BOOKS:Exposing Disability Bigotry
Ervin, Mike
Exposing Disability Bigotry The Ragged Edge edited by Barrett Shaw The Advocado Press. 235 pp. $18.95. Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence by John...
...We don't need pity...
...When Hockenberry balked at the next task of screwing a bunch of bolts, he was branded in the counselor's report as bitter and uncooperative...
...The uninitiated and jaded alike are bound to gasp frequently and come away shaking their heads...
...But the pieces that are most illuminating are those that indict past and present forces from Nazis to the ACLU that have nurtured, exploited, and been sucked in by lethal disability myths...
...Hockenberry landed with NPR by accident...
...So I always wondered if on the inside he might be one of those dreadful types who "overcomes" his disability, who climbs mountains and wrestles alligators just to prove he's not really one of us...
...We are taught to see the world as a big machine...
...On the fringe, chance intervenes like a lottery ticket...
...We were protesting idiotic Medicaid rules that imprison disabled folk in nursing homes...
...Lisa Blumberg's "Eugenics and Reproductive Choice" shows how some things aren't much better today...
...But to his fellow gimps, he's not known as a guy who jumps at the chance to use his unique power to tell the amazing stories of the disability experience in a way that no one else can...
...The collection has but one flaw, which is the flaw of the Rag itself...
...With no journalistic experience, he dabbled as a stringer for public radio in Oregon when the Mount St...
...During his time in the rehab hospital after his accident, the worst insult a fellow para or quad could hurl was to call you one of Jerry's kids...
...Disability bigotry is a juicy target for parody and satire, but there's none of that here...
...Here and throughout The Ragged Edge, it's made clear why the charity paradigm as personified by Jerry Lewis and his telethon is so reviled in the disability community...
...While reading The Ragged Edge, I was looking for words that captured the kick of bus blocking...
...Hockenberry left rehab in a wheelchair with bright red upholstery, a symbol of his attitude that he had no intention of seeking a safe hiding place...
...In the middle is everyone else, the hopeful players...
...The demoralizing effect of this worldview is everywhere...
...Hockenberry runs screaming from the overcoming tragic-hero stereotype as surely as any self-respecting person with a disability...
...I would have a career...
...I found what I was looking for in Laura Hershey's tribute to the late Wade Blank, the phenomenal activist who pretty much originated the tactic...
...It was more an adventure than a tragedy...
...All in all, on his rolling adventure of the last two decades, Hockenberry draws the same conclusion as a lot of us who live this life...
...Blocking buses, Hershey quotes Blank as saying, is "like giving the finger to the white man...
...It is for this reason that I have come to find myself grateful to have been a crip for the past nineteen years: I may miss walking, running, or tree climbing from time to time, but I do not miss being a spectator...
...It is rarely from experience that a white person learns history...
...Helen's volcano eruption brought him to NPR's attention...
...For nineteen years I was a young white man of comfort and suburban privilege in America...
...You think of the extraordinary people and places and lessons you would not have come within acres of on any other path, and it's scary to think of how empty your life might have been had you not had a disability...
...Until the accident, he recalls, "I understood the world only as an evolving landscape of clockwork challenges and gradual change...
...This intense collection of essays, articles, and poetry gives you the kind of no-holds-barred disability-awareness crash course that Health and Human Services employees received when several hundred members of ADAPT, Blank's vanguard radical group, barricaded them in their Chicago regional office by blocking all entrances...
...There's a certain shared sensibility...
...She sounds an ominous alarm by citing the Darwinistic bile of a well-known lawyer and self-proclaimed fetal-rights advocate who thinks that the only time abortion should be permitted and even encouraged is when it comes to wiping out burdensome fetuses like those with muscular dystrophy...
...Hockenberry has been in a wheelchair since a 1976 car accident...
...Iapproached John Hockenberry's Moving Violations with considerably more mixed emotions...
...The bureaucrats respect us more genuinely when they see us as hoodlums than when they see us as tragic heroes like Tiny Tim...
...That's my disability...
...This anthology from the first fifteen years of the Disability Rag, the gimp-radical's Bible, is supposed to express "the disability experience," and nothing expresses my disability experience better than the defiant job of bagging a bus...
