Flushed Cries of Distress

 I am not Howard Stern." --Charlie Rose, in a post operative interview with Terry Gross, a preemptive strike indicating how much we all owe Howard Stern 

As my follower Jason Dorwart is aware, sexual pride is important in the progressive disabled community. I’ve written about it in somewhat explicit fashion in earlier years, nor am I the only formerly indoctrinated and embittered outcast to be censored in search and have page views suppressed because of it. Far more confident paraplegic females have had instructional videos removed from You Tube by Google over the issue, and in extending an olive branch to ableism, the dowager was sympathetic. Reading the narratives of shared experience takes us only so far, and whereas sexual activity may leave certain women ambivalent, others may be happy in pushing boundaries. Harassment and hostile environment is the flip side of this coin, and having been through these trials, my viewers may think I’d find the scoop by Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain commendable. Eight testimonials illustrate a pattern of conduct similar to those which besieged Cosby into an opaque court case, and Rose, like other lesser PBS titans, stayed at the top of his game far past Medicare eligibility. He was bound to be forced into retirement at some point, given that his facial features in a live interview setting occasionally cast a ghoulish aspect to his profile.

What is seemingly intractable, however, is the incongruity of his cultural and political excellence juxtaposed against behavior we more readily expect to emanate out of the Playboy mansion. From my point of view, it is less about power, in Rebecca Traister’s micro-post, and more about a legacy of excellence tarnished less by the heinous aspects and more by the hideousness foisted on all of us by entropy. Look at everything he has done to explore issues with his audience, his lengthy segments taking psychiatric medical model treats seriously, even with enthusiasm by his guests. Rose is a robust believer in cooperative treatment in a way the spastic dowager is not, dissecting the clinical aspects of his heart disease with more than one eminent cardiologist, in an envious lust to hang on to the quality of his life. He channeled the outrage felt by the public over the Iraq war to joust with Donald Rumsfeld over the destruction of a regime and a society which later devolved under Obama into a puppet state. Judy Woodruff commended him on his scoop with Assad when the Syrian theatre was hot. There are too many probative conversations to list which amount to a daunting legacy. If it seems I am coming perilously close to advocating a grin and bear it approach, which is what my humiliation has amounted to since 1999-- no, not quite. I'm merely suggesting, much as with Roman Polanski, that being the best at something shouldn't be entirely forgotten, and though there is a rush to being a journalist on deadline which extended my lifeline to September 2017, I'm increasingly unhappy with The Washington Post anointing itself as the moral arbiter of feminine esteem. Would I have broken this story, unleashing the #MeToo fury in the public square? What I can say is this: I would have waited to give Rose the benefit of the doubt. We should rehabilitate and honor that ego, whether or not he considers his cardiac issues debilitating, or merely chronic.

Eschatological Targets

"I wouldn't know where to find such people." Tom Wilkinson.

When Howard Stern had syndication currency, simulcast from his New York station to WYSP, he claimed, in less than scintillating fashion, that black authors wrote to capitalize on the white guilt market, and I probably believe that about Morrison's work, though I am not entirely certain about Beloved in particular, like a snake in the grass, choking on marshmallow. Did she write it for the chimera of canonization? For herself? For a paucity of comparison to the estimated 4 million lives taken in the division of the Korean peninsula?

We read fictional narratives for many reasons, the most prevalent being an enjoyment of satire, or the need to escape ourselves. What Morrison has provoked in me is guilt, guilt not for her characters, some so abused, so wretched, that they snap into a madness, pleasure and horror intermingled, but guilt in my own identification with her bleak exposition. There is nothing wrong with softening the toughness in her courageousness in being explicit, as she does in Beloved. It has the standard ironical undercurrents, humorous interludes, comparisons to Salman Rushdie's ending of The Satanic Verses, descending into the escape hatch of schizophrenia, but the hymnal wail of Morrison's communal voice of expiation was too overly lavish. It led to a regurgitation of my sympathies. This doesn't mean I resent Toni the way I resent Oprah's rise as America's shadow empress, but a cop out is still a cop out, though it would be too much to feel the grand dame implicitly modulated her tone for a Danny Glover/Winfrey deal.

I do not know the truth about myself anymore. Jimmi Shrode cut me socially first because I was having an emotional breakdown over what Linda did to me. He had been my friend (supposedly), but refused to understand what he and Erik von Schmetterling did was wrong, and placed honest applicants at a disadvantage. Since Philadelphia ADAPT, as a whole, cannot rectify its moral turpitude, I cannot reengage the group. I have absolutely no intimacy in my life, not a soul to speak to who cares about me. Think about that, how hard it has been for me while Linda still buses into work, has her social extensions and a paycheck, and I can't leave the building where so many of her consumers still traffic in and out of her domain. Both the staff who knew me and the staff who didn't say "I transferred your case file." Why don't we close your case file?

Are you that relegated?