Philip K. Dick long ago predicted the cosmetic nature of democratic choice in a story about robots created to simulate human politicians, where an older prototype is operated by a short black man who pauses out of exhaustion and asks for a beer, and in many senses, Obama is still this figure, uneasy in his own identity, neither black enough in the civil rights sense, and not quite accepted by white America on its own cultural terms. What Romney shares with Barack is that same invisibility, and though Gwen Ifill was not entirely off when she remarked that Eastwood's speech evokes Ellison's famous opening, she gives the country too much credit for being able to pick up the allusion, and I am doing my best to tune out national politics on either end. My sentiments about actors and the two party system seem only to be confirmed. The best the Democrats can do is offer me compliance with a regulatory system that is brutal in its own right, and the Republicans have nothing to say to me as a disabled woman who believes in success through hard work, and wants her own autonomy, inclusive of more fluid mobility options.
The disabled community views Eastwood as an enemy, and indeed, John Hockenberry shredded the former mayor for his objections to the ADA with a better effectiveness than anything I have at my disposal, but my view is more nuanced. Million Dollar Baby was about escaping bleak entrapments, not killing the crippled. Neither the right, nor the left, seem to realize that the American conception of individual liberty is virtually paralyzed.
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