UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

The New York Times coverage of the new Lancet study of Iraqi deaths, while maintaining an objective tone, is heavily slanted against the study; many of the painfully bad right-wing arguments against the earlier survey are repeated by the Times, usually without rebuttal. For example:

Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.

The implication is that perhaps these new numbers underestimate pre-invasion deaths due to “spotty statistical history.” But the Lancet study does not draw on the counts of Hussein’s government for it’s pre-war mortality estimates, so this is irrelevant.

Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.

The Iraq Body Count tallies only those deaths which are reported by at least two reputable news organizations. No one associated with the Iraq Body Count claims that their results represent “the maximum number of deaths.” From the Iraq Body Count website:

Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.

Back to the Times coverage:

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.

But as this example from The Roper Center’s “polling 101″ illustrates, it’s accepted statistical methodology to extrapolate from small to large numbers - in their example, from 30 purple jelly beans in their sample to the conclusion that there are approximately 20 million purple jelly beans in the huge jelly bean jar.

The new Lancet survey is based on interviews with over 1000 Iraqis. The Times - and all major news organizations - routinely report numbers extrapolated from surveys which interview 1000, or sometimes just 500, people. Mainstream newspaper FAQs about polling methodology (example 1, example 2) suggest that a sample of just 500 is sufficient for surveys representing all Americans.

Of course, the Lancet survey - due to methodological issues having to do with collecting data in a war zone - has a wider confidence interval than most surveys. But that doesn’t mean that the study is unreliable, or its methods incorrect; it just means that the results have a wide confidence interval. We can be reasonably certain there have been between 426,369 and 793,663 excess Iraqi deaths since our invasion. That’s extraordinary, and appalling. If the occupation is intended to protect Iraqis, it is a dismal failure.

Curtsy: Deltoid

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Looking back at the disability press and its coverage of the FDR Memorial and Chris Reeve’s post-injury politics, there’s clearly a different perspective of these famous disabled men than the mainstream media presents. The topic of stereotypical representation of disability by the media and newly-disabled celebrities themselves rather than news about disability rights ignites activists to raise their voices. Each of the following links (save, perhaps, the last one) are worth reading in their entirety.

FDR

After the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., had been unveiled, there was an outcry from disability organizations that the wheelchair Roosevelt used daily all through his presidency was nowhere visible. A 1997 article in Ragged Edge (then called Electric Edge online, since the ‘zine-like print version of Disability Rag was still available) questions “FDR: Rolling in his grave?” :

The controversy among crips is this: Is it great that NOD [National Organization on Disability] is calling Roosevelt a hero for crips, and using him as what one person called a “‘culture icon”? Or is it misplaced praise for a man who really went to great efforts to pass as non-disabled?

“It is important to Americans with disabilities — and important as a symbol of how American society perceives its disabled people –that the Memorial depict the man as he was: tall, strong, heroic and disabled. Don’t let them steal our hero!” Hugh Gallagher, author of FDR’s Splendid Deception, has said. He has been liberally quoted by supporters of the NOD campaign.

[Blind reporter Kathi] Wolfe worries that the effort to turn Roosevelt into “a crip icon just because he was a crip” contradicts history. “He wasn’t a disability hero,” she insists. He wasn’t “a crip advocate like Helen Keller, who worked to better conditions for blind and deaf-blind people and veterans who had disabilities — as well as being a feminist and against racism.”

Here’s the Congressional hoopla that led to adding a statue to the Memorial depicting Roosevelt in his wheelchair. It was a rare triumph that the voices of disabled people were heard and effected change, though likely the biggest reason for their success was Roosevelt’s political history of serving oppressed minorities. That aspect of his personal history tipped the scale to support people with disabilities.

Chris Reeve

Along with instantly becoming the most famous, most quoted disabled person on the planet, Chris Reeve was always a lightning rod for political controversy and frustration among disability activists.

In letters to the editor of Electric Edge, readers vent about Reeve:

Due to his high profile, it’s no surprise that much ink is devoted to Christopher Reeve. Our world has collided with that of an A-list celebrity in a way that we could never have anticipated, so it is inevitable that we react to him in the Rag, Mouth, Accent, and all of our other usual forums.

Readers themselves may have witnessed or experienced firsthand the myriad thoughts and emotions in the two or three years immediately following such a massively imposed change as is caused by a spinal cord injury. In the clinical model, there are textbook pages written about a pattern of denial, anger, and depression. Christopher Reeve is, so far, the most powerful, influential person to go through this experience. All his talk of The Cure is nothing new; convert gimps have been singing this tune for years. His use of this crap is now drawing the attention it craves because he’s the one saying it. We’re all horrified because he can undermine the life work of hundreds of advocates in just one speech.