...Hockenberry is an outstanding writer with the talent to make these personal stories interesting to anyone...
...I would graduate...
...There's power and celebration, too...
...In "Springtime for Hitler," Kahti Wolfe takes a chilling tour of the Holocaust Museum and faces up to the reality that because of her blindness, she would have been among the first to be exterminated in Nazi Germany...
...Despite horrendous inaccessibility and Nineteenth Century disability attitudes abroad, Hockenberry often found himself being more respected and accommodated in places like Gaza and Iran than here...
...It advances us to a degree that he appears on television so often without hiding behind bushes, doing tight head shots, or otherwise performing contortions like Franklin Roosevelt to avoid showing his wheelchair...
...I would grow up...
...Not even a big-shot correspondent can escape the silly notions of pedestrians, either...
...It's a gift to learn the fabric of unpredictability...
...24.95...
...Americans expect everything to work," he writes...
...The bane of his existence is "those telethon crips...
...It is not by any means a book for crips only...
...From the moment of his accident— caused when the driver of the car in which he had just hitched a ride dozed off— Hockenberry has had an astute take on life in a wheelchair...
...more Hkely it is from reading the program notes...
...by Mike Ervin Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, here in Chicago and around the country we would protest the inaccessibility of public-transit buses by parking our wheelchairs in front of them in the streets...
...Muscular dystrophy...
...One might know the historical details about the tragedy of the American Indian, the African-American experience, the struggles of everyone from Asians to industrial workers, but being white and free in America is to be more Hke a spectator...
...It's important to establish that we are multi-dimensional, but it's also important that we realize that our ability to capture the drama of life from our perspective is one of those dimensions...
...There are fabulous winners and horrible losers...
...We need to rectify a system that rewards insanely lucrative enterprises, like the $60 billion nursing-home empire, for exploiting us...
...It's not all dismal...
...His images of his humiliating encounter with vocational-aptitude testing strike a familiar chord...
...It stokes the fires by exposing disability bigotry in its most grotesque forms...
...371 pp...
...It is one of the consequences of being a superpower...
...As we move beyond accepting and overcoming our life circumstance into embracing it, so do we embrace the good disability stories that come our way...
...For more than a decade, he has been covering the news from Iowa to Somalia for National Public Radio and ABC News...
...It's completely humorless...
...So I was quite pleasantly surprised to find a disability perspective in Moving Violations that was generally perceptive, progressive, inspiring, sensitive—and it even taught me a thing or two...
...He even joked as he was pulled from the wreckage...
...That means it was a day well spent...
...I would be happy...
...Nevertheless, if this book doesn't get you riled up, I suggest you have your pulse checked...
...Mike Ervin is a disability-rights activist and freelance writer in Chicago...
...When he flipped out of his chair trying to pop it up a curb, nearby city workers immediately surrounded his prone body with orange emergency cones while stricken bystanders watched from beyond as if he'd just jumped off of a building...
...Rag founder Mary Johnson gives her account of that day, saying trapped bureaucrats (no doubt in the throes of nicotine fits) were referring to the protesters as "vultures" and "beasts...
...This living and breathing lawyer who is revered enough in her profession to have been quoted in the Journal of the American Bar Association would have me dead...
...His travels with NPR gave him an interesting international view of disability...
...Since he had taken college courses in calculus and advanced topology, the counselor, who gave praise in the "overloud voice the health-care industry reserves to its most degrading compliments," had him add up a bunch of numbers on an adding machine...
...Disabled people expect things not to work...
...And there's a section called "The Pity Ploy," which in itself is worth the price of admission...
...The upheavals of radical change and quantum unpredictability were taught to me as aberrations...
...But Hockenberry has never been much of a presence in the disability community...
...The Ragged Edge shows why writing with an attitude has put this bimonthly newspaper leagues beyond most other disability publications, almost all of which are so lightweight you have to put a brick on them to keep them from floating away...
...A lot of disabled writers and journalists, myself included, go through phases where we run from disability stories because we don't want to be pigeonholed...
...Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence by John Hockenberry Hyperion...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
