Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

And, since I'm an American by birth and habit, I suppose I should say something on the matter.

So here are the official lyrics to the chorus of "Stars and Stripes Forever," by John Phillip Sousa (1888):

(quote)
CHORUS: Hurrah for the flag of the free,
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The Banner of the Right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor,
Proclaim'd as they march'd to the fray,
That by their might, And by their right,
It waves forever!
(unquote)

But all that war and Might-Makes-Right nonsense isn't very pro-fun at all, so I hereby use this excuse to post the alternative lyrics to the same melody, which I've seen credited to Fred Allen (but also others) (1927 [?]):

(quote)
Be kind to your web-footed friends,
For the duck may be somebody's mother:
Be kind to the denizens of the swamp.
Where the weather is cool and damp

Be kind to your old umbrella,
For some day it may be under the weather,
Be kind to your old pair of shoes.

Be kind to your fur-bearing friends,
For a skunk may be somebody's brother-;
Be kind to your friends with the stripe.
(unquote)

Yes, I noticed that the second and third verses seem to be missing a final line, too. I just posted, asking about that at the Mudcat forum.

---

*Even though, technically, we didn't actually sign the peace treaty establishing our internationally recognized sovreignty until September 3, 1783 -- and the treaty wasn't actually ratified by our Congress until January 14, 1784. So July 4th isn't so much as the anniversary of our nation's birth as it is its conception. ...But we're too puritanical a society to speak about that out loud.

This started with a simple question from trouble:

(quote)

In my experience (such as it is), I've only heard the term "differently-abled" used recently by people who don't know anyone with a disability. (And I mean in the past couple of years.)

What is your experience?

(unquote)

This prompted yours truly to wonder aloud whether any of us count ourselves as "people we know who are ____" (It's a such a common motif in folklore, it has its own catagory: "The fool never counts himself"). And I wrote:

(quote)
(From capriuni: I was thinking about this, the other day. All my life, I've written fantasy stories (well, all right, not all my life -- I didn't start until I was about 4 or 5). And even though I've had a strong desire to see disabled characters in my fiction, I've never been able to write any without being terribly self conscious.

It didn't occur to me until just the other day -- it's because I base my characters on the people I see around me, rather than on myself. And being a member of the first generation of kids to be mainstreamed in school, I was always the only kid in my class in a wheelchair. The only times I saw other kids with disabilities is when I'd go to the hospital for surgery or outpatient PT, and neither of those situations are condusive to thinking like a protagonist, if you know what I mean.
(unquote)

Then lindra jumped in. She wrote: (quote)

I agree with this comment. I feel the same self-consciousness! It just feels strange to write people like yourself as disabled protagonists. There's this cultural sense of 'oh, no, I didn't mean you' that sort of filters into everything.(unquote)

And the intellectual ping-pong game bagan. We've been going back and forth on this topic for four days straight, now, filling up poor trouble's inbox, while the text boxes get skinnier and skinnier to the point of ridiculousness.

And lindra has been bringing up many awesome points about the intersectionality of all sorts of privilege, and how that effects who we can accept to be the heroes of our stories, that I thought a fair number on LiveJournal friends list would also be interested.

So here's the conversation so far, behind the cut:

( Long conversation is long (so tangents have been edited out*); each new comment is prefaced with the account name of the person who's writing )

[end of this conversation, so far, to be continued, probably]

*the full conversation thread is here, including discussions of different sign languages, and the learning of the same

WTF, LJ? a screen capture of what I found when I tried to click on LiveJournal's homepage link, showing a completely blank web page except for a single LiveJouranal icon of a man's face with the hand-written caption "Al" and a hand-drawn heart.

---

This is what I saw (repeatedly) when I tried to click on LJ's homepage, right now. Is such wierdness happening to anyone else, or is it just me? Do you think this is a fluke? or a deliberate attack?

( Please Don't Think It's Funny -- (c) 1968, Fred Rogers )

This. yeah.

Counterpoint to a nightmare A stylized green, fern-like plant against a light, soft, backdrop of flowing, multi-colored, curvilinear forms that converge toward a point slighty below the center of the image.

