It was a breath of fresh air to read the anonymous Professor X’s essay in the June edition of Atlantic Monthly entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.”

In a nutshell, Prof. X debunks the notion that a college education is attainable for everyone, using his own experience teaching at both a community and private college. Of his (mostly nontraditional) students, he says, that “they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.”

It’s no wonder he decided to stay anonymous, though this is pure assumption on my part as to his reason(s).

Though I’ve only had the opportunity to teach undergraduates for three semesters, that’s enough time for me to be familiar with the double-bind many English teachers (and instructors in other subjects) find themselves in. On one hand, teachers feel responsible for guiding students as they develop critical thinking skills and reach the goals described in the course catalog. Many of us begin our semesters with a drop of idealism; it’s easy to hope your students will get just as excited about the material as you do. On the other hand, the day the semester starts, it’s quite clear which students even have the ability to reach those goals, much less be interested in them. Do we teach down to them, hoping that they’ll make leaps and bounds in fourteen weeks, or do we ignore them and adhere to our academic standard?

But the truth, at least as I perceive it, and as Professor X writes with a decidedly Marxist slant applied to academia, is that academic ability can be a crapshoot. I’d add that by the time a student reaches college age, the success of the student, more often than not, is already decided.

So much of it depends on the nature versus nurture equation. Are you able to study as the education establishment demands you do, and did you take advantage of that ability during your formative years? And then you add in the identity politics prevalent in whatever area of the country you came from. Did your family foster a healthy learning environment? Were they even able to, or did you have parents who needed to work double-shifts to make ends meet? Were you on your own?

Did you live in a good school district? If you did, was your instruction a good fit for you? What were the values in your community? Were you expected to sacrifice to help your family make ends meet or resist certain activities because that’s not what people in your neighborhood do? Or did you live in a family with a heavy emphasis on self-betterment and striving for a very hegemonic ideal of success?

All of Professor X’s points aside (of which he makes many — the article really is worth the read), what gave me relief was knowing that I wasn’t alone. Someone else noted the feelings of despair you take on when you teach students who really aren’t prepared to be in your class.

And, gol’dang it, it was nice to read this — for once! — about students who, I presume, aren’t products of deaf or mainstreaming programs and don’t struggle with any of the varying educational stereotypes we always find ourselves putting on deaf students. Suffice it to say, the development of cultural and academic literacy and critical thinking skills in the educational field really are universal issues that teachers, researchers, and parents everywhere worry about and continually aspire to improve:

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

There’s a plethora of things to praise about Hallmark’s Sweet Nothing in My Ear, the film centering on a deaf mother and hearing father’s custody hearing, which aired last night on CBS.

And at first glance, it seems as if the pervasive controversy over whether the deaf child, Adam, played capably by the charming Noah Valencia, should receive a cochlear implant will overshadow all of those wonderful aspects of this film.

SPOILER ALERT!

---

Take, for example, the ways in which an ensemble cast portrays the deaf community with much more nuance and more accuracy than a film in which there is only one deaf character, often a victim.There’s the Deaf Pride activist grandpa, played by Ed Waterstreet, the conflicted deaf teacher and mother, played by Marlee Matlin, the cochlear-implanted deaf mother, played by Shoshannah Stern, the hard-of-hearing pyschologist who both signs and speaks, played by Deanne Bray. In my opinion, though, all were overshadowed by the voice-of-reason deaf grandma played by Phyllis Frelich. And, lest I forget, there was a gorgeous scene beginning the movie in which deaf kids and hearing parents alike collaborate in a deaf school production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Or consider the ways in which the arguments over the cochlear implant reveal the emotional investment that people have in the issue. And the true gift of the way this film/play was written is that neither argument wins out decisively. Instead, we see that emotion clouds the judgment of each parent, concealing the truth that there is faulty logic in both arguments.

In one heated scene, Laura (Matlin) asks her husband Dan (Jeff Daniels, who studied signing for the role, and did quite well) something along the lines of, “What do I tell him, what do I say when he asks me why he wasn’t good enough the way he was, why we didn’t love him enough that we had to surgically alter him?!”

To which Dan shoots back, “What do I tell him when he asks me why I had a chance to help him hear, to help him have a better life, and I didn’t do anything?!”

To be sure, it’s a recipe for soap opera-worthy melodrama, layered on quite heavily throughout the film. Nonetheless, the subtlety with which the film tackles the the fragmentation of Dan and Laura’s relationship over politically-laden and personally-wraught conflicts is to be lauded.

While I wish we had more stories in the deaf literature and film canon centered somewhere else than on the pathology of hearing or on the “choice” to hear or speak, it’s important to acknowledge that the pervasiveness of this theme is about more than decibels and language decisions. It’s about the deaf community’s struggle for self-recognition, and about the hearing community’s campaign to maintain its’ systemic marginalizing practices without necessarily appearing ignorant.

