Today, we interrupt the series of Jamie Bérubé Stories in order to acknowledge that some people have gotten kinda weary of the genre of Jamie Bérubé Stories. Earlier this week, in one of my other post-GNF bloggy gigs, I posted the .pdf to a new essay on Jamie and Harry Potter and some of the functions of narrative. In response, some of the commenters in one of the best comment sections on the Internets noted that Jamie Stories can be tough to read if you’re a parent of a disabled child who doesn’t do all the things Jamie does. I think about this all the time, actually. And as I pointed out in the Unfogged comments section, I take as my premise one of the most difficult contradictions facing parents and caretakers of people with disabilities: on the one hand, the imperative to insist that there be no performance criterion for being human, and on the other hand, the imperative to point out that many people with disabilities can do all kinds of things the nondisabled world doesn’t expect them to do. (I elaborated on this at some length in chapter five of Life As We Know It, but every once in a while I need to be reminded that not everyone in the world has read everything I’ve ever written about Jamie or disability.)
According to at least a few of my Internets correspondents, the one thing they regret most about my decision to blow up my humble old blog and disperse myself across the blogosphere is that I don’t do Jamie updates very often anymore. So here’s a Jamie update for at least a few of my Internets correspondents!
Two tangents from the Week That Was Imus Week:
I miss Lars-Erik Nelson, O great Zeus on Olympus by Gojira’s cleansing fiery (and minty!) breath how I miss Lars-Erik Nelson. Yesterday, Editor and Publisher ran an item about Nelson’s column on — get this — Imus’s long bilious trail and (for extra added bonus points) Joe Lieberman’s sanctimonious hypocrisy. The column was written in 1995. Nelson died of an apparent stroke on November 20, 2000. His last published piece appeared in the December 21, 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books; it was a typically eagle-eyed takedown of a fawning biography of Henry “Scoopâ€? Jackson, the father of today’s “liberalâ€? hawks. You know how exasperated I used to get on my old blog whenever I read Richard Cohen or Peter Beinart? Right? Well, Nelson was basically the opposite of those guys. Whip-smart and constitutionally unhoodwinkable. It’s no surprise to learn that Nelson was the person to break the silence and explain to Gwen Ifill why her colleagues thought that Imus “had a problemâ€? with her:
I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.
Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.
It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
“Isn’t The Times wonderful,� Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.�
I can’t confirm this, but I believe that at the time, Rush Limbaugh blamed Imus’s “cleaning lady� remark on soul music, noting that Betty Wright had recorded the song “Cleanup Woman� in 1972.
Hi, weekend Pandagonia! And welcome to my first “real� post as a member of the weekend team. This one clocks in at well under 20,000 words, in part because I have sneakily written some of it elsewhere.
Up in Canada, which is (as some Americans are aware) a whole nother country, the Toronto Globe and Mail has graciously made available my little essay on prenatal testing. I’m linking to it not only because Pandagon is one of the best reproduction-rights blogs on the Internets, a place where one expects to see sharp discussion of such things, but also because the politics of prenatal testing sometimes confuse and complicate the politics of abortion. There are people who oppose abortion except when the fetus has a significant disability; there are people who support a woman’s right to abortion but oppose prenatal screening on the grounds that it will lead to a revival of eugenics. And, as I point out in the essay (by way of the work of Rayna Rapp, who’s written a terrific book on the subject):
the ultra-orthodox Hasidim in New York are strenuous promoters of prenatal genetic screening because Tay-Sachs disease — a genetic disability so excruciatingly debilitating that it sometimes seems as if it were invented by bioethicists as an extreme limit case — occurs disproportionately often in Ashkenazi Jews.
You can learn more about Tay-Sachs here, if you like — and then you can think about whether you would seek to bar prospective parents from screening for it. Interestingly, Rapp points out that while otherwise politically and culturally conservative Jewish groups (one of which advocates prenatal screening and conducts arranged marriages) have embraced screening for Tay-Sachs, the Catholic Church (OK, folks, here it comes) in New York City owned the airspace rights to a new hospital building under construction and demanded that “genetic counselors be barred from working in the new maternity service to be located there.â€? So while some religious traditions can be downright extremist, it’s not as if all religious conservatives agree about this kind of thing. Nor is it the case that all opponents of screening are conservative; some of them are disability-rights activists whose politics are generally feminist and socialist.