Writing about her 1996 experiences as a South Carolina delegate at the DNC, Harriet McBryde Johnson was on the floor when Reeve addressed the Convention:

They’ve been building up to tonight’s major prime-time speaker, and now they’re introducing him: Christopher Reeve. When the introduction ends, the hall lights are dimmed. Onto the stage he rolls and then sits, gleaming under a dramatic spotlight. The crowd is on its feet, wild with welcome, with excitement, with awe. Yes. They’re awed by the mere sight of this man sitting, smiling, looking around. He hasn’t said a word and they’re going crazy. It’s real. There’s no prompting from the DNC staffers.

I’m in the middle of 60,000 drop-jawed souls, witness to a late 20th-century Pentecost. Physically, Reeve is way above the 60,000, isolated by that spotlight. Symbolically, he’s the object of devotion, not a member of the fellowship. As Reeve and the crowd are having their communion, I feel completely out of it.

He’s speaking now. I try to listen, but things have become surreal. I look up at Reeve.

I look up and I see … a ventriloquist’s dummy.

How could I think such a thing? I’m horrified. If these worshippers knew my thoughts, they’d tear me up and throw me to the dogs.

I tell myself Reeve’s playing out the very peculiar drama of his life the best way he knows how. He’s being used, but what can he do? This is a new role for him. He has no script.

But, there he is, Charlie McCarthy.

Where is this image coming from? No quad I’ve ever known has impressed me this way. I’m pretty quad-like myself. Maybe it’s the staging that objectifies him. Or maybe it’s the contrast between his persona and the physical vigor we expect on the podium of a national political convention.

No. It’s the face. That smile running from ear to ear. The face is commonly considered animated, but I see something … wooden.

I’m warmed by the sudden sunburst of TV lights; a camera crew is setting up. They want the crip reaction to Reeve’s speech.

“Beth, can you block me?”

She stands between me and the camera. The crew establishes a new sightline and she leans right into it. They call someone on their cell phones.

Reeve’s measured syllables are perfectly timed with his mechanical puffs of air. The pauses make what he’s saying seem important. Even in the dim lights I can see the faces in the crowd, transfixed by the sight of him, fascinated by the sound of him. The gleaming presence. The ventilator whoosh. The body propped up in dress-up clothes.

The camera crew realizes that Beth’s not going away. They load up their gear and head elsewhere.

Moments later, there’s a woman in a wheelchair on the giant TV screen in the rafters. She’s scowling. Quick cut to a nondisabled white woman, tears streaming across a smiling face, backlit to highlight her moment of inspiration. The lights pick out a variety of delegates. White, black, old, young, male, female. Everything but crips.

It’s melodrama. The kind of Telethon melodrama I tried to ignore in my childhood and youth, tried to ignore until finally I got angry enough to put up a picket line. How could they bring the Telethon here, to a national political convention? This is my party. How could they do it?

The speech ends and the lights come on. As emotion runs through this vast arena, I’m left cold. I can’t possibly feel what they feel. Now they’ll want to see me the way they see Reeve, a disability object, presumably tragic but brave, someone to make them grateful they’re not like us.

I tell myself I’m overreacting, but I’m almost shaking when I join the line at the elevators. A misty-eyed stranger kneels down beside me and clutches the hand I’m trying to drive my chair with.

“Wasn’t that just wonderful?“

“No,” I blurt out, “it wasn’t at all wonderful. I thought it was pretty bad.”

“Well, I thought it was wonderful.” She springs up and pivots away with an angry shoe-clop on the hard floor. How dare I refuse to be inspired?

On the bus ride back, everyone rhapsodizes about how inspired they are. Gone is the usual friendly chitchat. I stare at the black floor mat and withdraw from the group that has set me apart.

We get to our rooms, way past ready to collapse into our beds, but there’s a blinking light on our phone. A message from Mike Ervin: “Hi. Some people from Chicago are having a press conference tomorrow to deal with the Christopher Reeve, er, problem … “

Beth writes down the details. We’ll be there.

Continuing in Part II, Johnson describes the disability rights media response:

Christopher Reeve’s speech has left us with a problem. By putting him up on the podium the way they did last night, the DNC has fed–and fed upon–the harmful disability stereotypes I’m here, in part, to fight. When I arrive for the disability caucus and find the gang from Chicago outside the door passing out flyers, I’m overjoyed. The flyer, by Mike Ervin and Anna Stonum, deals pointedly with Reeve.