At the turn of the century, Veditz’s film project to preserve sign language stemmed from the advent of the oral method, championed by people in agreement with A.G. Bell’s oral and eugenics policies. Later in the 20th century, technological advances and pervasive sim-com and SEE pedagogical practices continued to excite the deaf community’s anxiety that they weren’t being heard. And certainly, today’s heated discussions about people who support, choose, or live with a cochlear implant is a continuation of that tradition of anxiety over the deaf community’s continued lack of integration/recognition.

That’s why I like this movie so much. Though the cochlear implant is almost a character of its own, the film ends on a happy/sappy note as Laura and Dan realize that what’s best for Adam is for them to arrive at decisions like this together, rather than basing it on their own individual selfish desires. The last frame is of their intertwined hands, wedding bands prominent. Cue white middle-class heternormative hegemonic gooey-ness.

Yes, even technical and political liberties taken throughout the film can be forgiven, like the occasional tendency to cut a signing person’s hands out of the camera frame, or the tactic of voicing-over signed dialogue instead of subtitling it.

Certainly, we can explain that away over the anxiety hearing people (including the film producers? Oh, if only we could sit them down for coffee) have over the lack of sound when trying to access a story. And of course, sound played a central role, as shown when the soundtrack suddenly cut out whenever the camera switched to a deaf character’s viewpoint.

There’s one awesome scene during the custody hearing when a lawyer is interviewing one of the hearing grandparents, who has just finished saying that Adam knows she loves him. How, the lawyer asks? Befuddled for a split-second, she explains that her love is obviously apparent in her hugs and her facial expressions. But, the lawyer interjects again, how does he know what you mean “when you don’t even speak the same language?” Oh, snap!

I gotta admit that moment made me whip around, punch my partner in the shoulder, and say, “That, right there, would never happen in the cueing community!” So, clearly, we all come to this film with our own biases. Nonetheless, there’s a bunch of one-liners like this one that make this movie enjoyable. Another favorite is when Laura looks incredulously at Dan, and says, “He developed deafness, not cancer,” and walks away as if it were the stupidest conversation in the world.

The only extremely sour note, for me, was after the film had ended, and we didn’t know whether Adam would get an cochlear implant, and it didn’t really matter, because people in the story had learned more about each other and had grown from the experience. Kleenex and group-hug time, okay?

But then Hallmark plugged their magazine, and more emphatically, a story within entitled “Learning to Hear,” about a woman who’d gotten — you guessed it — a cochlear implant. The tagline?

After 47 years of near-silence, Stephanie Olson—like thousands of other deaf adults with a cochlear implant—cherishes the small daily miracles of a world with sound.

Talk about spoiling the moment and destroying the delicate balance the film had labored so hard to achieve. Sure, if you read the story, it’s not evil in and of itself. But plugging it right after the film draws the focus right back onto the cochlear implant and why someone should choose it, rather than on the human side of “Sweet Nothing” that transcends sound.

By the way, if you missed the film, no worries. The DVD version will be available in Hallmark Gold Crown Stores in May. Another classic deaf film with Ed Waterstreet and Phyllis Frelich, Love is Never Silent, will also be available there in June.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

As members of Costco, we’re constantly receiving “junk mail,” our favorite of which are the seasonal coupon books. Amidst bargains on toothpaste and cereal, we’ll see things we really really reeeeally want at really really reeeeally good prices. It’s porn for our checkbook’s salivary glands. He’ll want a flat-screen TV; I’ll want the leather armchairs and matching loveseat. And thus begin the budgeting/whine wars.

“It’s $200 off!”

“Yeah, 200 off two grand.”

“I know but…”

“I know, but nothing. SOMEDAY.”

“Oh, someday… *sigh*”

But the latest mailing, received yesterday, threw us for a loop. It was bright green on the outside with idyllic photos of a blue sky and a totally fun-looking lunch gathering and read, in typically annoying typeface (probably chosen by a graphic design intern), “Introducing a NEW technology at Costco.”

He thought this NEW technology was some new gadget for sale. I thought maybe they were streamlining their torturous checkout counters. But no. We opened it to find that the NEW technology was this instead:

Brite, a fashion-friendly hearing aid, suitable not necessarily for people, but for “hearing loss from mild to severe.” (A scanned photo of a larger section of the mailing is below.) Looking like an upside-down comma in technicolor, this hearing aid is being marketed as the antithesis of the big, beige and boring aids of yore.

Is it just me, or does this seem like an especially ingenuous marketing angle that’d work much, much better in the plus-size bra manufacturing industry? Yeah. Out with big beige and boring, and in with sexy, fuschia or grape, and… let’s face it… delightfully irreverent. How do you like ‘em apples, eh?!

Because the dang things have long been considered pathological medical supplies marking their wearers as different and devoid of individuality — hearing aids, that is, although I suppose you could say the same for bras — it’s indeed a breath of fresh air to see this happening, and happening outside the realm of grade schoolers’ confetti-studded earmolds or UK activist Tomato Lichy’s infamous conspicuously spiked aid worn at Deaf Way II.

