Continuous Disabilities

Autism and gender dysphoria are continuous disabilities in that tey can be managed rather than cured and are of unknown origin and have serious or mild symptoms for unknown reasons and so are addressed with scorn or horror when other disabilities are treated with only sympathy.

Deviance is the process of identifying and castigating people and groups of people thought of as not included in ordinary people. The study of deviance also looks at the ways of life of people considered deviant. Deviance included a number of categories that have over time become absorbed inro life as members of a social class or ethnic group so that prostitutes are relabeled as sex workers and so within the strata of class structure and African Americans are untouchables, part of a caste, but among the ethnic groups, as are gays and lesbians, who also see themselves as an ethnic group with its own flag, particular customs and its own sense of pride. But there are also new groups emerging to be treated as deviants and so met with ostracism and scorn as a result of being somehow unnatural which was the case with earlier deviant groups. Two of these have become prominent in popular discourse. The are the autistic and the gender dysphoric, both of them becoming politically controversial in that the Trump Administration thinks there is an epidemic of autism and Conservative lawmakers think that gender dysphorics are an abomination that is not a medical condition and such people therefore to be retrained to normality or considered not quite human at all.. 

What characterizes both of these erstwhile medical disabilities is that they are continuous disabilities in that each covers a range of degree of disability from barely perceived to very flamboyant as opposed to levels of disability which can be stratified each one having a style of life that is characteristic of its disability, such as cripples or the mentally ill or the disfigured as was discussed in my article on “The Stratification of Disability”. What is noteworthy about the cited two continuous disabilities is that there are no chemical tests for assessing the degree of disability, only clinical judgments that place people in the category and so allow them to be regarded as sham or elastic categories while there are blood tests for diseases running from the common cold to prostate cancer, though there are some ailments not thought of as subject to restraint, such as essential tremor and Parkinson’s, perhaps because the infirmities are so obvious that they can be considered diseases and so excused for their disabilities as has happened with any number of other diseases, moved from deviance to sympathy, as is the case wit leprosy and perhaps even STDs.  

The treatment of continuous diseases do not cure or delay or ease the disease as does happen in non continuous diseases,  even in cancer where chemotherapy may be excruciatingly painful but extend human life and painkillers can ease much pain. Rather, continuous diseases can only be managed. Jerry Lewis found no cure for Muscular Dystrophy and his researchers could not explain why it progressed more or less quickly and over time offered wheelchairs and other devices so people could manage their deterioration. That is also true of the most prevalent continuous disease: deterioration in old age. It can occur infrequently with young people and there are people who get into their nineties without much illness. No one can explain why people age or which people will age faster than others. Drugs can help ease the symptoms and there are plenty of devices like hearing aids and canes to help manage the deterioration of this disease which is always fatal. Aging, however, to the surprise of Seventies and Eighties gerontologists, is not castigated, as might have been expected if it was a form of deviance, but younger people generally go out of their way to accommodate or assist old people, perhaps because it is an easy way to accomplish a good deed and feel proud of themselves. Moreover, doctors can test the degree of aging by blood tests and heart measurements that are different than are usual measures for younger people, which is not true of the clearly continuous diseases where only clinical studies can observe the degree of the disease.

An almost continuous disease that occurs at increased age but also happens with very rigorous exercise is arthritis which is an inflammation of the joints that can cause extreme pain but can be relatively mild, offering just some aches and pains, and where it is not clear who and when various people can get the ailment and the major treatment of the disability are painkillers, no cure available despite knowing its cause. Unlike infectious diseases that are diagnosable and do vary in their intensity, infectious diseases are not continuous because people don’t have to endure their course because there are vaccines and other treatments.

Autism is a continuous disease in that it is measured by its results rather than in its biology and where there is no clear reason for why it occurs because the speculation is that hundreds of genes are involved as well as environmental factors, and the two put together covers an awful lot. I have not heard of a virus as the cause of autism. Autism is a disease on a continuous spectrum in that some patients have a mild case of aversion to human contact but can continue on with ordinary life just having to be self-conscious about noticing social cues to being so troubled by the social environment as not to be able to function and so need institutionalization. The numbers of those with the continuous disease of autism has become politically relevant because of its rapid increase and is said to be cured by various nostrums even though the clinically based designation means that the numbers are increased because there are more diagnoses as doctors pay more attention to it and so label even minor degrees of the disease as ones in that category. Another characteristic of continuous disabilities also applies. People with autism are not cured but managed so that they will not get very upset when touched or subject to loud noises. Books are provided not just for adults but for young patients so that they know what their problems are and how to adjust to them and even to consider whether being autistic is just another way of being rather than an ailment.