Most of the time, when I decide to honor the memory of a powerful dream, I try my best to commemorate an image from it directly. But my last set of dreams were so horrible, I felt like the only sane thing for me to do was go in an entirely opposite direction, and go for something full of warmth and light and softness, and affirmation of life.

I did not intend, when I started out, to fill my picture with thinnly disguised phalluses, but the subconscious will have its way...

Last week, my Davros and the Daleks (sounds like a dodgy pop rock band, no?) thread reignited. 'Twas (and 'tis) good. But it left my brain too busy to come up with a new discussion.

But I thought I'd get back to it, today. My topic was going to be:

Yes, indeed, the concept of "Disability" is a social construct, just as "race" is a social construct.

I was planning on starting early, today, and writing something clever, and tying it in, somehow, to how Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson broke the news cycle. But I had to wait for a phone call, so I stayed offline, and couldn't gather links and quotes and examples. So now it's late. And the tempurature-humidity index for today is officially "Ridiculous." And I'm feeling too "meh" to write anything clever.

So I will leave you with this link:
Report: 1 in 5 Americans Have a Disability(*, +, ^)

And summarize the broad-strokes information in that report thusly:

If you are between 18 and 44 years old: You have better than 1 in 10 chance of being disabled.

If you are between the ages of of 45 and 64 years old: You have almost a 1 in 4 chance of being disabled.

If you are lucky enough to live past 65: You have better than a 50/50 chance of being disabled.

And finally, I'll leave you to comtemplate, in the face of these numbers, what sort of accommodations (and representations in the media) we might consider "normal."

---

*From the Centers of Disease Control, which, according to the report, many consider to be overly conservative in their estimates.

+Culled from U.S. Census Data, and thus does not include all the young, permenantly, injured soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

^I haven't looked for stats from other industrialized nations, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were more or less the same as America's stats.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Most of this is taken from a comment to trouble, but with some stuff added, and other stuff removed:

Reason One: This weekend, as a project (as yet uncompleted), I decided to collect various examples of local cities' "name logos;" I was surfing around the cities official webpages, and snagging the .jpgs.

Anyway, on Virginia Beach's homepage was the announcement that two branches of their public library would be temporarially closed. At first, my heart sank, thinking: "Economic Trouble!" But that wasn't it at all.

They were closing the branches for one weekend, to replace the old circulation desks with shiny new ones that are ADA*-compliant!


Reason Two: Today, while I was visiting my own home-branch library, I had the opportunity to point out to one of the librarians that people were leaving those rolling step-stools in the aisles, making it hard for wheelchair users to navigate. I suggested a few friendly signs to remind patrons to return the stools to the end of the aisles when they were finished with them.

And she thought that was a very good idea, and she would pass the suggestion on to the woman who makes all the library signs. She said she'd never thought about that before, but of course that made it harder for me, and I shouldn't have to deal with it.

Awareness Win!!

Reason Three: The books I can nao haz:

The Artemis Fowl Files, by Eoin Colfer.

I saw posters for some of these books near the (what used to be) the Y.A. section, and remembered hearing an interview with the author on NPR. I didn't remember what the author had said, but I did remember putting the series in my mental "I want to read that!" file. Only. The YA section wasn't the Y.A. section anymore -- they're still reorganizing the library, and today was the day to move the Y.A. books. They'd already shelved F-
Z, but the first half of the fiction section was still on the carts (It was when the librian was retrieving the Artemis Fowl books from the book cart that I mentioned the idea of friendly, helpful signs).

Anyway, I've read the first chapter of the first novella in the volume, and apparently, the series is about fairy land as imagined if fairy land is now as technological and urban as Modernday Earth. I like it very much, so far.

Sun Dancing: A Vision of Medieval Ireland, by Geoffrey Moorehouse. This one is a complete blank. I got it because I thought maybe I should just get out of my comfort zone of genres I know I like. I picked it up because I liked the font in the title. It turns out, reading the informantion on the flyleaf, that it's an historical novel about Early Christianity. That's why I put it in my bookbag, instead of back on the shelf.