Local TV news shows up. They shoot video of the group and then zoom in on my red delegate badge, proof of my authenticity as a genuine Democrat from the Deep South. Up here, I guess, I’m exotic. They set up lights. Mike and I agree to talk.

There’s a lot of noise and I can barely hear what Mike’s saying. Is he really calling Reeve a whiner? No, not exactly, but close. I think Mike might be going a bit too far, but a wave of gratitude washes over me. He’s a champion who’s fighting not Reeve but the people who put him on that platform.

Another 1997 Electric Edge article asks about Chris Reeve “What’s it gonna take?” Here’s writer Pat Williams:

Some gimps I know say, “give Chris Reeve a break! He’s new to gimpdom. He doesn’t realize there’s more than Cure out there.” These gimps want to believe that after Reeve’s been a gimp for a few years, he’ll get on to disability rights; he’ll speak out on the importance of access, attendant services, all that.

But I don’t buy that. I think Reeve knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows you can’t talk about cure on the one hand and access on the other; he knows people see them as contradictory. He was drawn to the American Paralysis Association, he said, because “they are dedicated solely to finding a cure for paralysis, nothing less. I liked that idea,” Reeve went on. “They’re not into lower sidewalks and better wheelchairs.”

“Suppose Chris Reeve were Barney Frank”:

Suppose he wrote an autobiography about seeking a cure for his homosexuality? Suppose he started the Barney Frank foundation to cure homosexuals? Suppose he held a television special to raise money to find a cure for homosexuality?

Suppose Barbara Walters interviewed him on 20/20 on his work to find a cure for homosexuality?

Imagine it.

A 2000 Ragged Edge response to Reeve’s Superbowl ad where a digitally manipulated Reeve got out of his wheelchair and walked:

With an unemployment rate of over 70%, the vast majority of people with disabilities could not begin to be considered consumers of this product. But the ad was not created with the disability market in mind; its target was people with money. It unabashedly pulled at heartstrings with an in-your-face, no-holds-barred “disability is bad” message. In the tradition of Jerry Lewis, this ad meant to bring tears to the eyes of football fans during their favorite game, courtesy of the incredibly courageous former Superman.

The ad may have done more damage than Jerry himself: unlike the telethon, this “disability is bad” message aired during one of the year’s most watched TV events. Nuveen paid $4 million for that minute of airtime.

At the same link, several disability activists speak out. Paul Longmore:

“The opportunities in this new world for people with disabilities have not been created by technology alone. They are the result of several generations of intensifying disability rights activism that has won passage of laws protecting us from discrimination and guaranteeing us access. . . . We need to ask why society keeps giving Reeve platforms to propagate his views but excludes the disability rights perspective.”

Tom Deniston of Accessible Design Associates:

“If I had pulled a Christopher Reeve 30 years ago, none of at least 1,000 buildings would be accessible today.”

Charles Krauthammer:

“In Reeve’s view, reality is a psychological crutch. His propaganda to that effect undermines those — particularly the young and newly injured — who are struggling to face reality, master it and make a life for themselves from their wheelchairs.”

New Mobility editor Barry Corbet writes:

Alas, poor Christopher Reeve. He can do no right.

In his quest for cure, he’s been roundly criticized by a large and vocal sector of disability activists for obscuring our core message of rights, equal opportunity and dignity.

Alas, poor Christopher Reeve. He can do no wrong.

In his quest for cure, he’s raised millions of dollars for research, elevated public awareness for all people with disabilities and brought hope where once there was none. He’s become Saint Christopher and there’s not much his detractors can do about it.

Ted Gilmer’s 2002 New Mobility interview with Reeve presents a detailed picture of the man and his advocacy while also subtly showing how alienated he is from the average quadriplegic’s life.

In 2003, Mary Johnson’s book Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against Disability Rights explains how Reeve’s efforts dangerously undermine disability rights.

In a less critical 2004 article about his death Ragged Edge editor Mary Johnson notes:

We are awaking today to a week in which we will read and hear all sorts of encomiums to Christopher Reeve the actor, the brave man who kept on in the face of tragedy, the man who became an icon for stem cell research.

What we will not hear are tributes to the man who changed America’s understanding of disability discrimination, who put a face on the problems this country causes wheelchair users by the persistent denials of access and accommodation.

Had he lived, Chris Reeve might one day still have come to symbolize to the American public the fight millions of us must wage in order to get out of institutions, into homes of our own, into jobs, into the public environment. Many of us wanted to believe he would someday embrace the rights issue much as he had embraced, as a nondisabled man, many progressive causes.