A continuous disability significantly in the news these days is gender dysphoria which is a disorder where people feel uncomfortable with their biologically assigned gender and is to be distinguished from body dysphoria where people think that physical features like a nose or teeth are disfigured. Gender dysphorics do not have other than clinical tests to assess this condition and so rely on careful observation and case history and interviews to see how deeply ingrained is this problem and so opponents of there even being such a disease, something more prevalent, as with autism, because it is more studied, allows people opposed to there being such a condition, to think it has been made up, constructed within culture by a permissive society and therefore to be abolished as unnatural, though the heat of derision of the condition clouds the obvious biological fact that there are sports in all species. People have a sixth toe or are albino or dwarfs and so it is also possible that feeling uncomfortable with one’s sexual body could also occur for reasons unknown such as perhaps not being able to smell themselves with the correct sex. Also, like other continuous disabilities, there is a question of degree of the disorder, from girls being for a short time tomboys to feeling comfortable in dressing as the opposite sex, to wishing to be rid of all the visible sexual characteristics of their biologically appearing sex, which is different from the degrees whereby a known discontinuous disease progresses in its specific disease. The gender dysmorphic for unknown reasons can have mild or serious disorders.

As in other continuous diseases, there is no cure or treatment for gender dysphoria ant more than there was a treatment to cure people of a different sexual sport, which is being gay and lesbian, disciplining and even jailing people until the group became somewhat destigmatized by themselves pushing for being recognized as a distinct ethnic group. But that has not yet occurred for gender dysphorics, though the recognition of transfender people as models and in other occupations may be a start. After all, the acceptance of Black models and, in general, miscegenation was an important way of refashioning Blacks as just another ethnicity. Meanwhile, medicine can only offer accommodations for the management of a disorder until it is recognized as a natural even if unusual one. That means parents allowing children to dress in the clothes of another sex or, if the disability persists, allowing for puberty blockers or resculpting the body into that of the preferred sex even if politicians and many in the Republicans find such alterations as loathsome rather than people and patients and doctors just managing a situation as best they can.   

Here are some reasons some continuing disabilities are treated with horror or scorn while other continuing disabilities like arthritis or aging are treated as pathetic or brave. Polio and Covid might be considered temporary continuing disabilities in that they knew the cause but no effective treatment until vaccines were developed. In the meantime they were only managed. No one could tell how bad a polio victim would get and for very bad cases people had to be put in iron lungs where the patients would recover or expire. Covid patients, when they got bad, were put in respirators and some patients preferred dying to undergoing that. So these diseases were just horrible, like a horror movie, while even cancer could get a few years reprieve if the excruciating treatments were administered. So cancer has some hope and people are able to set limited goals, like making it to a daughter’s wedding, if that is all that is available.

Here is a different reason for thinking continuing disabilities gain scorn and horror rather than sympathy. Autism can be regarded with horror or scorn because they seem to make nature out of joint. People suggest the mind either works at thinking it does not but autism is, rather, a slippery slope between having a full complement of skills or some degree of limited mental skills, and that is unnerving. Similarly, gender dysphoria also seems an assault against nature in that  mixed gender sexual assignments are not always the case, a very unnerving idea. But what also matters is not the characteristics of the disease but its current cultural moment, when disease is politicized as a matter of opinion rather than medicalized and relegated to an elite profession.      