I have a hard time believing that the general public with its tendency to fetishize and pathologize deaf people (”You mean Marlee Matlin can dance?!”) no matter how many times we demonstrate our humanity (”Read my hips!”) will actually embrace this NEW technology. After all, I thought the whole idea behind in-the-ear aids was to hide this “disability.” (Thanks go to Mr. Sandman for the link to the little exhibit on aids.)

Bernafon International, Brite’s manufacturer, is well aware of this “stigma” (their word, not mine), and says quite optimistically:

In creating brite, our designers were inspired by the shape and tactile characteristics of soft organic forms, with the aim of producing a hearing system that compliments the individual. Since no hearing instrument is ever completely invisible, Bernafon created a device that features an iconic shape drawn from nature, resulting in a distinctive yet discreet design.

For the user, the result is a highly advanced hearing system that can be worn with flair and confidence, both in terms of cosmetics and performance.

How sweet. But I’m a bit confused. Maybe I’m just way too used to years upon years of the pathological framing of my hearing loss (look out - deficit thinking red flag!), but does this mean I’m supposed to have fun now? Am I actually allowed to enjoy being deaf? “Brite helps you enjoy the sounds of life!” Neat-o. There is hope!

Ah… I can’t figure it out. If these aids that resemble, as the guy over at Hearing Mojo writes, “pieces of fruit, small vegetables, and candy,” are supposed “to match my personal lifestyle,” they better do a heck of a lot more than help me listen to the piano. Like help me pick out a new bra. And one that matches my non-beige individuality to boot.

(Photo below. Click to see in its entirety.)

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

In rape cases in close-knit communities, it often seems best to leave judgment to those charged with that task. This story out of New Jersey in which a 19-year-old deaf male is charged with the rape of a 16-year-old deaf female classmate at Mountain Lakes High School is probably no exception.

Still, it’s hard not to get angry after reading this story, even leaving aside the he-said, she-said qualities of this story, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the case itself.

For one, the deaf factor in this story is taking center stage. “Deaf” is the first word in the headline (usually, copy editors are advised to put the most important or eye-catching words first). The news of the rape charge is buried between descriptions of the defendant’s deafness and his “special class for the hearing-impaired” in the first paragraph alone. Whether this is a sensationalist tactic on the part of the journalist, or the de facto influence of those dealing with the case, I’m not sure. Either way, for those directly involved with the case, the issue is primarily deciding whether a rape happened and whether the defendant needs to be sentenced. Seems to me the journalist’s views on just how interesting Deaf people are have skewed the way this story needs to be told.

For another, the defendant’s lawyer has capitalized on the clear bias some people hold toward viewing deafness primarily as a pathological and isolating disability.

“He was an A-plus student. He is a poster boy for how to overcome handicaps,” said defense lawyer Paul Faugno. “What’s really very unfortunate is that this boy has overcome so much adversity in his life. To have this adversity presented to him now is really a shame.”

Certainly, in some places this mythology ends up being true (usually because the belief in deafness as a debilitating quality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy), and I don’t know enough about the school, the community, local culture, and/or the individual students involved to appropriately throw in a defense of deaf people as perfectly capable of living lives as variable as any other human life. But none of that is the issue here.

The issue, according to Faugno, is that an A-plus student is being faced with “adversity” in the shape of rape allegations. There’s a number of inferences you can draw here, none of them appropriate for him to make about a deaf defendant or about this particular case. One possible inference is that students who earn better grades are less likely to rape other students. Or that a deaf student who earns an A has overcome some insurmountable obstacle, represented, of course, by the fact that his ears don’t perform the way his hearing audience expects. Or a that a student who has to face criminal charges and be deaf at the same time is really a pitiful shame, a double tragedy. Regardless of his own understanding of his deaf client, it’s pretty easy to see what assumptions about his audiences’ views Faugno is relying on.

In The Record’s story, details about how the alleged assault happened and the defense’s response comes chronologically after all of this. Since this story is primarily formatted as a hard news story, it’s not hard to determine which information editors felt was more important to readers. Definitely not issues of consent, age, or the law, it seems.

And the kicker in this sob-story: Mommy’s playing sign language interpreter at the court hearing.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

By noon today, anyone in the Deaf community who hasn’t heard about it is either on a safari in a remote land without pager/internet access or in a coma.

Seven kids at MSSD have been sent home pending an investigation into what Dean Katherine A. Jankowski and DC police are calling a “serious incident” with “racial overtones” and others in less official positions are calling a “hate crime” or “attack.”

Whatever you call it, it’s clear that it’s about to blow up (or it already has) as the “threequel” to the Jena 6 story in which six black high school students were charged with attempted second degree murder of a white classmate. Protests subsequently erupted with participants taking the position that the punishments for the black students were unusually excessive and racist, especially in light of several racially charged incidents (including an “adolescent prank” in which white students hung three nooses, said by some to represent the Ku Klux Klan on a tree traditionally marked as “white” territory on school grounds) occurring before the alleged murder attempt in which participants received the proverbial slap on the wrist.