Emily the Strange: Lost, Dark & Bored (Volume 1), created by Bob Reger, Illustrated by Buzz Parker, Written by Bob Reger et al. This was from the Graphic Novel section, though it really seems to be more a graphic anthology of short stories. The physical condition of the volume is poor to bad (pages are tattered and falling out, but so far, they seem to be all there.

This is another one I know nothing about, but decided to borrow because I want to branch out and become more comfortable with the literary form, and also, I was drawn to the cover.

---

*That's the Americans with Disabilities Act (realizes not everyone reading this necessarily knows that)

To explain, a snippet of something I said to spiralsheep, in a comment thread, earlier:

(quote) So, in these past few weeks, I've been fixated on the idea of individual daleks as individual people inside their casings -- do they sometimes leave them and transfer to another, when maintainance needs to be done, or they just need a break? And how individual are they? Are there dalek artists, and poets? Musicians? Mathematicians? Engineers?

Could there be a renegade dalek, who steals a SIDRAT, and makes a break for it, to wander the Time-Space Continuum alone? And what would happen if renegade dalek and renegade Timelord crossed paths? How would the lone (And thus vulnerable) dalek code his/her/its individuality so Timelord wouldn't simply attack it on sight? How do daleks imagine the concept of personhood, anyway? (unquote)

But really, it's just that the image of a dalek in big, pink, fuzzy bunny ears has cemented itself in my brain. And, so help me, it won't leave.

I was originally going to make this a 600 X 600 pixel picture (or so), with a lot more detail. But I psyched myself out. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it. I just kinda made it for the sake of making it. If you want it, snag it. Credit would be nice.

P.S.: And if you like this idea, but think you can do a better job, by all means -- go for it!

If I had to pick one image, and one image only, to communicate what my mundane, off-line life looks like, it would be this one:

Chesapeake logo This logo appears on all city-sponsored websites, on official city correspondence, and is painted on all the water towers. [description for the visually impaired] "Chesapeake" printed with an uppercase C, while the other letters are lowercase; the h in Chesapeake has a long, sweeping, serif, underlining the letters e through p. "Virginia" is written in a smaller font, in all caps, directly underneath, and is right-justified with the final e in Chesapeake.

I'm not sure if I love it or hate it. It is, however, the image imprinted on my brain, when I think of this place. This is in large part, I'm sure, because I see it in ten-foot high letters on the water tower (maybe? I don't know how to estimate the size), every time I leave the house to go just about anywhere.

The only places I have not seen it is on tee-shirts or ball caps, or any of those gift-shop touristy things proclaiming hometown pride. This ommission makes no sense to me, as it seems perfectly suited to a tee-shirt. And it would be more fun to see it there than on your city tax bill, I'm sure.

This is my first test of DreamWidth's crossposting feature, to see how it works.

I've made some more decisions about this journal, since last night, when I created the account:

(start list)

• I'm keeping my LiveJournal as my Internet Homepage, because I've designed it to be an easy-ish hub to my favorite places. And I've just added a link here so I can access both spots at once.



• I will continue to be a paying user of LJ for the foreseeable future, so I can continue to have access to favorite communities (Especially NaArMaMo*), and have access to my LJ scrapbook.



• If this crossposting thing works, and works well -- both for ease of reading and ease of commenting for people on my lj f'list, especially -- however, my default practice may be to post via DreamWidth by default, and just echo it on LJ. But only if it's headache-free-ish. I ain't running away from anyone. Just so you know.

(end list)

Now, to the heart of my matter. When I created this account, I imported all my special features, including my custom filters.

When DreamWidth started asking me about my filters, I realized something important: Most of my filters have been around far longer than most of the people on my f'list. And so most of the people on my friends list might not even know certain filters exist, much less whether they'd want to be on any of them.

So here they are: with brief descriptions. Tell me which ones you'd like to be on, and I'll put you on. If you want to be taken off a filter, let me know that, too. I will use this mostly to edit my LJ account information, rather than DreamWidth, because, like I said, this place will most likely just be a mirror.

