quote:Don't assume that reason and rational discourse will get anyone to pay any attention to you unless they already agree with you. It's a pretty foul reality, but it's the real world we need to deal with, not the world as we would have it be.
You know, I find statements like this to be profoundly depressing, mostly because they're true.
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Again, though, it's not just me - this was vetted by two other activists before final release (realizes the final form differs somewhat from the version here, but not in the ways people object to).
I'd submit it's irrational to have irritation at me be a reason to be less sympathetic to the cause.
And, like I said, it's a dirty game. Nationally syndicated columnists Frank Rich and Gary Thomson have both admitted in private correspondence that their elimination or marginalization of attacks on MDB coming from disability groups was intentional. Their columns framed the issue solely as a right vs. left thing. And so did Pat Buchanan and others on his side, for that matter.
Suggest some alternatives that don't involve being so polite we're ignored.
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quote:I'd submit it's irrational to have irritation at me be a reason to be less sympathetic to the cause.
Because it makes me less likely to give your ideas any weight, if I know I'm going to have to slog through name calling and hyperbole.
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quote:Suggest some alternatives that don't involve being so polite we're ignored.
Seems to me that you're screwed either way, then. You're either polite, reasonable, and overlooked, or you're inflammatory and noticed but dismissed because you've alienated your audience. Which is also depressing.
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quote: Nationally syndicated columnists Frank Rich and Gary Thomson have both admitted in private correspondence that their elimination or marginalization of attacks on MDB coming from disability groups was intentional. Their columns framed the issue solely as a right vs. left thing. And so did Pat Buchanan and others on his side, for that matter.
If it's really a dirty game, what keeps their correspondence private?
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Nothing, probably. Although I have a personal dislike of sharing personal email, it's something I'm learning to get over when it comes to figures who are public. I'll post them within a couple days. One was from an exchange between Rich and Lenny Davis, a disability studies scholar here in Chicago. The correspondence was posted on a listserv, so I guess it's public now.
I have Thomson's reply to me - and I want to wait to email him back (probably tomorrow, though, when I hopefully have more than three hours sleep.). I'll share after that volley.
Wait a day or two. Just don't want to get too bogged down right now with this stuff. But I have the stuff and you'll get it.
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I'm with you. Do whatever it takes to be noticed. Even if you have to play their same game, or be harsh. It doesn't turn me off from your cause because the outrage is justifiable.
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There is a book (I wish I could remember the name of it, I’ll try to find it) that analyzes the stages of social justice movements, particularly in confrontational vs. reconciliatory techniques. It has a graph that stuck in my mind after it was used in a presentation I saw. Basically, when power is highly imbalanced, more confrontational methods are necessary. When one side isn’t heard, justice requires speaking up for that side. As the power balance equalizes, more conciliatory techniques and compromise become possible. When both sides are at the table, then being able to hear and empathize with both parties’ concerns is important.
(“Both” is an oversimplification, of course, since it implies that there are only two “sides” and almost every issue is more complex than that.)
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quote:I'm with you. Do whatever it takes to be noticed. Even if you have to play their same game, or be harsh. It doesn't turn me off from your cause because the outrage is justifiable.
Syn, thanks, but there are always limits. For one thing, NDY follows a strictly nonviolent approach. We also make sure we're on a solid factual foundation - always. Unlike people who are "authorities" like Arthur Caplan, we have to be accurate about claims we make, because, unlike "recognized authorities," we'll be challenged. Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Thanks. I am very tired and it was nice to have someone talk about power inequities besides myself - and Syn, of course. Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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No violence of course, Violence is so impolite. And, also having the honest truth helps too... But, I am not against a good strong effective offense as long as it is tempored with wisdom.
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Just to give you a good and current example of what we're up against in terms of not only writing us out of the story, but "rewriting" it in other ways, there's this from today's NY Times:
quote:And no great controversy - with the exception of a late-breaking protest by advocates for the disabled, who objected to the portrayal of an assisted suicide in "Million Dollar Baby" - enlivened the run up to this year's Oscars.
Late-breaking?