Last night CNN broke open the story of seven MSSD students (six white, one black) sent home after marking a fellow student (three guesses what color this student was) with swastikas and “KKK.” Gallaudet community members had already been apprised of the situation in a campus-wide e-mail from Jankowski earlier in the day (Edit: I’ve just found out MishkaZena carries the text of that e-mail).

According to Metro Police chief Cathy Lanier, “no charges have been filed and no names have been released” and the investigation is ongoing.

Puh-leeze.

There may be no legal charges filed, but these students — and, by extension, MSSD, and by even further extension, the entire Deaf community — are already carrying the full weight of a “hate crime” on their shoulders. And in a community this small, you bet your pretty hiney names have already been released. Maybe not to the press, but to community members for sure. I’ve already been apprised of two identities only moments after waking this morning, and I didn’t even ask for them. If I started asking around, I could have a roster pretty easily. But their names are quite beside the point.

Any investigation that ensues will only be caricatured and dwarfed by the speculation and the pontificating in which the people affected by these incidents will partake.

Take, for example, one blogger’s guess that perhaps the MSSD students didn’t understand the meanings of the symbols they scrawled onto their classmate’s skin with marker. I find this idea worth only fleeting consideration since actual usage of the symbols implies some sort of understanding. But it’s an idyllic thought, one that speaks a desire I share, to ascribe some sense of innocence to these people, even if only because of their youth.

Or, from the same blogger, the speculation that gaps in language and education in deaf students are partially responsible for the atrocity of their actions. As much as I want to dismiss this sentiment as heavy-handed hasty generalizations about all deaf people (which is why I say this isn’t an incident with impact limited to only MSSD), it’s impossible to deny that this is a thought that’ll go through many people’s heads, both ignorant and knowledgeable about the Deaf community. And so it’s a response that needs to be addressed, and addressed yesterday.

Another blogger has been quick to draw the connection between what he’s branded as the “Gally 6 or 7” and the Jena Six. But his interpretation isn’t one of shock at the racial atrocities committed; he’s taken a step back and looked at how the media rhetoric used is shaping our understanding of these events.

Though I resent the arbitrary connection to the Jena Six and I find his quickness to dismiss racism as a complication in the entire scenario problematic, I agree.

Hundreds have descended on Jena, LA, shouting for reparations for racial injustice. Down there, one crime has morphed into the figurehead for many, and the uncivil behavior exhibited by some small-town citizens has suddenly come to stand for the good ol’ Southen brand of hate. It seems no one’s interested in the real story behind the charges anymore, nor is anyone interested in listening to anyone less than famous. Those who showed up with good intentions, carrying signs calling for a rainbow-infused world, have bought into the subtle lie that peacemaking speeches and politicking constitute actual social action and that the violent transformation of these kids’ lives is worth the national spectacle.

And what surprises me about the stories, both in Louisiana and in DC, which seem to be almost certainly doomed to be cast as the slam-BAM chain-reaction proof of high school racism in the 21st century, is that people are actually shocked.

Um? Hello?

Wasn’t racism/diversity a hot-button issue on campus during last year’s presidential protests?

Wasn’t that long ago that the Super Bowl commercial featuring Terrell Owens being propositioned by Desperate Housewives star Nicolette Sheridan was denounced as scandalous and inappropriate. I’m pretty doubtful, in this age when people call the American Secretary of State’s boots “sexy” (or when they demean a person who’s achieved such a high ranking in the U.S. government on the basis of her gender, calling her Bush’s “office wife”), that those objections stemmed from the raunchy nature as much as it suggested cross-racial friendliness.

Being a citizen of the 21st century is no immunity from social mores and vices that existed in the 20th. They might have different feels and they may have different reporters extolling their stories, but they’re still here, lurking under the surface in ways we consume regularly without realizing it. As a citizenship, we’ve done more to brush it under the rug, perpetuate it behind closed doors, and call ourselves a happy family than to actually face our own demons.

As long as people believe the way to cure racism is to become blind to race and difference as opposed to embracing it, we’re taking one step forward and two hundred years and a mob scene back.

When this blindness takes the shape of calls for racial harmony without acknowledging the real gut-slinging that it’ll take to achieve that harmony, I get worried.

I get worried that people will forget that there are at least eight kids at MSSD in pursuit of a high school diploma whose lives hang in the balance here, figuratively. They have the opportunity to understand the role they play as young victims and perpetrators (whether there’s a difference, I’m not sure) of a socially-constructed existence in which they’re cast into characters that are either black or white, though few people want to talk about the script.

Odds are, however, that they’ll never be able to improvise this on their own in a way that they’ll be able to go on to life after high school with a lesson learned. No, they’ll be forever influenced by people who want to demonize and objectify them, body and soul, as pawns in this national struggle over the status quo.

They’ll be denied a chance to look at all the different little things that contributed to their role this one weekend: parental lessons, self-esteem, self-awareness, educational experiences, social experience, social conditioning, methods of school supervision, peer pressure, identity politics, socio-economic status and so on.

