Corporate Tolerances

Tiffiny, your post about Dr. Tepper and his instructional video points to why I have stopped supporting New Mobility, aside from my rift with your managing editor Josie, whose lesbianism is so sacrosanct that it is holier than my prospective dinner date with an Argentine journalist, but of course, she has rank on you so what can I expect you to say? 

What I can tell you is that advocacy involves risk, and you do not really examine the first amendment issues you raise in relation to consumer needs for tactical advice, corporate censorship, and public access to digital environments. I do not have a vertebrae fracture. My spinal cord is intact, and I am able to feel sensation in my vagina; I am also fifty one years old, and the issue of constant sexual assertion becomes strident after half a century of listening to it. Sexual liberalism has binary positives and negatives. It leads to a certain degree of narcissistic selfishness, and indeed, led you to drop the ball on the larger issue of public access, prurient interests versus access to expert advice to relieve frustration or overcome obstacles. Lionel Trilling, a literary critic of stature, one whom I'd wager would draw a blank in your academic experience, raises his voice to say Henry James doesn't presume the poor to be stupid.

New Mobility presumes that all wheelchair users care about is sex, medical equipment, the rhetorical conveyance of legal equality without being honest about the reality many of us face, and inclusion over viable and workable matriculation policies. Tim Gilmer's long winded personal article about his journey to emotional stability doesn't interest me, not in a glossy that purports to be of use. This does not mean cerebral palsy isn't a reality in my life, and that I do not have flaws, one being honest about my hatreds. I shall never forgive Josie, and consider her nothing more than a pedestrian hypocrite who needs a new experience, like turning her crucifix into a vibrator. She took the pleasure of a personal intrigue away from me. This shall not be forgiven. The reality of my quadriplegia, however, does offer perspectives that lead to befuddlement. Why is is such a precious thing to conquer certain geological formations in dangerous isothermic patterns that could have been avoided? True, I could drop dead from not easing up on the buttock with the pressure sore, but this is the difference between unfortunate circumstance and manufactured tragedy. Elucidate your issues with more focus. That is what I strove for in my 2004 feature that Tim published before he dropped me without explanation. Linda Dezenski, my criminally liable former supervisor, emailed her group that we were "like a second family."

That analogy is all but equivalent to a stake in my heart, with how many betrayals I have had to absorb.

The Imagined Meritocracy, Rosy Muniment

Everyone has their own views on James. To Ellen Moody he was an aggressive lover of other men; to Sheldon Novick he was coy about homosexual practices. Others believe he was a tortured celibate; this also applies to the lens we bring to the text.-- the spastic dowager

When I raised my voice in transmission to Gregory Zacharias about my weariness in the role of the good lieutenant, perhaps I should have paused to reflect on why I always find myself in the uniform. I have been trying to revise, simply revise, a poem of mine which I like. It sits in my strongest manuscript which I am attempting to take out of moth balls and put it back into the contest circuit. Since the title of the poem is appropriate to cite in anticipation of this evening's spectacle, I will feed it to you: "A Festive Independence". Do you see what the immediacy of the digital age has done to those of us who had some sense of tranquility before it? As a member of the Henry James Society, until the early summer of 2014, I am now coddling the aggrieved ego of the non academic acolyte, and have done so in an attempted sympathy, with doubts in the back of my mind as to whether or not I didn't make things worse. I take no quarrel with Lionel Trilling's attempted rescue of The Princess Casamassima. Lionel's knowledge illuminates Henry's motives for the novel, but here, James's masterful ambiguity fails him, because anarchy is not amendable to the qualities of the fairy tale. Hyacinth is almost a protean transvestite for his beauty, and little convincing as the man in the middle between zealotry and aesthetic appreciation, and yet I think of James at his most invested in his middle years, his most cynical, trying to keep his creations, the doll-like Rosy, from "blowing her brains out." This is how the narrator leaves the poor girl, dreaming of aristocratic finesse and their vivid estates. Yet James did disability cultural a favor by pitting Rosy in a dialogical contest with the fabled Tiny Tim, because we have two extremes on the spectrum, pity, and the tyranny of guilt.

Every time I reveal that cerebral palsy necessitates dependence on my power chair, and that I am one of those in poverty who Henry James varnishes in semi-gloss, affluent white males, either in the vigor of their public roles, (Niall Ferguson), or in looking to me for assertive sympathy, convey the same sentiments, the same sorrow for my *situation*. Perhaps I am better off that Greg assumes the posture that I'm a disruptive force.

This certainly applies to Edward Snowden's mortal fear. Dana balances the bone stuck in my throat, and though I rarely agree with any columnists opinion in its entirety, Milbank touches upon the crux of the problem. Snowden's paranoia about Obama is overblown; Snowden's cowardice flies in the face of the gravity of his actions. Outsourcing security clearances to USIS represents the real problem, more so than whether or not his ass is fried. I'd contend, even if Snowden evades the executive branch for the time being, his ass is fried anyway, but you cannot run the CIA on absolutist free market models.