But the response to autism and gender dystopia may have nothing to do with the characteristics of these disabilities. Why do politicians and the public make such an issue of a very small part of the public so as to castigate them? It is possible that societies need to have deviants to scold, chastise and punish so as to assert their own normality as when same sex marriage was disparaged because it took something away from or cheapened hetrosexual marriage. It took a long time to medicalize disease and treat ailments as a condition rather than a curse or an evil event, and it may not take all that much to move conditions out of the medical realm of sympathy and palliative intervention to being again an enemy. Moreover, disabilities that are seen as mental illnesses are treated as more fearful and antagonistic, not fully gripped as part of the medical model, because they to remain difficult to understand or cure though psychiatric pharmacology has made advances that treat these conditions as manageable and so non-continuous rather than an inevitable decline and so more like viruses which can be dealt with like vaccines and other medications. Or it may be that there is a stigma in gender dysphoria that it is an issue ginned up so as to oppose its political opposition by showing things were better off when these unnatural occurrences had not come into view. Anger at something or other is the inevitable rhetoric of politics and people prefer to think that they can overcome their shortcomings through efforts of will. But that is the way things stand in a Trump Administration that insists on identifying others as having malicious intent.                             

Another Short Post on Race

People say the United States is on the edge of a constitutional crisis when in fact the nation has gone over the edge and it is about race. Masked government agents detain and make disappear long established as well as “criminal” people on the basis of them looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish or around places where illegal aliens might be found. The Supreme Court has decided in early September that such apprehensions are justified because the detainees can be released if they are found not to be illegals. That violates both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments which has for hundreds of years meant that people can be detained for probable cause of a particular crime rather than general suspicion or suggestive features. I don’t know why the American people are not up in arms about this authoritarian move but life seems pretty ordinary despite this insult to the Constitution but after all the Harris campaign did not make much headway with the American people in that democracy was on the line in this election and Democrats today are going back to inflation and economic issues as the basis of their challenge to the Trump administration rather than getting to the core issue of constitutionalism. What the Supreme Court now allows can be used to stop anyone of color or race or political affiliation to be stopped and detained for any suspicion, which means most people and that is an attack on the heart ofAmerica.

Trump’s racist impulses are overt and of longstanding, back to the days when his father discriminated against Blacks in his housing developments and the federal government went after that for that. He came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015 by excoriating Hispanics for having calves like cantaloupes because they were carrying drugs with them over the border. Trump has said that Norwegians can come to America but not Arabs or people from “Shithole” nations. He said Haitian legal immigrants were literally eating cats and dogs inSpringfield, Ohio. He treats inner cities as pestholes rather than struggling populations of the sort of areas from which white ethnics emerged. He doesn’t hate all minorities. He is more supportive of Israel than any prior President and gave the Jews the backhanded compliment when Trump was running casinos that he wanted his accountants to be wearing yamulkas, but all things considered he is the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson, who expelled Black workers from the federal civil service and does worse than Wilson in trying, as abetted by Governor Abbott of Texas and others to eliminate voting rights protections or gerrymander out minority districts. 

People are blase about the present situation and it traces back to the unwillingness of Democrats to ask Republicans again and again whether they supported Trump fomenting the insurrection on Jan. 6th, 2021. Unmasking his racism would be a worthy companion piece. Don’t be civil so as to bring down the heat when the other side undermines American principles. As the Senate hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi showed, the two sides have only contempt for one another. I don’t know how it will end.

A Short Post on the Shutdown

The shutdown is a constitutional way to  confront Trump’s unconstitutional and just very bad policies and statements.

I think I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the inside baseball of politics to know what is going on behind the shutdown, however much the significance of the shutdown is clear and everyone decides whether or not to support it. Four months ago, Chuck Schumer and some of his Democratic Senators went  over to vote with the Republicans to support a continuing resolution so as not to shut down the government on the grounds that Trump would use a shutdown to fire a lot more federal workers more easily than otherwise and his Progressive allies thought that a bad idea but this time Schumer is standing up to Trump and Trump is threatening publicly to do in a few days just what Schumer said would happen. What changed? Maybe Schumer decided that the Medicare and the Affordable Care Act cuts were so serious that he had to take a stand regardless of the consequences. Or maybe the Progressives pressed Schumer on the issue and he gave in. The Progressives think there has to be more confrontation with Trump and not wait it out until the midterm election which Schmer prefers because the Constitution might be in a shambles to wait that long and I tend to agree that Democrats should resist Trump in every way possible that is legal. Moreover, the polls, according to a thousand member focus group by the Washington Post, support the Democrats, with twice as many blaming the Republicans as the cause of the shutdown, which is what happened as well in past shutdowns.  So Schumer is reading public opinion rather than the Progressives on how to play this rather than to accommodate to keep Trump from being even worse. So the Democrats are getting a shutdown on their own issue rather than a Republican issue but the Democrats will gain politically. 