The Need to Critique

I’ve been getting a lot of heat for daring to criticize Andrea Dworkin’s public writing about disability. Thinking critically about who the widely disparate disabled are and how we’re portrayed isn’t something I decided to play at just to “slam Dworkin.” It’s a long-term project that includes looking at literature and film too. I didn’t have a blog during the FDR Memorial issue or until the very end of Chris Reeve’s life, but I did write a letter to the editor of my college paper about the Memorial:

This letter is in response to the Tuesday State Press editorial stating that FDR should be remembered for his deeds, not his disability. While this newspaper has certainly made more blatant errors recently with regard to group stereotypes, the editorial speaks to the lack of support for diverse groups and their experiences.

It was widely known during Roosevelt’s time in office that he used a wheelchair, and buildings all over Washington were equipped with ramps so he could come and go. These ramps were all removed when he died, attesting to the fact that because his disability was hidden, the access needs of other disabled Americans remained unacknowledged for a couple more decades. No, Roosevelt did not want himself portrayed in a wheelchair, but neither did he want any kind of memorial in his honor. We already have the memorial; now the challenge is to depict Roosevelt honestly and in a way meaningful for future generations.

The history and experiences of other stereotyped and marginalized groups have not emerged without struggle. Recognition of both contributions to society and discrimination from society have been hard won for African Americans, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, etc. While the editorial board acknowledged that people with disabilities are often pitied and patronized, they fail to truly examine Roosevelt as a president with a disability. He chose to hide his disability because of discriminatory attitudes. As President Clinton has said: “He knew it was necessary at the time because he knew he had the capacity to be president, and he didn’t want some artificial perception to keep him from being president.”

In addition to Clinton, former Presidents Bush, Carter, and Ford — as well as 16 of Roosevelt’s grandchildren — support a statue depicting him in a wheelchair. History does not change, but what we see as important about our past continues to evolve. Who our heroes and role models are for the future has thankfully expanded. As the editorial states, “FDR was an inspiration to many,” but perhaps not “regardless of his physical state.” Perhaps his experiences with polio are part of why he was so great, and why he could say “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Incidentally, the new statue would not cost taxpayers a dime. The National Organization on Disability has pledged to raised the necessary funds.

And Reeve is mentioned anecdotally throughout this blog.

There aren’t many famous disabled people because disabled people don’t get enough media coverage to be recognized as the political activists and political writers they are. It ends up being famous people who become impaired and thrust into a brighter spotlight that society views as our spokespeople — mostly spokesmen. Without criticism of their unwitting role in our continued oppression, their stereotypical messages go unchallenged. It’s not enough to critique the media when the public turns to these celebrities, the roles of the celebrities must be examined too.

Crossposted on The Gimp Parade
Check there for more comments

• “Pimp my gimp.” Recent Doonesbury strips showing B.D.’s efforts to decorate his prosthetic leg are the latest in good crip giggles.

• Sage of Persephone’s Box has an announcement about blog color choices and the her ability to read what is offered. While we’re on the topic, I can’t remember who posted on it recently, but the CAPTCHA function for spam-proofing comments at many sites is troublesome for many of the sight-impaired. I’ve turned mine off and so far the spam on my little site is only about 2 per day.

• Dan Filler at Concurring Opinions has some legal thoughts on “Mental Illness and the Death Penalty,” followed by interesting comments.

• The Independent has an article on toxic garbage from Western nations poisoning West Africa:

All down the West Africa coast, ships registered in America and Europe unload containers filled with old computers, slops, and used medical equipment. Scrap merchants, corrupt politicians and underpaid civil servants take charge of this rubbish and, for a few dollars, will dump them off coastlines and on landfill sites.

• Another article in the same edition tells of the daily struggles of African women and how sexism and ableism work together to make life hard:

An HIV-positive woman is nearly 10 times as likely to experience violence at the hands of her partner as a woman who does not have the disease. Domestic violence causes more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 worldwide than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war. In at least 20 African countries, more than half the women have also suffered female genital mutilation.

• The founder of a Swiss clinic offering assisted suicide for the terminally ill wants to widen the scope of elligible people to those who are depressed.

He claimed that such a move would help to cut the suicide rate to about 20 per cent to 25 per cent of its current level. “You could avoid the huge majority and reduce costs to the health services,” he said.

Apparently, if someone commits your suicide for you, it isn’t legally suicide. (True, btw. This also means family can cash in on insurance policytaken out on the dead person.)