I’ve just read over what I’ve written as a reaction to this becoming a national story. Frankly, I find the things I’ve said overblown, effusive, and simplistic, especially as a white woman who knows next to nothing about what really went down in that MSSD dorm that weekend other than what I read online.

Overblown, effusive, and simplistic? Yes, I think so.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

VA Tech president Charles Steger has recently come under fire from parents and other critics who say he should have done more and been more accountable for the shootings on April 16. This criticism stems from the report released by the VA Governor Kaine-appointed review panel, which found among many other things, both good and bad, that “[s]enior university administrators, acting as the emergency Policy Group, failed to issue an all-campus notification about the WAJ killings until almost 2 hours had elapsed. University practice may have conflicted with written policies.

In response, Steger has refused to resign and even said that things could have been worse.

I am troubled by the idea that an officer of a university should be asked to resign because he could not prevent someone else from becoming a murderer or whatever else they expected him to pull out of his crystal ball. The whole thing smells too much of hurt and traumatized people seeking vengeance or closure of some sort.

But this sentiment is apparently popular among Virginians: The Bullwinkle blog gave him a knucklehead of the day award for refusing to say he’d have done anything differently if he could; laurelliberian seethes that VA taxpayers’ dollars go into a hefty salary for this man who waited two hours to tell the rest of the campus that fellow Hokies had been slain.

It took me awhile before I found a perspective in the blogosphere I agreed with: farewell2logic decries the scapegoating coming from grieving parents, calling it “dangerous and poorly thought out” in his/her post, “Revenge Costs Too Much:”

I feel bad for the families who lost children and spouses that day. I feel bad for the whole campus. They have to find a way to get past the trauma they all experienced and live their lives knowing they could have been one of the victims. BUT, is firing a university president who has also survived this and gained valuable, irreplaceable hands on experience dealing with a crisis a logical move? No workshop or drill can compare with the educational elements that came with living through that day while in a position of responsibility. Steger has gained that experience and knwoledge in the hardest way possible.

What bothers me is the language used by both Steger and the report: “might’ve,” “if,” “could’ve.” The desire for accountability and results and closure I empathize with. The appropriateness of Steger’s resignation for basically acting as an accomplice in the VA Tech murders? Not so much. I think he is just as correct as the report — things could’ve been better or worse. We don’t know.

Furthermore, the report notes a number of things that contributed to the tragedy — very few, if any, of which implicate Steger personally.

And therefore, although I don’t know if any direction is easily the right one in this situation, I don’t know if I agree his resignation is appropriate.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

It’s been a year since we first read about the NAD’s complaint against the Redskins. In a nutshell, complainants wanted access to announcements and rulings and that sort of thing during games.

This morning, the Washington Post printed an update on the complaint.

I’m fuzzy on what the update itself is, but basically the NAD says the Redskins franchise hasn’t done enough. The Redskins say they don’t know what more they can do, and no way in heck are these announcements going up on the JumboTron.

Read into the situation what you will.  I’m not familiar enough with the case to know what technological remedies have been accepted or rejected, and so as a Redskins fan I just have to sit, let the lawyers battle it out, and hope someday I’ll have the same game experience as everyone else.  But one thing I glean from the WaPo piece is that the Redskins would like to believe that asking for equal access for all paying fans, deaf or not, is woefully unjust.

David Donovan, attorney for the team, said in an interview last week that the team had gone above and beyond to accommodate deaf and hearing-impaired fans.

“At this point, we are scratching our heads,” Donovan said. “As far as we are concerned, we have done everything that we have been asked to do. There is no other stadium in the NFL or professional sports that has attempted to accommodate the hearing impaired as much as we do.”

The thing is, if they can accommodate hearing fans by maintaining a sound system and hiring the personnel to run it and send out these announcements, then why is making sure the same information is available visually going “above and beyond” for the “hearing impaired?” Why isn’t it instead a scenario of making sure all fans get what they paid for - a good ol’ game of gridiron and all the trappings that come with it?

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

Late last year, John F. Egbert (yes, the guy behind the protest of AG Bell and the Deaf Bilingual Coalition — see also here) self-published MindField, a novel about a mysterious strain of meningitis unleashed by terrorists that leaves untold numbers of Americans deaf.

I’d bought my copy several months ago, but waited until I had a free summer moment to read. Hearing about positive reviews (here and here) that spurred several friends to buy their copy and one friend who’d already dived into his, I moved it to the top of my to-read list. Now I wish I’d waited longer.

Perhaps the biggest letdown is being led to believe, even hope, that a deaf person writing about deaf people could actually do it: write a great American novel in which the complexity of the deaf community is finally fairly represented, or, at the very least, portrayed in an innovative manner. Sure, the premise alone is enough to lift those hopes sky-high.

By page six I wanted to throw the book in the trash.

Though usually I have a 100-page rule in which authors have a hundred pages with which to capture my attention, the spelling and grammar errors and typos alone were frustrating enough without the stilted and artificial dialogue style and the unimaginative wording that felt cribbed from a dozen other conspiracy theory novels and stitched together here.

There’s a reason for the editing process that publishing houses use; by choosing the self-publishing route, Egbert did himself and his audience a grave disservice here.

