in a country pub.

Gary MacLennan and John Hookham, of Queensland University of Technology’s film and television school, believe that work such as Mr Noonan’s is being validated under the rubric of postmodernist or poststructuralist thought, where “you abandon any idea of individual worth”.

“For us, this is symptomatic of a wider intellectual and moral problem,” Dr MacLennan said.

I want to make two points about this. One about the ethical questions raised by the op/ed itself, and the second about the politics of laughter and disability.

The first is one that Mel Gregg has noted.

Wow. If you wanted to take an opportunity to collapse every workplace grievance you felt in one very public statement, this feature in The Australianâ??s Higher Education lift-out today would seem to be a pin-up example.

She rightly questions the ethics of taking bitches about how a particular faculty is run and dressing them up as intellectual interventions. I’m not sure that it’s as rare as one might think though – there’s often personal animosity and workplace grouches behind academic arguments. But what’s stunning here, I’d have thought, in an op/ed ostensibly about ethics and truth is two things.

What are the ethics of senior academics taking to a national newspaper to attack a Doctoral candidate? That seems to me an outrageous abuse. The writers would have much more power to be heard than the PhD student, and seem cavalier about damaging his career and reputation in pursuit of their own agenda. No doubt a lot of their gripe is with his supervisors, but he’s a much weaker target.

The second is that they’ve got strange company in their rant about TEH EVILS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM. Like a previous academic op/edder, Merv Bendle, they’re making an argument which is designed to pull at all the strings of the educational traditionalists and canonical culture warriors without disclosing their own actual position – anyone who’s had anything to do with Brisbane political and cultural scenes knows that MacLennan is an unreconstructed Marxist. But I guess saying so wouldn’t sit so easily with the agenda they’re writing themselves into.

To turn to the question of the politics of laughter and disability, I’d agree with a lot of what Verity wrote at The Dead Roo:

To me, this just draws attention to the way Australians view people with disabilities. They are the least vocal and least recognised of the various groups we label â??minorityâ?? and â??discriminatedâ??, by which groups Iâ??m thinking of immigrants, the homeless and, in many ways, women. Having worked with people with physical disabilities for some years now I find it interesting watching the way any one in a wheelchair (and anyone accompanying them) is treated. People smile brighter, faker smiles, tend to talk to a spot somewhere over the left shoulder and either stare or entirely avoid eye-contact. On a larger scale having a disability means you are immediately significantly less likely to get a decent job, live independently, maintain close and longlasting friendships and have romantic and sexual relationships.

And then they have to put up with interfering bureaucrats who most likely have very little understanding of what living with a disability actually involves, who through misplaced political correctness attempt to stifle any such action as this designed to humanise the disabled. And I say â??humaniseâ?? very consciously. Comedy is a great leveller, once we can laugh at something, we can begin to accept it, it is fear which maintains stigma. I think we need to take off the kid gloves many people consciously and subconsciously use when dealing with issues relating to disability. If the showâ??s funny, then why not air it?

I don’t feel myself qualified to write a theoretical treatise on humour and difference, but let me just give you one visual example of what I’m talking about. This is a t-shirt you can buy from AmpuTeeHee:

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/llegstory.jpg"

Now, as some LP readers might know, I am myself an amputee, with one leg. This t-shirt actually has fairly complex semiotics, which all respond to the way others read and respond to this fact about myself. When it’s fairly obvious that you’ve got one less limb than the usual quota, people are curious. But they don’t want to sound patronising, and conversely, you don’t necessarily want to have to engage with either expressions of pity and sympathy (or the “heroic crip” narrative) or for that matter, be interpreted primarily as an amputee and only secondarily as a person. It shouldn’t be too difficult to work out how the use of humour disarms (tacky pun intended) a lot of the angst that clusters around the affects inspired by my difference, using humour.

The op/ed doesn’t really need parsing, but it’s worth noting in passing that the so-called concerns expressed appear to deny all agency to people with disabilities, and construct us as poor souls in need of protection.

So I very much get where Verity is coming from. I don’t know, and I don’t think I’ve been given a fair chance to judge, what Noonan’s film project is like. Yes, there are fine lines to be walked, but that’s humour, and that’s life, isn’t it? I do know that the use of his work to prosecute personal and political grievances is pretty dodgy. And I do think humour can be empowering. It can be disempowering too. But most things can either be good or bad! Or good and bad. Including disability, incidentally.

It started with Rush Limbaugh:

Political people are different than you and I. And, you know, most people when told a family member’s been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has, they turn to God. The Edwards turned to the campaign.

That’s where it should have stopped, but it didn’t.