The film was in limited release until mid-January. Our Chicago protest was held before the national opening of the film. One of the two authors of this piece wrote about us in the NY Times on January 31. Considering the limited release only happened around Christmas, my "call to arms" review came out on January 11th, how does this all qualify as "late-breaking?"
Answer: It doesn't.
So, good people, how do you deal with the rewriting of history? Write letters to the editor knowing full well that the Times will just refuse to run them? (The only reply they ran to Frank Rich's column was from a religious conservative. There were at least a dozen letters from people within the disability community who sent responses to that column.)
Nice touch, though. One more reason to marginalize us. Not a true reason, but not too many people will notice, so it will work.
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Advocates of the disabled? Damn, those people are clueless and I have more reasons to hate the Oscars. For some reason it made me mad that they took so long to give an oscar for best actress to someone black. It takes so long for things to change -_-.
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I'd just like to chip in that through this thread I've pretty much consistantly agreed with Dag, but I wanted to add that I have enormous respect for Clint Eastwood as a director, he can bring a powerful movie to the screen, Unforgiven was, in my opinion a classic.
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But Dag, you'd think they could at least send an auto-reply e-mail. (I write my letters in e-mail form, as it's the paper's preferred mode of communication, and it's cheaper, faster, and easier.)
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NPR this morning had a report on the Oscars. I was disappointed to hear the reporter sum up the controversy about this film with the phrase:
"Million Dollar Baby has earned criticism for showing the consequences of boxing."
Um...is anyone anywhere even talking about how boxing might CAUSE the ethical dilemmas?
Ugh.
I think Stephen is right...reviewers (who are essentially "Hollywood beat reporters" will go to great lengths not to tick off the power-elite. Whether she was hoping to not divulge the surprise ending or was deliberately miscasting the controversy so that Clint would like her...it still trivialized one of the most important social issues we're grappling with today.
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I've been involved in two issues that got national coverage (only one of them as an advocate), and the most frustrating thing is how quickly such stories get turned into team A v. team B. Complex issues are devolved into X and ~X, seemingly overnight. There's no room for nuance.
It's even more frustrating when you have to rely on one of the teams to get legal help.
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Well, Diane and I are both developing a nice collection of hate mail. It's nothing new to me. The first piece I ever received was from a mother of a teenager with severe disabilities. That woman's crusade in life was to be able to kill off her daughter before she herself died - would rather hand her to death than to strangers.
That was just about ten years ago.
The really amazing thing is that some of Diane's email is related to her own powerful piece, which will be reprinted in several places now, including a journal devoted to anti-racism.
I can understand the venom directed at us over some of our stuff - but Diane's piece? Some people really are vile.
There's some other stuff, too. I'll post later.
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*Cannot understand how anyone can write hate mail in response to those.* But, I'm glad Diane's piece is being printed in a lot of places because that is quite cool..
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(This is the kind of long-term impact we're hoping to see more of. This columnist read Diane's essay and went thinking beyond the issue of "Million Dollar Baby." It's a really great column - and the issues are the same ones being faced in most states right now. Today's news says there will be at least 40 billion cut from federal medicaid funds.)
quote: Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) TRIBUNE COLUMN Blunt’s budget backs disabled in Missouri into tough corner
By TONY MESSENGER Published Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Gov. Matt Blunt’s first budget is his million-dollar baby.
The brutal document landed on the legislative canvas with the thud of a boxer going down for the count. It’s not pretty, but that doesn’t bother the governor, who promised his constituents a government that would cut back and not raise taxes. Having promised not to take money from the mouths of school babes, Blunt had no choice but to target the biggest heavyweight of all: Medicaid.
He slashed with impunity, lowering qualifying levels to those who don’t even have the federal poverty line in sight. He added co-pays and cut entire programs. His targets were the fringes of society, folks whom most of us don’t want to think much about anyway. The elderly. The poor. The disabled.
The governor says he has no choice. Times are tough. Money doesn’t grow on trees.