English 101 gripes aside, it does get easier to ignore these mistakes as one keeps reading. Usually that’s a good thing for people who really want to sit back and enjoy a good yarn. Unfortunately, for this reader, who desperately wanted to root for a deaf author, it just made the other weaknesses of the book more glaring.

As a story, the book’s substance is spread thin.

There is zero character development. Each character serves a minute purpose; that one became deaf, that one’s a mom of deaf kids, that one’s an audist, that one’s a clueless politician or militiaman, that one’s money-hungry. Further than that purpose, there’s nothing remarkable about any of the characters.

Egbert fails to dig into the psyche of any of his creations, even with Nathan, one of the apparent protagonists who eventually becomes deaf. The narration of his sudden deafness is filled with cliche and both does nothing to move the story forward and nothing to tell us about who he is as a person. Often, the things they say are only bits of information Egbert wants the reader to know but couldn’t seem to figure out a way to show (hence, the ASL 101 lecture one teacher of the deaf gives her mother-in-law).

Usually, when stories have little in the way of character development, that means the story is found in the plot or theme itself. But here as well, MindField is weak. In the first half or so, terrorists unleash meningitis; martial law ensues and deaf people are interned in camps with cute government-inspired labels. In the latter part, people, laymen and politicians both (including the new president of the US with the interesting surname: Jordan), try and figure out the “right” thing to do with this newly deafened population.

What exposition exists is abbreviated, and either sounds as if it’s cobbled together from tourist brochures of other countries (i.e. when an American embassy is described, baroque architecture is mentioned, but nothing about the character’s impressions of being in that setting) or as if chapters had been cribbed from pre-cold war history textbooks.

There are also entire chapters that do nothing for the story and should have been left out entirely (for example, chapter 40, in which a public relations guy shows the woman in charge of the camps posters used to advertise the camps; she chooses the one she likes and the guy thanks her and she congratulates him on a job well done. The relevance of the chapter is never revealed).

There are continuity mistakes as well; deaf people who want no part of internment camps manage to flee to Canada and Mexico even though the borders to both countries have been closed a few chapters before; entire characters are elaborately introduced and then never appear in the book again, their relevance unexplained. One character is said to call another “doctor” for the first time, when, in fact, he has rarely ever called him anything but.

Perhaps the biggest continuity mistake is dropping the terrorism thread altogether. A small town in Montana is targeted in order to contain the virus that deafens people. But if it’s really a terror attack, why contain it? Furthermore, is any place in America today really insular enough that such a containment is even plausible? That is, after all, what happened to the signing deaf population in Martha’s Vineyard and why the tuberculosis groom was such a newsworthy story earlier this year; Americans today are simply too mobile.

We very briefly meet the terrorists, but their motives are never explained, and the victim-mentality of the terrorized never appears throughout the book. Odd, since in a post 9-11 world, we should have plenty of emotional landscape available for mining.

Instead, the rest of the book attempts a scattered collage of amateur Deaf studies awkwardly meshed with Big Brother-type government infiltrated by evil oralists armed with rifles.

Emotional recognition software, in which people’s feelings can be visually read on their faces, appears repeatedly. But like the questions about the nature of bioterrorism, Egbert’s characters never answer the question of why this software is important. It’s a frustrating scenario of so tantalizingly close, and yet so far.

There is an annoying tendency to focus on the physical and technical descriptions of people and technology. Instead of finding out what a person’s heart is like or what someone else’s first impression might be, we find out he has brown hair and stands 5′10″.

A government official is finally given the budget he wants and lo and behold he receives “a high end MacIntosh, a thirty-inch-wide full color Epson printer, and a top-notch scanner; and camera equipment along with a T-2 high speed Internet connection.” In a novel of Tom Clancy proportions, these descriptions might serve a purpose; without them, the reader cannot hope to understand later developments of plot. But here in MindField, they’re superfluous.

One interesting note is that there is almost zero auditory description throughout the book. This is kind of intriguing, since it was, after all, written by a deaf person. Whether thats an intentional omission or an unconscious oversight, I don’t know, but considering the book is ostensibly geared toward a paradigm shift in the minds of hearing readers, I question the wisdom of that omission. It could even have been fertile ground for a little sensory play in terms of the one character who went deaf later in the story.

Perhaps the best way to read this text is as a philosophical treatise on deafness in the vehicle of fiction. Egbert’s best points come out here: Halley Weber, the government official in charge of education whose daughter is hard of hearing wavers over whether her choice of oral education and cochlear implant (which wasn’t all that successful) is the right one, and further, whether the plan she outlines for the three million newly deaf Americans is appropriate. Though Egbert doesn’t explore that as much as he could have, those portions of the story are easily the strongest.

Unfortunately, instead of turning this into a human suspense novel at this point (which is something the best thriller novels do), Egbert veers toward the conspiracy theory thread, portraying Halley as a helpless brainwashed victim of the corporate powermongers who lead AG Bell.

