Disability Metaphors Run Amok
Some brief commentary on a few examples of disability-related language in recent news items. The metaphors have been running amok and the Watch is out to catch them before they wreak more havoc.
The slew of commentary on the Don Imus debacle focused on in/appropriate language, and who is entitled to use certain words and who is not, etc. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (April 13, 2007) Harvey Fierstein wrote about the rampant use of “expressions of intolerance” in everyday life. Toward the end of the piece, talking about several recent high-profile instances of such expression, he said: “Still I’m gladdened because our no longer being deaf to them may signal their eventual eradication.”
On an NPR interview about Imus’s use of insulting language to describe the women’s basketball team at Rutgers University, Todd Gitlin was interviewed. It is interesting to note that the subtitle of his most recent book is: Blind Republicans, Impotent Democrats and the Recovery of American Ideals.
Maureen Dowd (NY Times, April 18, 2007) wrote about Paul Wolfowitz giving his “girlfriend” (as the mainstream press refers to her) a raise and promotion. She then went on to talk about the many lies and deceptions of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and company, by saying they “have learned nothing from their mistakes of blindness and hubris, except more blindness and hubris.”
In Fierstein’s use of “deaf”, Gitlin’s choice of “blind” for his title, and Dowd’s use of “blindness” we have examples of such words being used to connote ignorance and obliviousness. If you type the word “blind” into your computer’s Thesaurus, you might find that the terms ignorant, imperceptive, insensitive, irrational, oblivious, obtuse, random, rash, stagger, unaware, unconscious, uncontrolled, unknowing, unplanned and violent come up on the screen. Roget’s Thesaurus also provided inattentive and purposeless. These meanings lurk under the surface when the word “blind” is used whether on its own, or in pairings, in such phrases as “blind passion”, “blind rage”, “blind justice”, blind drunk” and “blind faith”.
A search of the word “deaf” in Roget’s yields, among many others: inattentive, obstinate, insensible, neglect, careless, supine, unbelief, dumb, mute, sullen, intractable.
How can the culture get away with attaching such an absurd proliferations of meanings to conditions that affect, simply, visual or auditory acuity? Of all the impairments, blindness seems to call up the most fantastical of responses.
It is particularly disturbing to find these examples in contexts in which the writer is calling for greater conscientiousness in our use of language. I have written about disability metaphor in other entries and will stay on the lookout.