In fact, we always have a choice. That’s what Academy Award director Clint Eastwood showed us in his critically acclaimed movie that took home four Oscars. We often have tough choices, the kind of life and death decisions that tell the world of our character. It was the choice of the main character in "Million Dollar Baby" that made some in the disabled community recoil in horror at the ultimate message in the same way they’re responding in anger to Blunt’s budget. It’s my choice to give away the plot in this column. It’s your choice to stop reading now if you don’t want to know it.
In the movie, Hilary Swank’s paralyzed former boxer, Maggie, chooses death rather than a life in a wheelchair.
The decision didn’t bother me. Maybe it’s because I’m such an Eastwood fan that I was predisposed to an ending that provoked thought more than it uplifted. But after I read Diane Coleman’s words, I came to a deeper understanding of what bothers some disabled people about the movie. Coleman is the president of Not Dead Yet, an advocacy group for disabled folks. She lives her life in a wheelchair and is one of the folks bothered by the movie.
"Many people have told me that they don’t think they could ‘stand to live’ if they needed a wheelchair like me," Coleman wrote in a column she posted on her group’s Web site. It’s easy for non-disabled folks to feel Maggie’s pain as she decides to die in the movie, Coleman notes. It’s easy for them to sympathize with trainer Frankie as he fulfills Maggie’s death wish. It’s too easy, she says, for folks to sniffle "in pitiful admiration of Maggie’s determination to die rather than move on and leave her non-disabled life behind."
It’s much harder, Coleman says, to look at her and imagine the life she leads as something of quality. It’s why the movie made her queasy.
That’s the feeling Tammy Jennings had when she heard of Blunt’s proposed budget cuts. Jennings, too, uses a wheelchair and gets by with a personal assistant who helps her shop, bathe, eat and dress each day. She sent me an e-mail using a device in which she uses a pointer attached to her head.
The Columbia resident is 39 and has cerebral palsy. She is in the process of buying her own home, though now she’s reconsidering.
"Blunt might as well shoot the elderly and disabled people, because they can’t afford the medications they need to live," she says.
Jennings isn’t alone in her anger. Luci Bruyneel wrote to tell me she would end up in a nursing home if she loses her personal care services. Cindy Eckstein fears the same thing.
In fact, says Mark Stone of Services for Independent Living, that’s the terrible truth of many of Blunt’s proposed budget cuts. Personal care services funded by Medicaid keep disabled folks living and working in our community. That’s better for our economy and in the long run cheaper than warehousing them in nursing homes.
"What they don’t understand is that this year’s budget cuts will cost us more than they’re going to save," Stone says. His organization serves disabled folks in a six-county Mid-Missouri region. Blunt’s counter-punch on his seemingly uncaring cuts is that he cares about the people he’s hurting but wants other segments of society to take care of their needs. Blunt’s plan shifts the care of the neediest Missourians to insurance companies, charities and, ultimately, right back to different parts of the Medicaid program.
Stone and other advocates hope to convince state legislators that cutting Medicaid funding to disabled folks costs more than it saves. He thinks he can make a real dollar-for-dollar case that Blunt is just wrong, but mostly he wants us to see the disabled as people who make hard choices to live the way they want to live.
"They’re ignoring the human factor of taking a person out of the community and putting them in a nursing home," Stone says.
That human factor is what Coleman says is so easy for non-disabled folks to see right through.
We can’t look past the wheelchair. Neither could a fictional young boxer living in a nursing home who just wanted to die.
As moviegoers, we applauded her courage.
If Blunt’s budget passes in its current form, the noise we hear won’t be clapping.
It will be the enormous thud of an entire community going down for the count.
quote:"Since 1990 there are laws that allow (cognitive) patients to refuse treatment. A quadriplegic on a respirator could simply ask to be disconnected from the device. Doctors would have done so and administered a sedative so the person could die peacefully."
But Eastwood chose to have his character "illegally enter the hospital and disconnect the device."
That "would make her gasp like a fish on the shore," says Stephen Drake, whose mother was told he'd be a vegetable. Stephen is now research analyst for Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group.
quote:Disability rights activist Diane Coleman of Not Dead Yet, whom I've known for years, points out that message: "Some of the (film's) audience will be newly disabled people, their family members and friends, swept along in the critically acclaimed emotion that the kindest response to someone struggling with the life changes brought on by a severe injury is, after all, to kill them."
