Blog

I lost it at the Apple Store. (Well, not really, it happened by phone in my office, but I had to make the metaphor stretch a little.)

Christie Liu of Western Ontario University (home of the Fightin’ Mustangs!), specifically their grad journo program, talked with me last week about how I came to write PC Bedtime Stories, and wove it into a not-bad examination of the topic. You can find it at the link below, to Rabble Podcast Network. Associating with “rabble” must help my street cred a little, right?

Rabble Podcast Network

I’ve grown tired of this topic in recent years, as other deadly threats to the brain and health seem to emerge daily. But hey, I’m always willing to help someone on deadline. The show’s high point is an interview with Dr. Heinz Klatt, who gives the most succinct yet comprehensive definition I’ve heard of political correctness.

And for a good example of how maddeningly subjective the entire topic is, listen to the interview with Lorin McDonald, “a law student with hearing loss.” I put the description in quotes because she has very definite opinions about the proper terminology to use for those people who are hard of hearing. (Hey, I’m finally in a possibly oppressed minority! At least, I think that’s what she said.) For the life of me, I can’t follow her logic about why it’s okay to call herself “hard of hearing” but not “hearing impaired”. She says that

impaired implies that something is broken, and for those of us with a hearing loss, all it means is that we don’t have the same level of ability to hear. ..it’s not impaired, broken, needs to be fixed, it’s just that we have to approach things in a different way…

My ears are broken. Actually, I was the one to break them, specifically by decimating many of the cilia in my cochlea by constant loud music when I was young and stupid. And if there was a way I could fix them, I would walk over my mother to do it. I can’t fucking stand it, nor can I stand the ringing in my ears. And you can say I’m deef or stone-eared or have hearing nay-nays, it doesn’t effect me one crumb.

She also prefers the term “disability” to “condition…because a condition is a very negative word” and as more aging baby boomers are “acquiring this disability,” we need to treat this as just another part of life. So, a condition has more negative connotations than a disability? Do people protest for the rights of the conditioned? Jumpin’ horny toads, woman! Your hearing doesn’t work. Your ears or your nerves or your brain IS broken, as in, doesn’t function as well as it could. You should be proud that you’ve overcome it with lip-reading and hearing aids, and you don’t have to change things if you don’t want to, and you DEFINITELY should fight against discrimination, but how does the word used have any effect on the price of butter? If she “feels” the word “condition” has a negative tone, I’d say she’s imagining things and has hamhanded skills in the English language besides. Which of course, in the PC world, doesn’t disprove her argument one bit.

To listen to how quickly symptoms can morph into effects, creating a condition that might evolve into….something even more awful, listen to this clip from “Doctors Hospital of Medicine,” from the Waveland Radio Playhouse. (For a few other clips of WRP, go to this page of my website.)

From the most accomplished Gaelic poet of the past quarter century, Shane MacGowan:

The island it is silent now
But the ghosts still haunt the waves
And the torch lights up a famished man
Who fortune could not save.

Did you work upon the railroad?
Did you rid the streets of crime?
Were your dollars from the White House?
Were they from the five and dime?

Did the old songs taunt or cheer you
And did they still make you cry?
Did you count the months and years
Or did your teardrops quickly dry?

Ah, no, says he, t’was not to be
On a coffin ship I came here
And I never even got so far
That they could change my name.

Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
To a land of opportunity
That some of them will never see.
Fortune prevailing
Across the western ocean.
Their bellies full,
Their spirits free,
They’ll break the chains of poverty,
And they’ll dance

In Manhattan’s desert twilight,
In the death of afternoon,
We stepped hand in hand on Broadway
Like the first man on the moon,

And the blackbird broke the silence
As you whistled it so sweet,
And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
I danced up and down the street,

Then we said goodnight to Broadway
Giving it our best regards,
Tipped our hats to Mister Cohan,
Dear old Times Square’s favorite bard

Then we raised a glass to JFK
And a dozen more besides.
When I got back to my empty room,
I suppose I must have cried.

Thousands are sailing
Again across the ocean,
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery.
Postcards were mailing
Of sky-blue skies and oceans
From rooms the daylight never sees
Where lights don’t glow on Christmas trees,
But we dance to the music
And we dance

Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean,
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery.
Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees.
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
And we dance

And as captured by the BBC, at a free open air concert in Belfast three years ago,

Cheers.

For a weekend in which we had nothing pressing to do, it somehow completely exhausted me by the end. Don’t know what it was, but it might have been trying to negotiate with a daughter who was ready to scream at the drop of a hat. Is eight too early an age to worry about her hormones running amok?

Went with Number One Son to see the Ghost Rider movie at the Davis Saturday night. It wasn’t a good movie–not by a long shot–but parts of it were quite superb, and it was a very enjoyable time. Not least because we could walk to the movie and back and talk about it. It’s almost as good as being in a 70s Woody Allen movie, except we don’t have to live in Manhattan and worry about rats scurrying around our feet in the theater. And also, we can talk about Stan Lee and not Leni Reifenstahl.

Parts of the movie certainly were corny and lame. Well, when you juggle such dog-eared elements as a deal with the devil, and mystical cowboys, and demons connected with air and land and water, it’s going to take a pretty deft hand to not make the awful. But somehow, the image of a flaming skull still packs enough power to make it all watchable. The flaming bicycle was worth it too. And Johnny Blaze, the human host of the Ghost Rider, always stops his channel surfing when a video of a monkey shows up. This made me identify with him as a hero, more than the stuntriding and the loving Eva Mendes and the whole head-on-fire thing. Monkeys are the great leveler.