(begin list of filter names)

Pagans:
I don't use this one very much, any more. I started using when I still self-identified as Neo-Pagan (I now identify as Agnostic and/or Atheist), and was concerned about the prospect of Bible-Thumping trolls coming in and hijacking an conversations about spirituality or worldviews that don't center on the Judeo-Christian deity. I still sometimes talk about this stuff, but I'm not as worried as I used to be. Still, the filter is there, so if you want on, let me know.

Doctor Who:
For talking about my favorite sci-fi franchise. I'm not so much afraid of trolls, here; this is more a do-not-annoy-the-nice-people filter (My love of Doctor Who is one reason why I'm reluctant to use DW to refer to DreamWidth; it confuses my brain).

Women:
Again, one I don't use very often. But sometimes, I want to talk about women-specific issues without feeling like a man might possibly be reading over my shoulder. Note: whether or not I put you on this filter depends entirely on how you see yourself, not how some stranger sees you, regardless of what may, or may not, be between your legs.

Men:
I actually don't think I've ever used this filter, in posting, but, for the sake of fairness, I didn't want to denegrade men into second-class people on my friends list, as: oh, yeah -- all those other people, over there. The same Note applies here as above.

GeekErotica:
For discussing my erotic fantasies, which just so happen to often take place in a sci-fi or fantasy context. I also tend to get very intellectual and philosophical about such things. What can I say? I am a Geek, after all. This is an "Explicit Adult -- only 18+" filter.

Frontiers of Justice:
For discussing the book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership by Martha C. Nussbaum (a book about the shortcomings in, and the author's alternative to, predominate social contract theory in philosophy). I bought the book back in the beginning of year. And I've read the introduction. Mostly, it's still in my "I really ought to read that" pile... But when I get up the energy to tackle it, I promise to use this filter more often.

Novel 2009:
For discussing, asking advice on, posting excerpts of (etc.), the novel I set myself up to write this year, as my new year's resolution. (I'm currently wrestling with my Inner Critic about that, and trying to see and hear the secondary characters more clearly)

And filters which I only use to help sift through my friends list page, which is a feature DreamWidth doesn't have yet, so it's kind of a moot point. But for the sake of completeness:

Communities:
Just what you'd expect.

Fiction and Roleplay:
For those secondary journals, created by friends, that are written in the voice of fictional characters. This is a very small filter.

(End list of filter names)

And there you have it. Let's try this experiment out, and see how commenting, in particular, works. Just in case you don't want all and sundry to know what filters you're interested in, all comments will be screened.

*Sorry, but I can't find the instructions for linking to an LJ community from the dreamwidth site; the rules for individual users don't seem to apply

I'm capriuni over there, just as I'm capriuni here. I've imported all my lj entries, tags, and special friends groups, filters, and all.

I've titled the journal the same ("Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains"), and have the same default icon (Jester in red, yellow and green motley, reclining on a treble musical staff), because these things are part of my "online face," and my real face doesn't change when I go different places in the three-dimensional world; I don't see why it should be different in the cyber world.

I made the decision in favor of DreamWidth over other LJ-alternative sites for three main reasons:

• It just feels more stable than DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, or Inksome ever did -- like it may actually (or perhaps, already has) reached the Hundredth Monkey state.



• The people there seem to be making a real effort to make it barrier-free to everybody as a matter of course, instead of as an awkward, and embarrassing afterthought. This should be supported.



• The TOS allows users to keep control of the copyright of everything they post; so I'm more comfortable posting my own fiction and poetry over there, especially stuff I'll know I want to publish in other ways and places.


• And a bonus reason: so far, no swarms of Russian-friending bots

So -- if you're on my friends list, and have a dreamwidth account, let me know your user name there, so I can add you to my circles.

Oh, and BTW: here are my filters (let me know which ones you'd like to be on; though, natch, whether I put you on that filter will be up to me):


Pagans

Doctor Who Chat

Women

Men

GeekErotica (where I talk about my kinky thoughts, especially in SF and Fantasy scenerios)

Novel 2009 (where I puzzle out [and possibly ask for feedback] the novel I promised myself I'd write, this year)

Frontiers of Justice (where I discuss / review this book I bought, with one of its main focuses being the social contracts and the rights of the disabled) -- I haven't posted to this filter as much as I thought I would, but it's there)

[icon description: A hand-drawn sketch of a steam locomotive, dated 1892, with the added caption "Won't be derailed." The caption is written in a combination of the fonts Edwardian Script ITC and Copperplate Light]

On Friday, June 12, who_daily posted a link to my Davros, Daleks, and Disability (Redux) post.