In fact, this is where the story could have used some focus or some consistent purpose; in the epilogue and in the author’s notes, the overall intent of the book is to purportedly serve as a tipping point (allusion definitely intended - the Gladwell influence is too heavy to miss) through which the hearing world will understand the barriers they have placed in the way of deaf people, who are actually just fine and not deformed, thank you very much.

But instead of continuing this subversive intent through human stories (there is no “always been deaf” character in the story, much to my disappointment), the book ends up a thinly veiled assault on what is sometimes esoterically called “the organization” and, at other times, explicitly named as the AG Bell organization.

A well-written anti-AG Bell narrative would have been interesting to read; this ends up being oversimplified argument against oralism and an unjustified plea that sign language is a “visual symphony” and children deserve it. The term “unjustified” doesn’t mean I disagree — in fact, there were many moments when I almost rooted for the anti-oralist characters downright. It just means Egbert barely glossed over any explanation of why oralism-only is a bad idea and focused his attentions on painting AG Bell and its supporters as evil archetypes.

For a book that’s supposed to spread understanding in the minds of clueless hearing readers, that was a severe misstep. Now they have no reason to understand why oralism-only isn’t always a great idea, and they do have reason to think deaf people, even the ones intelligent enough to write a book, are incapable of making a reasoned or convincing argument.

For deaf readers, that’s just fuel for the divisive fire we find among factions within the deaf community; ironically there is a chapter where a pro-ASL character rails about the inability of the deaf community to represent a united front about what is best for deaf children and people everywhere.

The assault on AG Bell notwithstanding, there’s just too much in this book, not just in terms of deaf studies, but also in terms of continuity and plausibility that undermines its noble intent:

• The explanation of ASL is linguistically questionable,
• the neuroscience theory repeatedly espoused within is also questionable (one character recommends learning ASL underwater to shut out auditory input — because the brain apparently can only focus on one sensory input at a time, learning is facilitated this way. This reasoning is both untrue and inadvertently supports AG Bell/AudioVerbal’s justification for their auditory-only methods.)
• The deaf experience is not realistically portrayed (Egbert encourages “more dramatic lip movements” for easier lipreading, for example. Or take, for instance, the hearing parent who suddenly says he regrets his decision to implant his deaf child. Aside from being a rarity - if such an instance even exists - the hearing parent never fully explains why implants are so horrible. Such a miraculous change of mind deserves some explanation, no?).
• The math doesn’t add up; apparently only three million Americans are deafened, a mere fraction of the number that already exist today. Yet this causes concern about national economy and security, not to mention widespread panic and martial law. The reasons for these anxieties are never fully explained.

In sum, there’s zero complexity, but tons of unnecessary rhetorical flourishes, inconsistency, and bias. Even the evil oralists/audists are not given a chance to show their human depravity; authorial interventions and an inability to show instead of tell prevent this from happening.

Perhaps the greatest irony about this book that is supposed to teach the world that there is no essential difference between deaf and hearing people is that it polarizes the difference even more.

Egbert does make a valiant attempt; this is why I’m saddened by this book more than I’m angry about the waste of my book money. Early in the book, he writes one beautiful line that I think is worth sharing:

Ultimately, the only thing that ensures freedom is unhindered communication.

Funnily enough, that line appears in the midst of a discussion about appropriate government control, and has nothing to do with deaf people. My hopes for the success of this book flared briefly after reading that.

Nevertheless, instead of staying focused on this one concept throughout the book, the story spazzes in many different directions, clearly being influenced by last fall’s Gallaudet protests, and at one point directly referencing them in the present tense, an odd anachronism in a book that’s supposed to be set in 2010.

Egbert, in several places, confuses the difference between deaf and hearing with the same difference between humanity and animal that many hearing people have historically “observed” about deaf people. In this sense, he fails to create a paradigm shift in MindField and instead and just writes a book that says, “Yo, hearing people. Right back at ya.”

The grossest example of this elision comes, again, from Nate, the newly-deafened character, towards the end of the book. As he waxes poetic about how wonderful it is to be deafened, he wonders, “Were the deaf always more intuitive, more compassionate than those who could hear?”

Apparently not.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

When I was a kid, I thought Sesame Street was the dumbest thing on earth. It was captioned, but uncaptioned She Ra and He-man were way cool in comparison. Rainbow Brite kicked some serious Elmo butt. The Smurfs, whom I’d sometimes, sometimes not, catch captioned, were also way up there on the cool scale.

It wasn’t until I became a mother that I started loving PBS again for its edutainment programs… except for Sesame Street. Fetch, Hacker, DragonTales — you name it, the kid and I watch together. Even the Teletubbies had the potential to start a vaccuuming rave in my living room. Whoo-hoo — partay with La-La and Po! They, with the exception of the Purple-Idiotdino-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, were all rock stars. Every single one of them.

Except for the friends on Sesame Street. I could never figure it out - they were neat. They were imaginative. They were educational. But still, I always thought they were just socially retarded. More so, even, than myself.

Then one day, when I watched after my shower and had my hearing aids in, I had my Eureka! moment.