Cancer survivor Jane Hamsher tracks the spread of this meme at Firedoglake. And Crooks and Liars writes on its wholehearted and sickening transmission to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes. Atrios cuts to the quick:

I think one of the worst habits we have is telling other people not just how they’re supposed to live their lives, but what the appropriate emotional responses to life events – births, deaths, triumphs, tragedies – are supposed to be. While we’re not all twisted freaks like Rush Limbaugh, I think the impulse is a fairly universal one.

People who get a serious illness, or become disabled, lose both their agency and their humanity in the eyes of many. They become freaks who have to prove they are human in every interaction, and have to reassert their own agency at every moment.

For some reason the most natural and seemingly healthy impulse – to go on with your life as you had intended to the best of your ability – seems to be the most alien to those not experiencing a tragic illness.

As someone who has been through cancer, I can only nod and wholeheartedly agree.

What I did want to share was a deep ambivalence I have about one particular campaign to draw attention to the plight of women in Angola who’ve lost limbs through landmines. In some instances, they ran across a mine because they were escaping violence – either domestic or military. In others, they were tending fields because male relatives had been killed, imprisoned or abducted.

What’s ethically ambiguous about this project? The way in which it’s framed as a Miss Landmine Contest. The site says:

Conceived and directed by Norwegian artist Morten Traavik, the MISS LANDMINE project puts the global landmine problem and its survivors in the spotlight in a new, celebratory and life-affirming way.

The site notes that beauty pageants are a popular celebration in Angola, and tries to distinguish them from those in the West:

Angola was chosen as the pilot country for the Miss Landmine project for several reasons. Compared to Afghanistan and Cambodia, the two other countries on the â??world Top 3 listâ?? of landmine-affected countries, Angolan culture has a relaxed and open attitude to physicality and sensuality. Furthermore, beauty pageants are a huge cultural phenomenon and a firm tradition in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not least in Angola.

A startling contrast to the politicized, often highly controversial atmosphere that surrounds such events in Europe and USA, African beauty contests are most often an uncomplicated celebration of cultural identity, not unlike Brazilâ??s carnival tradition (which is also celebrated in Angola).

Why am I troubled by it? In part, because I feel very ambivalent about the notion of celebrating the loss of a limb – certainly, celebrating beauty and courage, but… I’m sure it’s not just the phraseology, because what’s missing from the project’s presentation is any real sense of the voices of the women themselves. I’d love to hear about their stories, their hopes, what they think about the project. I’d love it to empower them and for it to be reflexive. But it seems to me that without any intentionality, a lot of stereotypes about sensuality and women which are peculiar to the Western anthropological gaze rather than the lived experience of Angolan (or Brazilian) women form the core of the representations depicted. They’re powerful, and challenging, and I’d love to applaud. But I’m troubled that we learn little about the causes of these conflicts, and what lies behind the militarisation of civil conflict and the gender relations of war and violence in Angola. And I’m very troubled we don’t hear these women speak to their own experience. Nor are any solutions to landmines offered, except for the production of a glam fashion magazine.

Partly my point is the complexity of the motivations and situations involved in “Western feminists” (or anyone else) trying to (selectively) highlight and perhaps “save” or “solve”. The tragedies, and the lives, depicted in the project are hidden from our gaze. Certainly they’re not the subjects of crusading News Limited op/eds in Australia. What I think troubles me most is that rather than being the subjects of their own stories, these women face being reduced to objects of pity or emotion. That’s mostly because they are shown, but not heard.

But I still have very mixed feelings. On balance, I think the fact that I’m deeply troubled suggests that the project is deeply troubling. So I’m wondering what others’ take is.

Elsewhere: There are some reactions at Black Looks, Women of Color Blog, the Nigerian blog Grandiose Parlor, The Guardian news blog, Jay Sennett, and The Zimbabwean Pundit, who writes:

There is absolutely nothing fashionable, celebratory or life-affirming in the aftermath of landmines (or the holocaust). To try to infuse or deduce some kind of positivity out of the predicament of survivors such human rights abuses is nothing but a not so subtle affirmation of the destruction wrought by landmines. There are many other things people can do to stop the horror of landmines; see this and this for ideas.

Imnakoya writes at Grandiose Parlor:

Hat-tip to Sokari (Black Looks) for posting on this Norwegian freakshow: A beauty contest for landmine survivors in Angola, where the contestants are then propped up on display in a fashion magazine showcasing specially designed clothes for amputees!

To say this project is despicable is an understatement, itâ??s an appalling means of social advocacy, and a reckless display of human and cultural insensitivity. I share the anguish and disgust of the writer (and those have commented to the post).

However, what we need to understand is that this â??beauty showâ?? was not designed to mock or be-little the circumstances of the victims, and if the victims were Norwegians it would have been appropriate for their society. The project back-fired because Morten Traavik, a Norwegian artist (no wonder!), and the the originator of the idea, failed to consider the implications of his project.