Kevin McHale, Mime Karaoke

During a nascent episode of glee, Kevin McHale's Artie is swept up by Dianna Agron's cheerleader (most likely) in an aggressive seduction scene in which the nerdy pretend paraplegic is bewildered, entirely ignorant of the convoluted cross ethnic love plot suggestive of a sizzlingly kitsch hip bisexuality that regresses rednecks to awed pornography Neanderthals. Hot girls and hard nipples, that is an art in progress, as opposed to your grandmother's estrogen loss and the suggestive comfort crones can take in fallen paps, with the fearful androgyny of the Furies ever evocative of our founding myths, and our instinctual unease with gender definition and its tensions in relation to origin.

Artie's bewildered naivete is something of a truism in the wheelchair user innocence lexicon, but only in terms of Caucasian parents sheltering their invalids from any sexual identity: If you are paralyzed and need injections to get a hard on, what's the use? His silence in the scene is meant to have a comic, nerdy impact, but what it also illuminates, inadvertently, and I hear fans of the show's early incisive biting wit on Americana dysfunction crying out, "unfair, you are deploying a cheap stratagem!" is the wall of silence that surrounds the sexual abuse and exploitation of those with chronic conditions, a wall that is even thicker in the inner cities, where black women with MCTD are forcibly raped and assaulted into providing oral sex. No SVU doggedly pursued this girl's rapist and abuser when I knew her, too inexperienced as a journalist in those days to get her a cover story and some exposure to alleviate the duress she lived under, though the violence of her partner affected us all. He vandalized the mailbox unit and killed her cat. This is the systemic stress I was exposed to by Presby in the inner city, to then be nearly ceaselessly harassed here in this unit, let alone what this poor woman had to be subjected to in order to survive (and I do not know that she did).

It also adds layers to our current preoccupation with complicity, to pun on my own correspondence (work at it, you'll get it). That Artie is clueless does not spare him, any more than more worldly experience, and mine was above average for disability norms, spares us from future injury, which time and again, cordons off the unfortuate low status primate. glee is not my thing, particularly, musical theater that unites, mocks, and at the same time articulates the conflict of difference, synthesizing everything into our knowledge of Kantian universals, but I have seen enough of it not to spare you from exercising your mind a little away from the willful necessity of self-interest.

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I was nonetheless pleased to figure out what I had been doing wrong with the kindle paperwhite, the curse of vapid technical literacy.