• Lingual Tremors presents the impressive 23rd Carnival of Feminists on the theme of women and health care.

• A visually-impaired Atlantic City man sues the city and the “senior-transportation service” (I’m not sure why they call it that and not just paratransit like everyone else) because the driver arriving to pick him up in July, 2004, refused to let his guide dog on the bus. She was afraid of dogs.

• A respiratory disease called “popcorn lung” plagues workers in American factories where a chemical in artificial butter flavor is used on microwave popcorn.

• Some interesting Finnish blogs I can’t find a good page translator for. Anyone?

• Lene Andersen at The Seated View thinks about self-image versus objectivity and the words — like “deformity” — that can cut.

• Time magazine’s feature story, “Who pays for special ed?” begs for some disability blogging by those with more expertise than me on the squeeze between parents of disabled children and school districts feeling a desperate budget crunch.

• Larry Scott writes about the Republican plan for “Buying-out Disabled Veterans” with a lump-sum disability compensation and all the questions that brings up about eligibility for medical care through the VA.

• “The Meaning of Deafness” discusses education for deaf students and the conflicting philosophies parents of young children must chose between.

• Rochelle Gregory at Points of Praxis looks at the documentary Autism Everyday,the purpose the film is meant to serve and the disability rights critique of it.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

Here’s a mini-sociology lesson. I found this article today, which includes the following quote:

Dr. Raoult Ratard took a unique approach to studying the suicide rate because there have been no reliable estimates of how many people have returned since the storm. Various sources have put the number at anywhere from fewer than 200,000 to around 250,000 out of a pre-Katrina population of just under 455,000.

So, Ratard looked at the number of deaths from October 2005 (when the city was reopened after the storm) through March 2006, and compared that total to the number of deaths of all kinds during the same period the year before.

The pre-storm death total was 2,507; post-storm, 1,024. That means the number of deaths was down by about three-fifths.

Then Ratard looked at suicides. The number of pre-storm suicides was 16; post-storm, 11. That means the number of suicides was down by only about one-third.

So, the suicide rate appears to have gone up. But the totals are too small to conclude that Katrina caused the increase, Ratard said. “They are not big enough so that you can say with certainty that it would not be due to chance,” he said.

There are a few important sociological issues that this brought up for me. First, I think, while innovative, the methodology is fairly weak. One of the problems is that we may also need to count Katrina evacuees in this as well. Of course, this is going to be damn near impossible to do, since the Katrina Diaspora is so dispersed across the US. Now we could argue that only people in the city limits over the entire year should be counted, but I think if a researcher wanted look at suicides that could be directly or indirectly related to Katrina, he or she needs to think well outside the city boundaries. The other methodological weakness is the small numbers. I think it is irresponsible to report findings that are not statistically significant as if they are. I certainly don’t blame the authors of the study for this, but I do worry that people are going to get the wrong impression of strength o the findings. The other issue that I’d like to bring up, is the distinction between correlation and causation. This data only shows a correlation between suicide and Katrina, and one that may not even be significant. One funny example commonly used in sociology to demonstrate the distinction between causation and correlation is the strong correlation between the amount of ice cream sold in stores and the murder rate. In the US the murder rate goes up when people buy more ice cream, and when they buy less ice cream the murder rate goes down. Now anybody with a lick of sense knows that ice cream doesn’t drive people into murderous rages. There is a correlation, but we know ice cream doesn’t cause murder or for that matter higher murder rates don’t cause people to eat more ice cream. So why is this? Well, the murder rates (especially in temperate climates) tend to be higher in the summer, and the warmer weather is also correlated with people eating more ice cream. In the study above, they probably could do case studies of the suicides and try to determine if Katrina played a role. The researcher does note this problem, but I worry that the average reader may not realize why this important.

On another note, I do think there is a reasonable argument to be made as to why the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina could be related to an increase in suicides. This argument goes way back to one of the founder’s of sociology: Emile Durkheim. Durkheim is best know for his study on suicide. Durkheim identified various types of suicide, including anomie/anomic suicide. This type of suicide is related to conditions where social norms break down. The Durkheim website cited above describes the various types of anomic suicide as follows:

• Acute economic anomie: sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfill social needs.
• Chronic economic anomie: long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor.
• Acute domestic anomie: sudden changes on the microsocial level resulted in an inability to adapt and therefore higher suicide rates. Widowhood is a prime example of this type of anomie.
• Chronic domestic anomie: referred to the way marriage as an institution regulated the sexual and behavioral means-needs balance among men and women. Marriage provided different regulations for each, however. Bachelors tended to commit suicide at higher rates than married men because of a lack of regulation and established goals and expectations. On the other hand, marriage has traditionally served to overregulate the lives of women by further restricting their already limited opportunities and goals. Unmarried women, therefore, do not experience chronic domestic anomie nearly as often as do unmarried men.

