Neurologist's Spike Protein

 

Do you have a cigarette?

This intrepid, if also embittered, disability journalist confesses she used to be a regular viewer of LA Law, as lightweight, cornball, old fashioned serial television. Although it slipped my mind until I searched the recall, it was here on this series that Jimmy Smits entered into his fleeting generational reign as the American Adonis, and here too that Corbin Bernsen and Blair Underwood made their initial impressions; my nostalgia, however, is particularly kind to Alan Rachins as Douglas Brackman, who formed part of the comic relief contingent. Towards the end of the series run, it was also Rachins, digesting the wrongful termination of a transgendered woman, through the show runners, who made an ingenious argument about women and body enhancement, one that seemingly collapsed gender reassignment as little more than enhanced cosmetic surgery. It is a difficult argument to refute weighed against the generational juxtaposition Brackman’s character represents, in the era just before Suits and The Good Wife.

But what recalled Noah’s Bark to me was the synchronized nature of the fictional client’s Tourette’s Syndrome as almost necessarily lending itself before the audience to the correction of social justice Brackman attempts, and then fails to wage. Concealing a condition like Tourette’s is difficult, and Brackman is called on it. The client reveals the truth, Brackman is threatened with discipline, and Steven Bochco’s conscience can sleep well at night for matriculated classes. The disabled of Riverside Senior apartments aren’t the matriculated class, and Morton’s Tourette’s is more the threatening disruption of the automaton, like the liminal figure of Jerry in Master’s of Science Fiction. This Saturday I had the distinct privilege of seeing Morton, his bouncing gait like that of a bumblebee, pacing the sidewalk adjacent to the building, with excrement on his naked toes. It was a rare moment of intervention for me, noting in bitterness that Trudy Richardson, she herself the equally afflicted lupus administrator, tortured me, with Caucasian acquiescence, for significantly less, in terms of infractions.  In letterhead after letterhead, Riverside trumpets how concerned Trudy is for the Negro Urban League women who masquerade their propriety as virtue. Nothing could be further from the truth when public health experts do not have even basic solutions for forcibly herding people with chronic conditions together in to evolving super toxins in our vapor heated indoor air.

I follow a former Planned Parenthood director named Abby Johnson on social media. She and I perhaps share a similar process of having turned rightward after having engaged our careers in the progressive limelight of Steven Bochco’s desire for universal alleviation, but she is as wrong about the fringe and its feral aspects as Bochco is in his: Morton is an aggressive imbecile, no more, no less, incapable of survival through utility. Difficult as it might be to envision how he would have fared in a pre-industrial era, the 21^st century can no longer afford his inability to intersect, just as it can’t afford the sum total of my horrific failure in abridgement with the ambulatory world.