Michelle Obama, Contravened?

According to EJ Dionne and Joe Biden, Michelle Obama scored with her personal narrative, and indeed, if you pay any attention to the upscale pundits, the First Ladies should run the damn presidency, and sometimes have. My problem with the Obamas is not their potential, nor the hope they generated in 2008 as a political couple. The issue that sticks in my throat is nothing happened. Where did the change we can believe in go? It vanished into TARP, into Timothy Geithner's stress tests, or into derivatives and credit default swaps, mysterious financial tricks that make me feel my IQ is near parity to the imbeciles among whom I live, and no, I am not being kind, to the same degree that Philadelphia has more than once nearly taken my life, I am entitled to causticity. Today I thought I'd give you another reason for that.

When I first returned to a full urban life, now defeated I suppose, I had a neighbor, Levora, who lived to my right, and the good Sisters, recognizing my intellect, wanted me to mentor the girl, motivate her to finish study for her GED. Problem was, Levora had Huntington's complicated by the fact that Levora was not Olivia Wilde playing a bisexual doctor who did not yet have full blown symptoms. Levora was the real thing. Levora had it early, a gangly athletic girl with google eyes and a large smile who broke down and cried to me, "It's too hard!" Levora and her brother fucked like bunnies, passing on this condition to their children, and I have to live with the memories of the disgusting physical dissipation of this family in the inner city, live with the memory of her dying seven years later at Inglis House, another black woman in scrubs rubbing Levora's reptilian neck with ice chips. Linda, who was then not what she would become, the Linda who isn't so much stronger than I am, only and simply more capable of destruction, said, "Don't feel guilty."

Someone should. Levora is forgotten by all but any survivors, a living shame, a scandal under any model we'd like to use. The ideological left is back to whining about the fact that the disabled want to work. and the ideological left is tone deaf. Abilities need to be recognized as well as limitations, but again, this is another case of liberalism run amok. I think it is a horrible thing to give birth knowing you've passed on a death sentence in so many years; it is also a horrible thing that in trying to imitate those who told me I was normal, that I have been punished repeatedly for aspiring to live a rich aesthetic existence.