I suspect this is the sort of theory that is guiding the study mentioned above. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know whether or not the suicide rate in New Orleans has truly increased. In spite of the sound theoretically argument that can be made about why the suicide rate should increase under such conditions, it is going to take a little more time and a little better methodology for us to determine whether or not Katrina cause a surge in suicides.

I found this story from the AP. It is notable because both the age of the victim and the number of perpetrators.

It began with a crush, police said, and turned into one of the most shocking crimes in Milwaukee’s long, violent summer: an 11-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by as many as 20 boys while a 16-year-old girl she was romantically interested in watched and coached her.

There were also a couple other details that lead me to think about how this story will be portrayed and how the media coverage will be structured. First, the involvement of the 16 year old girl in the attack has drawn attention probably because of her gender and her gender identity. My impression is that the 16 year old is transgender or possibly gender queer in some other sort of way. I base that on this quote:

The 11-year-old girl told police she was interested in the teenage girl, who looked and dressed like a boy, authorities said in court records. She and two friends went to the teen’s house, where the child performed oral sex on three teenage boys, the court records said.

Second the involvement of the 40 year old uncle in all of this is disturbing, and adds even more sensation to the story. It’s also interesting that the article frames this event as part of an escalating number of violent gang assaults. I don’t want to argue much either way about what direction the story will end up taking, but this one should be a good story to follow to see what happens and how the media coverage is framed.

This was originally posted on The Gimp Parade in March, 2005.

A French energy company has produced a video advertisement about access for the disabled that is quite interesting. The link leads to a page in French (naturally) where you can choose high (haut) speed or low (bas) speed video. Here’s a quick description of the ad:

“One is the Loneliest Number” is sung by Aimee Mann in the background. On a noisy city sidewalk a nondisabled woman is jostled slightly by the busy activity of numerous people in manual wheelchairs hurrying about their business. She appears to be wanting help with something but no one stops to talk to her. A different woman in a bank informs a teller she would like to open an account, but he responds in sign language she clearly cannot understand.

On a street in the heavy rain, a nondisabled man slips and slides to keep his footing while people in wheelchairs easily roll by. At a public phone, a nondisabled man stoops over awkwardly because the phone is adjusted for a seated person’s height. Across the street, a person in a wheelchair points at him because he looks so strange. A “pedestrian” traffic signal that would usually show a symbol of a person walking has a symbol of a person wheeling instead. It turns green and a happy young man and woman in wheelchairs cross together. In a library, a nondisabled man steps around a woman using a white cane, but when he looks at a book he sees that it is all in braille and he cannot read it or any of the books around him in the library.

At the bottom of the screen: Le monde est plus dur quand il n’est past conçu pour vous. Translation, is, I believe: The world is harder when it is not conceived for you. Then a voice says: Desormais, les espaces EDF sont accessibles à tous. From now on, the spaces of EDF are accessible to all.

I’d be curious to know how nondisabled viewers of this ad interpret it. Would their description include everything mine does above or would they not have noticed some things that were obvious to me? For example, would they notice that the first nondisabled woman is not only the lone person without a chair but seems to need some help and no one stops? Would they notice that the disabled person pointing to the man at the phone is staring because he is not “normal?” These observations of the content of the advertisement involve inversions of everyday encounters to me, but does a nondisabled person viewing the ad even register that this is what is happening? I’d be interested to know.

The ad isn’t a perfect translation of the disability experience, of course, but it is much more sophisticated than most cultural statements about accessibility. It reaches beyond the idea of ramps and physical adjustments of the environment to include social relations and the conceptual privilege nondisabled people enjoy by sustaining an environment that is not “conceived” as being for everyone.

Often, the argument against compliance to the ADA is that disabled people are demanding something “extra” and their quest for equality oppresses business owners or employers who must suddenly provide something additional to the disabled person that no one else is asking for. The implied belief is that the nondisabled person never asks for anything “extra,” though this is not really true. Rather, the built world is “conceived” to include the extras they might need. Lights, for example, which none of us who can see consider an extra at all, but a blind person surely doesn’t need. Another “extra,” as seen from a traditional male perspective is on-site daycare at work. Of course, that view involves both the conception of a world where women take care of all the children AND stay at home to do it. “Extra” is in the eye of the beholder in many instances of disability access too.

