“Kicking a Cripple”: Metaphor vs. Truth
Disability imagery runs rampant in common metaphor. I gave one example in a recent post, and here is another. Paul Krugman’s column in Friday’s (February 2) New York Times pays tribute to Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist and pundit, who died last week. Ivins was an outspoken, forward-thinking woman, who back in 2002 predicted the disaster that would become the war in Iraq.
Krugman’s main concern is to point out how the obituaries did not pay sufficient attention to her willingness to hold the powerful accountable for their actions. Instead, he said, the obituaries focused on her satirical gifts. Indeed, these were great, but, as Krugman points out, she used this talent in the service of skewering the powerful.
The reason I am discussing this on Disability Culture Watch, is Krugman’s inclusion of the following quote from Ivins: “Satire,” she noted “…has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people … it is like kicking a cripple.”
In this metaphor, satire is the weapon, analogous to kicking, and the powerless people are the victims of its inappropriate use. For the metaphor to work, cripples need to be understood as powerless people. Are we? When it comes to being physically kicked, I think it is likely that many physically disabled people are more vulnerable than many of our nondisabled counterparts. (Although there are a number of athletic crips I wouldn’t suggest you mess with in a dark alley.) But this isn’t a literal phrase, it is a metaphor we are talking about.
The power of this or any evocative metaphor is that it resonates, it calls up an indelible and incontestable image, and in doing so it strengthens that image. The question then becomes, how responsible is it to reinforce an image of disabled people as powerless?
I wouldn’t have demanded of Ivins nor would I ask any living commentator to be polite and hold back their weaponry in attacks on the powerful. I do demand though that truth be a necessary component of their language. While I have conceded that cripples might be, in certain instances, less physically powerful, the image of powerless cripple as rendered in this metaphor makes the powerlessness more absolute and pervasive.
Ivins has been a role model for me. She has taught me a great deal about how to debunk and dethrone the powerful - tools that disabled people need to have at the ready.
I will attend to the use of the word “cripple” at another juncture.