Some Anonymous Person clicked through, and commented thusly:

Riiiight. He can't just be one nutcase, he has to be a representative.

And I was wishing for an icon with this sentiment as I was composing my reply. Because, really. If you believe, deep down, that this is a legitimate point, and that discussing it could lead to a wider or deeper understanding, why would you choose to post anonymously?

Unless, of course, you know that your comment is a classic derailing technique, and that your behavior would be considered an embarrassment in polite society.

::Goes back to edit her reply, to stick this icon on it::

Poll #1415475
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you like my profile, as is?

Which of these things would be good on my profile?

What are three ideas you associate with me?

Yesterday, spiralsheep linked to my post from last week, about Davros and the Daleks.

This prompted sventhelost to ramble (his word) about the similar tropes of disability and the mechanized self in the expanded Star Wars franchise, sparking a rather (if I may say so) interesting discussion; this comment, about the Jedi attitude toward technology, how it fits (or so very much does not fit) with the philosophy of the Force, struck me as being particularly insightful.

who_daily also linked to that post, early this morning. My guess is that's how drho found it. He points out how NewWho has continued the Disability!Fail, and his discription of John Lumic reminded me of Hephestos (Hephaistos), which I consider a more positive version of the archtype.

[ETA: I can haz a flying weelchaer nao, plz?]

---

That is all. For now. I'm hungry, and I want to write some more of my novel.

I've been thinking of rewriting my profile page.

Actually, I composed what's up there now when I was in the mood to try an Internet dating site (again), so that's why it's so heavy on the disability info.

( Boy, that turned into a longer rant than I was expecting. ) I have other things I want to do in life. Also, every time you click on a page, Harmony.com installs spyware on your computer, also, they flood your email box (and they charge you for the privilege).

So, yeah. No longer interested, at least in that sort of connection.

So, old friends and new friends: help me (re)write my LJ profile. (I'm thinking, now, that I should rewrite it on a regular basis -- maybe in sync with the changing seasons -- just to keep it an accurate reflection of who I am at the moment.

Note: There was some sort of bug the first (and second -- and third) time I tried to post this poll, and it didn't load properly. So I deleted, and redid, it (trying again -- and again):

[F--- (Dash) this for a game of soldiers!] I'll try posting the poll in a seperate entry.

Two (and a half) versions of a word game that I like to do in my head:

Version one: Word Chains

Object of the game: Transform one English word to another English word one letter at a time; each "link" in the "chain" must also be an English word, with no proper names.

Allowed changes:

1. Swap one letter for another


2. Remove one letter


3. Add one letter


4. Make an anagram, without adding or removing any letters

Here's a an online version of that game: WordChains.com (I stayed awake far too long into the wee hours of the morning, playing this, last night today).

Version two: Doublets.

This one was invented by Charles Lutwidge Dodson (aka "Lewis Carroll"). And as you can imagine, this wordsmith made the game much more (read: "fiendishly") difficult.

He starts off by allowing only the first rule from "Word Chains" -- you can only swap one letter for another; no annagramming, adding or subtracting. So the start word and end word must be the same length. And then he demands that the two words have some clever relationship to each other.

Example: Change HATE to LOVE in three links:
HATE
HAVE
HOVE
LOVE

And here's an online source for some of Lewis Carroll's Doublets

Version Two-and-a-Half (my own hybrid of the two previous versions):

I really like it when the two words have some connection to each other, but the times when I need to play a word game of some sort to keep my sanity (such as being kept on hold on the phone, or stuck in a traffic jam) are the times when I have no dictionary on hand to help me find a perfectly paired match of equal-length words.