Yet the idea that accommodating disability is an extra is so firmly implanted in our culture’s conception of the world that we don’t even see our nondiscrimination policies toward the disabled for the proof of and continuation of marginalization that they are. Look at the simple example of “disabled person access” signage. We have designated signs for where disabled people can find inclusion in our society. Can I get in this building? Look for the sign. Can I ride this bus? Look for the sign that allows for my existence on board. (Of course, even the universal symbol for disability is marginalizing in that a stick figure in a wheelchair hardly illustrates access for someone who is deaf.)

The signs ARE useful when used to designate actual wheelchair accessibility (which often has no relationship to compliance with the legal standard), but this is because the rest of the world continues to be conceived of without a thought for inclusion of everyone. And the ways the signs tend to separate us out is a form of segregation, however benign the intention. Having a place to put disabled folks in is as dangerous to us and our ability to be a part of society as having no place for us at all. We want to be everywhere. We want signs to be redundant. We want all of society conceived to include us.

There’s a short story that further illustrates this need for a paradigm shift. In a fictional utopia of disability inclusion in the year 2050, a historian tells the awakened Crip Van Winkle how things have changed:

All conveyances, public or private, for transportation by land, air, sea and cyberspace, for individual or collective travel are naturally covered by the Universal Design principle. You don’t seem to understand, van Winkle, the United States of Europe officially abolished Apartheid in the year 2024 — 30 years after South Africa but better late than never. Since then, Universal Design has been the law of the land and the international sign of access that you guys were so proud of, is forbidden. It singles out and stigmatizes a particular group of citizens. Besides, it is not necessary anymore — I guess it never really was necessary. Already in your day and age it would have been better to mark the places that were inaccessible in order to point out the full extent of the injustice. By using the symbol of access you did yourself a disservice, because the symbol served as an alibi for the accepted norm of inaccessibility emphasizing the exception rather than the rule.

Like the short story, the French ad attempts to reveal the ableist paradigm we all live under by inverting it. While a clever advertisement doesn’t indicate how well the company achieves inclusion in the real world, the awareness it shows is refreshing. It suggests that lack of inclusiveness is a failure of creativity that should not be explained with any alibi.

Ad via Aleja

Andrea at Shrub.com has a good post with a feminist analysis of “Mantham” (YouTube link) the Burger King ad with new lyrics to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” (although in her count of women in the commercial, she seems to have missed the line of cheerleaders behind the guy burning his tighty-whities). Gayprof has some good comments, as well.

Although not always this blatant (how could it be?), smaller fast-food places have been hitting on similar sexual themes in their commercials for years. Jack In The Box, a few years ago, had a series of commercials based on Jack Box sponsoring a football team (the first commercial featured Jack’s plan to fire the male cheerleading squad - a silly gag, I know, but the symbolism of rejecting homoeroticism in favor of “real man” heterosexuality is hard to deny). And Carl Jr’s (doing business as Hardees in some regions) has had a series of aggressively sexist commercials, from Paris Hilton washing a car to commercials showing befuddled men in a grocery store having no idea what to buy, with the slogan “without us, some guys would starve.”

(It’s amazing how anti-male the “guys should be guys” mentality quickly becomes. Sure, the “some guys would starve” commercials were funny, but c’mon - their premise is that men lack the smarts required to choose a loaf of bread).

So the “guys should be guys” ethos of the Burger King commercial is nothing new, although it’s perhaps a new achievement in the compulsive over-the-topness of its sexism. For example, at the climax of the commercial, the mob of whopper-eating men toss a minivan off a bridge, symbolically rescuing the pleased family dude who got out of the van from his emasculating family attachments. (And if you think I’m reading too much into it, tell me why else they would throw a minivan off a bridge while singing about manhood?)

(Compare the auto-as-symbolic-emasculation theme in this commercial to the auto-as-invulnerable-manhood theme in the recent Dodge Caliber commercial, in which the macho Dodge is the one thing in the world that fairies can’t feminize. Ad writers are convinced that men have a thing about cars…).

But putting the feminist analysis aside, since Shrub.com has already done an excellent job of that, you know what I found striking about this commercial? The absence of fat people. Often, commercials about “everyday guys being guys doing guy things” will include a guy or two with a spare tire, because what’s more everyday than that? Not this commercial. The singer who opens the commercial is if anything a bit scrawny for TV men, and all of the dozens and dozens of guys who crowd through this commercial are thin. There are just two exceptions. First, they cast someone a bit round-faced to play the minivan owner, presumably because family men are stereotypically a bit chubby. Second, the dude pulling the dump truck by a chain isn’t thin, but professional truck-pullers usually aren’t.