Obviously, a filmmaker has the right to send any message he or she wants, or send no message at all. But Clint Eastwood should not be surprised that certain messages are not taken kindly by the disabled, who are not dead yet — and are as alive as he is.
posted
Nat Hentoff is great. His writing is generally a very good example of strong condemnation of ideas and practices without personal attacks. And he walks a fine line, because he's got major enemies across the political spectrum.
Even when he's espousing something I vehemently disagree with, he's presenting ideas that can be evaluated without having to ignore insults.
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To be very specific, Nat Hentoff is an atheist pro-life liberal/libertarian. Recent columns have criticized Democrats for their opposition to the appointment of Judge Pickering. Others have criticized the Bush administration over torture issues - such as the exporting of prisoners to countries that use torture.
Even though he is one of the most articulate defenders of the First Amendment, he's no longer welcome at major ACLU events as a speaker. Religious conservative pro-life groups aren't crazy about him either.
I like Nat a lot. He called this morning to tell me his column was up. Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The Netflix Critic, Rocchi, really got this movie's number, too. I just noticed it up on Netflix, though I know it was around before. He calls it a big greasy glob of Oscart bait, or something like that. Heh.
Actually, I think it was already linked to in this thread, but it's up on Netflix now, too. Several customer reviews gave it a good whack, too. I love Netflix for being so egalitarian.
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I wasn't sure whether or not to post this on the inflammator thread or this one...
Which give you and idea of what the column will be like, I guess. Just to show that anyone can fall prey to being locked into stereotypical thinking, I never expected to find this on the Sports page of a college (Cornell) newspaper:
quote: Leni Riefenstahl is alive and well and her name is Clint Eastwood.
Riefenstahl is the legendary Nazi filmmaker who created Triumph of the Will in 1935. The film carried on the tradition of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Sergei Eisenstein's October -- films where pageantry, pomp and splendor are used to push insidious political agendas.
Triumph of the Will was released a year before the 1936 Berlin Olympics. One of the most controversial sporting events of all time, the Games featured drug-fueled German athletes trying to show the world they were The Master Race. The swastika-clad athletes were blonde, blue-eyed and virile.
Riefenstahl released another film, Olympia, chronicling the Berlin Games. It was a terrific sports movie. It set standards for sports cinematography against which all future sports movies would be measured. Yet, despite its dazzling technique, Olympia was still dedicated to its message of social Darwinism -- the strong will survive and the weak must be weeded out and discarded.
**more good stuff in the article at the newspaper site**
quote: (SH) - I take as my text the film "Million Dollar Baby," directed and starred in by Clint Eastwood (who got his start as an actor in Westerns) as Frankie Dunn, a trainer of boxers, with Hilary Swank playing Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer. The movie has attracted considerable attention, and in fact was crowned at the Academy Awards with the honors for best picture, best director, best actress, and best supporting actor (Morgan Freeman). It has also been vilified by commentators on the religious right, who object to its alleged espousal of euthanasia. In the film, Maggie, who has developed into a fine boxer, is seriously injured in her big fight - so seriously that she is bed-ridden and immobile, unable to speak and with no future. She wants to die.
In the end Frankie, her trainer and mentor, ends her misery by killing her. Many viewers have found the film excellent and moving.
The religious right, however, is not concerned with cinematic excellence; it is upset because the movie seems to promote mercy killing, the taking of human life. People of the religious right regard life as sacrosanct, not to be terminated artificially under any circumstances.
If they knew what the movie was really about, though, they would have no objection. I am here to set them straight, and to reveal the movie as an allegory of a cowboy and his horse.
*****
I present here the original plot and characters: A rootless man, a cowboy with an ill-defined past, notices a neglected filly on the ranch, and takes an interest in her. He trains her, brings her along, and enters her in a number of races. The filly is unexpectedly good and wins her contests, developing a considerable following as she does.
Finally the big day arrives, and all are expectant but apprehensive, for the horse may be in over her head. Nonetheless, after a rough start she picks up speed, and is on the point of passing the odds-on favorite when the favorite's vile jockey causes her to trip by swerving his horse into her.