So, I like to allow all four rules from "Word Chains," as long as the start word and end word make some sort of sense together (as in "Doublets"). Here are some I dreamt up last night this morning when I should have been dreaming:

( Making the STORM CALM in seven steps )

( Turning WAR to PEACE in five steps )

And finally (this one gave me fits, but I was determined):
( Going from AWAKE to ASLEEP in nine steps )

I spent most of today (re)writing the first chapter of my novel, instead of messing around with MS Paint. Until I made this icon.

My mother would quote this line to me (in good humor) whenever I excused myself because I had writing to do. And since I didn't yet have an icon specifically for the topic of writing, this seemed as good a line as any to use.

My mother was an excellent writer, btw.

---

You know what's missing from the system of written English (in my very-unhumble opinion)?

Thought marks.

I know to use quotation marks when someone says a string of specific words out loud.

But it feels funny to use them when I write that a character thinks a string of specific words to herself. And yet, it also feels funny to put nothing around those words.

Also?

A Rhetorical Question Mark.

Y/Y?

This post wanders down a primrose path of links -- or maybe it makes a daisy chain of links (maybe the all those flowers are fertilized by the BS the essays in these links complain about).

---

Almost a year ago, I watched again, for the first time in nearly thirty years, Episode Two of Genesis of the Daleks (the one where we first see, and hear, Davros) and wrote this review: I know that this episode predates this PC-ness by about ten years, but still. I tried to articulate how painfully ableist Davros is/was (it might have helped if I'd had the word "ableist" in my vocabulary, back then). But the discussion thread wandered off into Nazism, racism, anti-Semitism, and the internalization of oppression by the oppressed -- all are important topics, but Davros's disability ended up being treated (even by me, woe) as a secondary metaphor for some other issue, and not as an important attribute in its own right (which is another of my long-time pet peeves).


Then, earlier this week, troubleinchina watched Genesis of the Daleks for the first time, and she wrote this review: Davros is not a physically handicapped scientist overcoming his "shortcomings" through technology (the link she posted in that review, btw, to an essay about the cybermen, has been taken down by the author).

In reply to that review, Goldfish (the host of "Blogging Against Disablism Day") posted this: It would be better if we were represented as a great variety of characters, but Davros did at least have some ... spirit.

And she posted this link (from the BBC's official Disability Culture Blog: "Ouch!"): ReTARDIS: Doctor Who and Disability (written on the eve of NewWho, and expressing the hope that RTD would help Who get beyond its old biases; shall we have a moment of silence for our dashed expectations?).

And finally, I've come to the end of my primrose path. For there is one paragraph in this last blog essay clarified for me why I preferred the Daleks before they had Davros as their single, twisted, "Creator":

To cut a long story short, Davros foresaw that his entire race, the Kaleds, were slowly turning into slimy, green blobs. Being a wheelchair user himself, his solution to this problem was to build mobility aids for everyone to travel around in - a.k.a. the Dalek machines. Now you've got to admit, turning your entire race into wheelchair users is quite an extreme way to bring about disability equality!

I realized, when I read this, that I was (partially) incorrect in my original analysis, last June. What's really promblematic about Davros is not (so much) that his "spiritual disfunction manifests as physical disfunction," but that he diliberately creates the Daleks to be more disabled than he is. He deliberately erases their capability for empathy and compassion. He expects them to be obedient to his every command, and to be grateful to him, as their creator and their "father." If Davros's plans unfolded the way he dreamt them up, he'd be the most able-bodied (comparitively) "Emperor of Skaro."

So, with Davros in the picture, the Dalek mythos only perpetuates and reinforces the hierarchy of Ability and Personhood. The more able you are, the more you're a "real" person. If you're disabled, your role in life is to be obediant and grateful, and the more "severe" your disability is, the more passive and grateful you're expected to be.

But pre-Davros, in the First and Second Doctor's eras, the Daleks had created their machine casings over time, and under their own initiative. In the Peter Cushing movie versions of William Hartnell's Dalek stories (thanks again, gordon_r_d!), the Dalek city is full of color, and art for art's sake. Even though they're still evil, they're portrayed as having a complete culture, and being complete people. So yeah, I find the pre-Davros Daleks to be more interesting.