Within a few days of the shutdown, the tone of Democratic support of the shutdown has shifted. Though minority leader Jeffries still insists itis about sustaining medicare and obamacare , others, including Sen. Adam Schiff, have enlarged the confrontation. The President has refused to pay for programs already authorized. He has fired people illegally. He is punishing only democratic cities and states from getting funds for infrastructure. He says Portland is in flames, which it is not, just like saying Springfield, Ohio legal Haitians were eating cats and dogs. He tells the military to wage wat on Democratic cities and regards Democrats as full of hatred, evil and Satanic, when I think only the first two applies to Republicans for cutting off nutrition to malnourished African children even though ngos would take the supplies and distribute the aid before they expired but the State Department refused and no Republican protested. There is nothing to compromise. Jeffries should take up a sombrero and a moustache along with all the other House Democrats as a badge of honor and so to make fun of the President. I don’t want the shutdown to end before the President and the Vice President, who abets the President with his lies and misrepresentations, to resign. It is going to be a long shutdown.

The virtues of politics as an object of contemplation of what it is as a thing and as a participant is that it is clear and easy rather than secretive. It is not a Manoichien world where opposing elites battle above the fray of the common man as Whittaker Chambers thought was the case because he thought the final war wou;ld be between the Communists and the ex=-Communists. To the contrary, the confrontation took place in full view during tbhe Cold War and everyone was aware of it and took sides on whether the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam was a good thing and it ended with the Reagan=-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, though I suspect that not all of the Reykjavik Accords have all been disclosed these thirty five years later. Nor is domestic confrontation like it is in the recent very well done but fanciful movie “One Battle After the Other” where an oligarchic cabal represents white people in a war against Mexicans who are armed with secret codes and secret confederates everywhere. The oligarchs are in fact just out there buying Supreme Court Justices and giving gigantic campaign donations as are their opponents and legislation results unless taxes for the rich when the oligarchs win and gigantic campaign donations are offered to the opposition, not that the contributions don’t cancel one another off because what matters is whether the nominee is personable or not. So politics is clear in that what you need to know about it is apparent. Politics is also easy in that you need no expertise to participate not needing to know the expertise required to run a supermarket or a hardware store but relying on whatever information or rumors a voter comes across and apply whatever common sense, as it is called, or ideological framework it has to inform itself. Politics is not in the stars but in peoples selves. So an educated person can decide to rid their hands of the matter, deciding that religion or cultivating one’s garden is the way to live, but I prefer this sport and form of co;;ective interaction as a way to understand something always engaging, a never ending soap opera with new faces and struggles and carrying great moment for how a collectivity will proceed and worthy because it is not opaque but transparent. Politics in our time can muddy or cleanse and see it happen, and that will occur with the shutdown.

Charlie Kirk's Decorum

I liked Charlie Kirk when I saw his YouTube videos of his format that any topic is up for discussion at meetings with college students, at one of which he was assassinated Wednesday. I liked when he took up Feminists who couldn’t say what a woman was and he took up Hamas supporters who were very ill informed. I didn’t agree with him when he was out of his depth and didn’t see the difference between Soviet Communism and Socialism. Maybe he should have finished his undergraduate education. An autodidact will have a lot of holes in his education. But many educated people also think they know more than they do, including me.

What I liked best about him was the manner and content of his discussion with students. He was pointed, humorous and, most important, never tried to demean his interlocators, only to make a shambles of their intellectual positions. He was respectful, just the way a debater is supposed to be, which is not what political advocates and especially politicians do not do. 