It’s odd, isn’t it? On the one hand, the whole commercial is saying “screw the wife/nanny nagging you about health - eat what you want” ethos, while at the same time the casting is trying to assure men that eating at Burger King won’t make them fat.

Now, as it happens, I believe that eating at Burger King won’t make you fat, nor will being fat make you unhealthy (more on that subject here). And I think people should feel free to eat what they want, even if it is unhealthy. But the way this commercial endorses ideologies of thinness and of sexism - even while waving a “just kidding! You’re not allowed to analyze what’s going on, because we’re! just! kidding!” banner - pretty much wipes out any possible beneficial message iit might have carried.

What’s interesting is how the ideology of “healthism” is now predominant enough so that hamburgers are sold the way beer is sold - as an appeal to base male instincts. “C’mon, be bad.” Eating burgers, which are probably the single most popular food in the country, makes you a rebel. Yeesh.

P.S. So why is there a mime? Is that the ultimate example of a feminized man coming back to manhood, or did they just think sticking in a mime would be funny, or both? (Look in the background about 32 seconds into the commercial).

***PLEASE NOTE***
Comments on my posts on “Alas” are heavily moderated. If you’d like to avoid all that, you can post comments on the identical post at Creative Destruction.

From the Washington Blade:

Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean fired the party’s gay outreach adviser Donald Hitchcock on May 2 less than a week after Hitchcock’s domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, accused Dean of failing to take adequate steps to defend gay rights. [...]

Hitchcock’s dismissal came after Yandura created a stir among party activists, both gay and straight, by sending an open letter on April 20 to gay Democrats criticizing Dean and the party for not getting involved in state ballot measures seeking to ban gay marriage.

Yandura charged that the DNC failed to counter efforts by Republicans to promote the anti-gay ballot measures as a wedge issue to win elections. He suggested that gays withhold donations to the Democrats until the party formally addresses issues he raised.

The Dems, of course, are claiming that the firing wasn’t retaliation. I don’t buy it.

The Democrats’ slogan should be, “We’re less awful to queers than the other party, so send us lots of money.” If the Republicans ever decide to stop supporting anti-queer policies, it will cost the Democrats millions every election cycle.

The article is notable as well for an example of exactly the kind of “anonymous” quoting that journalists shouldn’t print:

A third DNC insider, who also requested anonymity out of concern for sounding critical of Hitchcock, said Dean and other DNC officials decided several months before Yandura’s public criticism of the party that Hitchcock “was not the best fit” for his job.[...]

Hitchcock disputes this assessment. “I never had any bad performance review or anyone telling me I was not doing a good job,” he said.

The first two anonymous quotes (who are only identified as DNC insiders retroactively, by the phrase “a third DNC insider”) have reason to not speak on the record: They’re afraid of retaliation from Dean. If they work for the DNC, as seems likely, they might be afraid of losing their jobs. Under such circumstances, printing anonymous quotes is reasonable.

The third DNC insider, however, is hardly a whistleblower, or in danger of being fired for saying something supportive about his boss. He’s not concerned with “sounding critical of Hitchcock”: he is being critical of Hitchcock, after all. He just wants the convenience of slamming Hitchcock without being held responsible. I think it’s likely this leak was set up by Dean’s office. There’s no reason journalists should aid politicians with this sort of anonymous leak. If Dean or other DNC people want to slam Hitchcock, let them do so in their own names, or not at all.

Crossposted on Creative Destruction. My threads on “Alas” are heavily moderated; if you have trouble posting comments here, please try commenting on the crosspost instead.

http://onlineintegrity.org/ has a 4-point online integrity statement of principles that deals with respecting other people’s privacy.

The people behind the online integrity statement may mean well, but there is a glaring omission.

It doesn’t address the facilitating or encouragement of violence or harassment. Disclaimers that say something like, “Of course I’m not condoning violence, but if this person died, the world would be a better place” are backhand endorsements of violence and have no place on sites that lay any claim to integrity.

So often when personal contact information is posted unethically, it is given with the intent to harm the other person. If we only deal with the release of that personal information and not with the unethical intent behind the release of information, those who stick to the letter of the law and not the spirit will find loopholes so they can declare themselves ethical while acting unethically.

Note: Also posted on my blog, | Posted by Abyss2hope in Media criticism, Whatever | 5 Comments »