As for the argument that Terry Nation had to create Davros to give the Daleks some unique history compared to the Cybermen, I'd say that both the Cybermen and Daleks represent the abject fear that the Privileged have of the Oppressed:

"They Hate Us!! And if We Give Them Any Freedom, They Will Bring Us Down to Their Level!!"

The Daleks and Cybermen are "mechanized" selves, who have gradually lost their Personhood as they gradually lost their physical abilities, and compensated for their weakness with technology. This, in itself, makes them morally suspect, at best. What makes them evil is their desire to inflict their reality on the rest of us, "robbing us of our humanity."

Other modern sci-fi examples of this trope would be, I think, Hitchcock's The Birds (where humans are punished by the avians for our species-based privilege), and Franklin J. Schaffner's (director) Planet of the Apes (again, with species privelege, with added thinly disguised race privilege). But this trope goes back much further than the genre of Sci-fi, if you consider the ancient (patriarchal) Greeks' fear of, and fascination with, the Amazons, and what they did to men.

This fear and fascination probably arises out of the subconscious knowledge that:

• privilege is arbitrary and more a matter of luck than innate goodness, and


• the acts committed via this privilege are unjust, but


• the privilege-holders are so dependent on the power of privilege for their way of life that they equate letting it go with Death.

And of course, this fear completely distorts reality. Birds have no desire to wipe out humans as a species. Nor do Apes wish to own human slaves. Women don't want to castrate and enslave men.

And the disabled have no desire to inflict their impairments on the able-bodied. Christopher Reeve's advocacy for "The Cure" made me squrim, but I took no pleasure in his suffering. I was simply distressed when his advocacy, and the celebrity status that fuelled it, drowned out nearly all discussions of civil rights and equality.

[I've been writing this post on and off (mostly on) for nearly six hours, now (I thought it was going to be a quickie; I didn't expect it to be so hard to put into words). It's time I stopped. Here's my conclusion:]

Davros is a painful character for me to watch because he represents the fear that the Disabled are full of hatred -- both self-loathing and hatred of the able-bodied, and is another example of the fearful trope:

"They Hate Us!! And if We Give Them Any Freedom, They Will Bring Us Down to Their Level!!"

(So We better get Them, before They get Us).

I don't want to bring you down, able-bodied white men, staring at me from the bed of your pick-up truck,* please don't stare at me with such virulent hatred.

---

*I'm remembering an actual time when I was leaving the grocery store with Audrey, my aide. This was when I had the old van, with the slooow wheelchair lift, and I was manuevering to get onto the lift. Meanwhile, there were four red-necky-type white guys hanging out in their truck in the next parking space over. And they were staring at me with such angry expressions, I couldn't look them in the eye. If I'd been alone, I would have feared for my safety. Yes, this was one moment out of my lifetime, and it was atypical in its extremity. But it still sticks in my mind, and it's still painful.

A bit of background:

At new year's I made the resolution to write a novella as a Christmas / New Year's gift for my kith and kin. I was planning on taking a year to write it, instead of NaNoWriMo's insane month, because, after four "Successful" Nano's in a row, I wasn't having fun, anymore. I wanted to be able to slow down and actually talk and listen to my characters.

I then, promptly, got writer's block.

Until this week. All of a sudden, I got an idea for a story. And then, character showed up -- a real character, not just an idea for a character. I could see her in my head; I could hear her voice when she spoke. So this week, I've started writing.

All winter long, I've been blocked. Summer comes 'round, and the story does too. It occured to me that writer's block might be the first cousin to depression, specifically to the seasonal depression known as S.A.D.

And the image popped into my head of "Writer's Block" as an ice dam, blocking the flow of creativity, until the sun's warmth melts it.

So that's what I wanted to draw today: To make word art out of that phrase, shaped and colored like an ice dam, blocking a river a river of words.

I still want to make that. But it's complicated to draw. And it will take more than one day. So I'll post it next week. In the meantime, here's the photo of a real ice dam that I'm using for reference and as a color pallette. I use the eyedropper tool in MSPaint to select different colors from the photo to use in my picture. Getting just the just the right shades of blue, gray, and almost-white to make something look icy is almost impossible (for me) to do by guestimate.

Now, I'm going to make some dinner, and watch Kenneth Branagh in Mystery!