There were two immediate standard responses on the news of his death. David Axelrod said that both sides should draw back and consider carefully their remarks so that people recognize that they are human beings rather than just partisan advocates. Elizabeth Warren provided a different take. She said that Trump should be blamed for having fomented violence, and there is some truth in that in that Trump is notorious for villainizing and personalizing his opponents ever since he appeared in 2016 presidential debates and talked about sleepy Jeb and little Marco. So the Republicans are more the offenders to decorum in politics rather than equal offenders with Democrats. I remember when Jesse Jackson during a Presidential Primary Debate in 1984 confronted Phil Donahue, a talk show host trying to play moderator, who was being sarcastic. Jackson  said all of these candidates deserved respect. It was a grandstand gesture to answer a grandstand attack but still deserves notice as the honorable custom for how people for high office should be treated.

 Oh yes. There was the trucker who said  on the evening of te assassination, “This is war”, disregarding or even not knowing that two Democratic Minnesota state senators had been shot in their home a few months ago. If this is war, like the movie “Civil War”, then you are entitled to kill the President or a trucker, and we haven’t come to that. In fact, the anti-Trump people have showed remarkable forebearance. They have not accused the newscast Trumpites of being in the league of insurrectionists, as all supporters of Trump were, as there is plenty of evidence of that from the Jan. 6th investigation and the tape ofTrump trying to fix the vote in Georgia. Trump nor his allies have ever offered an explanation of those matters and the rest of us have let go because the judicial system was too slow to bring Trump to court..

Cable news commentators on MSNBC are also violative of political decorum. They go after the persons rather than their positions. Lawrence O’Donnell showed the video of hair dye streaking down Rudolph Guiliani’s cheeks so as to defame him. MSNBC shows Trump to be having intestinal difficulties, the back of his pants stained. More undignified for the ones who present these facts than the ones in physical distress. Remember that photographers did not take pictures of FDR in a wheelchair though later on when addressing Congress about the Yalta meeting he said he would have to sit because carrying around a lot of iron was tiring. We had come a long way to when the Miami Herald broke the story of Gary Hart dallying with Donna Rice in 1988, dooming his Presidential nomination or Ken Starr trying to doom Clinton’s Presidency because of Clinton’s liaison, hardly an affair, with Monica Lewinsky. Nor do I care about connecting Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. There are bigger fish to fry, such as cancelling USAID so that food packets for malnourished children in Africa will not be distributed to them.

So we lost in Charlie Kirk a model of decorum even if his President, his principal, does not exemplify that.

Sleazy and Serious Politics

The Jeffrey Epstein case shows the differences in the Democratic and Republican parties.

When I taught introductory sociology and courses on social problems, and when AIDS was introduced to the world and all we knew at the time were the demographics of the disease, I would discuss with my students the inferences to be drawn from it so as to show how such inferences were made and keep my students up on current events. Haitian men seemed prevalent and were only later revealed to be homosexual because homosexuality was so frowned upon by the Haitian community. It was known, however, that children did not catch AIDS from the others in the family who shared utensils and a common living space, and so the disease was not transmitted by air or touching surfaces. When AIDS was discovered to be a STD, I would discuss what kinds of unions, what form of copulation, might lead to an infection and I did not feel queasy about discussing these matters with my mixed sex undergraduates because this was, after all, a biological matter, no different from discussing Malthus, who said that population increased more quickly than agricultural productivity. 

On the other hand, I did feel embarrassed discussing, some years later,  the stained blue dress Monica Lewinsky kept without cleaning it as evidence of her liaison with Bill Clinton which she revealed to Linda Tripp who told Roger Starr and that got rolling the Clinton impeachment. But I did talk about it, as well, such as concerning Clinton’s insistence that he had not had “sex” with her because he used that term only when there was mutual satisfaction. It was all so sordid and not befitting people of high political stature, just as it was unappealing to learn about Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, which destroyed his presidential campaign, and the romantic entanglements of FDR, which were hidden, or the unfaithfulness of Martin Luther King, Jr., where J. Edgar Hoover tried to drive King into suicide but to no avail.