The captions were seriously truncated versions of the actual on-screen dialogue. For example,

“Oh, no! The TV won’t work! How are we gonna watch it?”

when captioned, might become:

–The TV is broken!–

Line after line after line, the captioning on Sesame Street presented to me, a Deaf mom watching with her Deaf daughter, a watered-down, unentertaining, uninformative, and frustratingly exclusive program that the rest of the world went ga-ga over for its enrichment value.

It is enriching enough, sure — hearing kids benefit from hearing Cookie Monster say “Balloon! Ba. Loon! Balloon no start with F! Me eat Balloon cookie! Cookie mine! HAHAHA *sounds of ravenous gobbling*” The language play inherent in that dialogue is fun and sneakily educational.

But deaf kids like me when I was younger and my daughter now get dumbed down and robbed of the same language play by the boring-in-comparison –“Balloon” doesn’t start with F! I will eat the cookie–. Coming from a show that regularly features deaf kids, this was a huge disappointment. Furthermore, it was a symptom of differing perspectives on what constitutes “communication access,” equal or not.

And that is part of why I’m so honored to be one of the judges for the Equal Communication Access blogging/vlogging contest.

It’s one of the latest evolutions of a grassroots campaign started by Jeanette Johnson, aka DeafPundit to those who frequent the deaf blogosphere. The name of it, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. And the contest is being sprearheaded by Virginia L. Beach aka Osh or Ocean, owner of the Deaf Pagan Crossroads.

You can check out the description, rules, and *koff koff* judges’ bios here.

For a blogging example of what an entry might look like, check out Osh’s “What Equal Communication Access Means to Me.” A little preview:

My favorite pizza joint had me come in and explain relay services to its employees so they would understand how to take phone calls from Deaf customers. Now when I get a midnight craving for their EBA Special (Everything But Anchovies, hold the olives and add extra cheese!) all I have to do is dial VRS and place an order…Presto! Tummy growlings resolved!

That’s Equal Communication Access.

Vereee cool. There’s five categories in this contest (blog, vlog, international, hearing friend, and video), and the one I’m most excited about is the video category. Instead of inserting commentary into a blog or vlog, I’m hoping to see creative entries in this category, which could really be just about anything as long as it’s in a video.

So enter. Or just watch/read. And comment. And remember:

Support Equal Communication Access.

Or Cookie Monster will come eat you. BWAHAHA!

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.

Just finished reading Tom Perotta’s Little Children, now made famous by the movie with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson. Though it was entertaining, it earned three out of five stars for triteness. The book was recommended to me a couple years ago by a friend known for eclectic tastes. I should’ve known - he’s also a rabid Desperate Housewives fan.

But one thing I noted with a sardonic grin was the way a gaggle of suburban wives in the novel were so verklempt with a stay-at-home dad who made periodic appearances at their playground.

(Yes, I actually used the word verklempt. Shush.)

You know what they called him? “The Prom King.”

They called him that because he was hot. Well, not just hot, but so hot that none of them could gather up the ovaries and say, “Hi. I’m Marsha. And you?”

So instead of using his actual name, for weeks they gossiped among themselves about the object of their suburban desire. In this situation, it makes sense. Calling him the Prom King says more about them than it does him.

But what that did for me was remind me of all the times I’ve done the same thing to people around me, maybe because I didn’t catch their names through lipreading, or maybe purely for the fun of it.

For example, there’s a woman at our gym who constantly meets clients with a latte in hand. We’ve talked to her a couple of times, and she stopped to give me a pointer one day. Usually, though, we’re on a strictly “hey, g’morning” basis. And somehow she’s worked herself into our daily vocabulary: “Oh, Coffee Trainer was at the gym again this morning. She says hi.”

She’s not the only victim of my glibness.

“Candyman” used to be the guy on the train who handed out candy on Fridays.

“Hurry-Up Woman” is kinda unimaginative, I guess. But, dang, it fit the blur that rushed past us every morning.

“Gus” is the white, rotund, and cranky bus driver we see sometimes.

“Pervert Fudd” is the guy who we see around town with a woman we know for a fact not to be his wife. I think someone told us his real name was Elmer?

Kind of reminds me of stories I used to hear about older deafies enjoying uncaptioned TV because they could make up their own stories. Often, when shows were re-aired with captions, they were crestfallen to find out the real McCoy was incredibly inane in comparison to their own improvised plots.

I know I’d be torn to find out “Coffee Trainer’s” real name isn’t Mochalatta but Mary.

Sometimes I view this tendency as a sort of karmic retribution for every time I’ve ever been called “that… the, the… uh, that deaf girl.”

When I’m self-indulgent, I call it another of my idiosyncrasies.

When I’m being more mature or nerdy, I view it as a coping strategy for someone who needs language to describe the people she sees.

But in all honesty, maybe I’m just being lazy.

—
© Copyrighted material. This article cannot be copied, reproduced or redistributed without the express written consent of the author. As with every blog on this website, this blog does not reflect the opinion of DeafDC.com.