She falls, and injures her leg. We hope that the horse can be saved, and the cowboy tries to save her, but her leg has been broken, and in the end he recognizes that the case is hopeless and he puts her down. He then rides off on his lonely journey from out of despair and into nowhere.
The movie is thus a Western of the traditional sort, with cowboy replaced by trainer and filly replaced by fighter. The action is transferred from the ranch to the city, from the corral to the ring.
Unless conservative commentators object to putting down injured horses, they can have no objection to this film. The Academy clearly approves. My job is done.
William F. Wyatt is a professor of classics emeritus at Brown University.
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Um... My objections to people putting down horses aside, he seems to forget that this is a HUMAN BEING we are talking about here.... Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I don't think he's forgetting at all - this is satire. My guess is that he is a conservative prolife guy and trying to get his point across in a satirical piece, which is always a dicey business.
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quote:Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, one of the council's conservatives, suggests that depression robs these people of autonomy, and maybe this argument could sway libertarians. Hendin agrees: "One of the key features of depression is an inability to see alternatives." But he thinks the chief distortion is ignorance of palliative care, which makes people think they have to choose between suffering and suicide. "That's not much of a choice," he says.
[ March 04, 2005, 12:13 PM: Message edited by: Lady Jane ]
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I dled the movie last night. I'm going to watch it later on. Perhaps I will post my opinion on it.
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Well, we've had a major coup happen - I'm going to see if there's a way we can capitalize on it.
FAIR - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting - is a liberal media watchdog group. Predictably, they're every bit as selective in terms of what they watch for in terms of inaccuracy and unfairness as conservative media "watchdog" groups are.
Today, they broke with tradition. FAIR's weekly radio show, Counterspin, features a ten-minute interview with John Hockenberry. He discusses MDB, the marginalization of disability groups by progressive columnists, and how the media dealt with Eastwood's ADA issues several years ago.
You can check it out at the URL below - in either MP3 or realaudio formats. Hockenberry comes in about 9 minutes and 20 seconds into the 30 minute show.
quote:This week on CounterSpin: Sure, Million Dollar Baby is just a movie, but given how rarely the media spotlight ever makes it around to people with disabilities, the movie is bound to shape public opinion and understanding. So the questions provoked by the film would seem to deserve more thoughtful, and inclusive, journalistic treatment than they’ve thus far received. We'll talk about media coverage of the controversial Oscar winning film and its ostensible message with NBC correspondent John Hockenberry, author also of "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence."
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Can a person really bleed to death by biting their tongue? That movie was such a let down. Even if I didn't know the ending, I'd still just be so down and annoyed from the ending.. i HATE endings like that. I know that life isn't all flowers and butterflies, but still.
AND I still don't see how it was good enough to win an oscar...
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The acting was good, but Clint Eastwood always seems wooden to me... Beady eyed and really stiff... he hardly shows any emotions for the most part. Also, I didn't see why they used voice-over narration. And why was Morgan Freeman's character narrating? It made sense in Shawshank, but in this movie? Perhaps it was unnessasary. Voice overs are overdone anyway in a lot of movies... I don't know, the dippiness factors of the movie bothered me.
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Hey, people are still talking! This is from The Toronto Sun. (If you want a paper copy, I'd need to know today, since the library doesn't keep copies of this paper.)
quote: Wed, March 9, 2005
Family films are ignored by elites
By MICHAEL COREN -- For the Toronto Sun
THE Oscars came and went. Another spasm of self-congratulation and indulgence. Especially ironic in that the major movie studios are in serious financial trouble and people are staying away from theatres in increasingly large numbers.
But Hollywood has never been concerned about people. If anything, the elites of North America's entertainment industry despise the people and all for which they stand. After all, Hollywood's fetishes are liberal politics, cosmetic surgery, publicity and sexual extremism, not necessarily in that order!
The nominated movies for this year's Oscars said a great deal.
Million Dollar Baby, for example, was as much about euthanasia as about boxing and gave a blatant defence of the killing of the handicapped and the terminally ill. Little attention has been given to large-scale protests against the film by leaders of the disabled community.
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