And now the nation is confronted with the Jeffrey Epstein case and whether Trump was entangled with that and I also find the whole matter sleezy, not a proper topic of discussion in high politics because it demeans everyone touched by it including the female journalists cloaked with their own respectability but hardened to deal with unpleasant things because of their duties, like policemen or female lawyers. ButI do not want to hear about such things because however unfortunate are the victims, and that criminal penalties should be assigned, these are not matters of state, issues that turn the nation in one direction or another, such as international relations or tax and welfare policy, which impact vast numbers in the popu;ace. Both Republicans and Democrats violate their vows and people have done so through history, and we make progress for the nation by improving, in general, the condition of women so that none of them need to be exploited. Why care so much about sexual malfeasance in high places?

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is my current pin up girl because she wants to take the high road when Democrats confront Republicans. She thinks Democrats can win if they recapture the economic issues; I hope a generation from now she can run for President. She is a centrist Democrat who appeals to Republicans as well. But I think she is mistaken about the electorate. The economy was doing pretty well. Wages were up and inflation was low even if it did not result in de-inflation to make up for the inflation of the Covid years. That was not the engine for Trump. It was immigration and the deep state and Republicans and what are called low information voters who adopted those issues even though they told opinion polls that economics were the reason for supporting Trump because that was a more respectable reason to offer. They liked the disagreeable man because he was disagreeable: crude and angry. They wanted a strong man, cynical that leaders could be noble and considered, like Henry Fonda when he played a President. It is hardly comforting that recent polls show that immigration and decimating the bureaucracy are no longer in favor once Trump started doing what he promised to do. They voted for him and there are no reruns for elections, just the next one, but I am not sure Republicans will change their hearts now thatTrump is no longer on the ballot.

Republicans win by doing Republican things and Democrats win when they do Democratic things. Republicans since the end of the Second World War have been plagued by conspiracy theories and more establishment Republicans have had to deal with that. Joseph McCarthy insisted on numerous Communists in government agencies but always changed the figures of how many and shuffled his papers at a press conference so asto indicate information he never provided, just as MAGA people insist there is a great conspiracy of pedofile bureaucrats without providing information, as if they had lost the ability to distinguish speculation about terrible things with evidence. But while McCarthy was talking about something that was real, the Communist movement in the United States, which was in fact trivial and honeycombed with FBI agents, the MAGA people are so intellectually impoverished that they cannot think of any greater threat than a pedophile ring to assign as what is rotting America. They might have focussed instead on the diabolical nature,. let us say, of Hollywood and Broadway. MAGA does vie with elite universities as having subverted America, insisting on more representation for Conservative professors and students, without considering that the brightest prefer to abjure Conservatism because MAGAs insist that politics is a faith that need not be explained, just extolled. Moreover, moderate Republicans also engage in an upward climb against what George W. H. Bush considered “voodoo economics”, the height of which are current MAGAs voting for the biggest deficit in relation to GDP since the Second World War.

The Democratic Party, for its part, has been ever since FDR on a long march to expanded entitlements. Obama was in line with that in thinking he had accomplished only one big accomplishment in that direction, the Affordable Care Act, and no more than such an increment could be expected in any one Administration. Sen. Slotkin is in line with other Democrats in saying it is always the economy, stupid. But that is not the truth. Civil liberties, immigration and the Constitution were on the ballot in 2020 and it was right for Harris to pit democracy versus authoritarianism. The fault was not in the message but in the voting public which failed to understand the key issues to be what they were.

Moreover, to our surprise, Trump in his Big Beautiful Bill is out to overcome incrementalism in the other direction by expelling millions and millions of immigrants, thrashing the bureaucracy, and violating civil and criminal law. Trump may be ignorant but he is still audacious. Why can't he make Canada the fifty-first state? Some Republicans these days who are outspoken Christians condemn the assaults on women by Epstein and his ilk, are nevertheless willing to accept allowing foodstuffs to be destroyed rather than sent to malnourished  children. They are hypocrites. They forget the coals in their own eyes. Jesus must weep.

The Jeffrey Epstein case will pass. Despite the Democrats thinking otherwise, the MAGAs will not eat their own. Today, July 22nd, Speaker Johnson closed Congress by going into summer recess so as to avoid a bill to open the Epstein files and the suits to open the files will be bogged down in technicalities, as has happened with past attempts to make Trump responsible for his actions. Just as well. I don’t want the public to make decisions on the basis of sleaze.. Let us get on with more serious politics.