NP? The hegemony of "normality"

[Paul Mackin]

The author of the recommended piece objects to calling the terrorists insane
because it tends to malign a group of sick people. Well, perhaps she has a
small point there but she seems to push it kind of far. Society equates
disabledness
with violence she believes and goes on to try and demonstrate this
proposition.
Seems to me she eventually makes the kind of leap in logic that is all too
typical
of alt journalism.

Speaking of the mentally ill she sez:

"So if people with such conditions (I think we would all agree) should be
cared for compassionately and provided with appropriate medical care and
supports why are they being framed as the culprits responsible for Sept.11?"

Huh?

Personally I don't know whether the terrorist were sane or insane. However I
do know that to SAY a particular terrorist is insane or even to say that all
terrorist are insane doesn't imply in any way that all the insane are
terrorists or have any innate tendency toward violence.. (Aristotle 101)

Of course we don't REALLY know for sure what the author exactly means
to say. Her language is sloppy. Is she really being illogical or merely
poetic?
Which is another major fault found in On-line Jounalism. No editors.


Or am I crazy?

P.


> Calling somebody insane is another way to dehumanize an Other.
> Enjoy,
> Doug
>
>
> http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-11/10russell.cfm
>
> ZNet Commentary
> Madmen? November 11, 2001
> By Marta Russell
>
> Since the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11,
> there have been numerous public outcries casting the terrorists and
> suspects as disabled.
>
> Former President Clinton as well as several pundits described the
> terrorists as "madmen." One writer labeled the Taliban a "cult of ignorant
> psychotics." Media pundits and government officials have called them
> "insane" or "insane SOBs."
>
> Some have used the term "sick people" to describe those who commit or
> support such acts. While comparing the "two enemies of democracy" as the
> Soviet communists and the Islamic peoples of the Middle East Former
Israeli
> Prime Minister Netenyahu on MSNBC (Sept. 20) described the Islamic belief
> system as "pathological."
>
> Others observed that the US policies have had a role in the strike against
> the US, have critiqued the ruthless acts of the CIA by labeling CIA
> operations as "insane."
>
> Here I want to look at what is beneath the inaccurate and seemingly
> off-hand casual way that society equates disablement with violence and
> unwanted acts.
>
> Each of these public figures and pundits have misused impairment and in
> doing so are building negative public sentiment based on assumptions of
> "normalcy." The men who flew into the WTC were not insane, they were not
> mentally disabled nor were they diagnosed with any illness yet they are
> being constructed that way. The terrorists are not insane no matter how we
> may disagree with their acts.
>
> Sane people commit murder every day. They fill the courts of our land.
> Timothy McVeigh could also be called a terrorist, he was certainly a
> murderer, yet he was not insane and he was not ill.
>
> Workers at the CIA who are behind the "insane" acts against governments
the
> world over are not diagnosed with physical or mental illnesses either,
> rather, they are carrying out institutional orders based on our
> governmentís policies.
>
> When society labels its enemies as "sick" and "psychotic" it is using the
> language in an inaccurate way. As an acquaintance of mine who has
> depression writes "I have several friends with psychotic symptoms,
stemming
> from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoid affective disorder, and
even
> in one or two cases from 'simple' clinical depression. Not one of them is
> in the least violent.
>
> (Even as a medical term, "psychotic" as a description of a _person_ as
> opposed to a person' _symptoms_ is seriously misleading.) They talk quite
> rationally of the voices they hear, and what the voices usually tell them
> is "you are worthless," so while voices can trigger suicide they very
> rarely trigger violence against others.
>
> Those who are actually sick (and not "sick") are well aware of their
> illness, suffer from it, and strive to control it."
>
> He poignantly makes it clear that the greatest "deficiency" of the vast
> majority of those who have schizophrenia is a deficiency of money. Many
> could manage their illness if they were not nearly penniless, disability
> pay and other income supplements being "criminally low."
>
> So if people with such conditions (I think we would all agree) should be
> cared for compassionately and provided with appropriate medical care and
> supports why are they being framed as the culprits responsible for Sept.
> 11? Why is there such a clamor to make the terrorists and other societal
> acts of violence appear to be the outcome of having an impairment?
>
> For one, those society identifies as "abnormal" have traditionally
inspired
> fears of moral collapse. Intellectual impairment, for instance, has often
> wrongly been linked to criminal deviance. I want to make it clear that
such
> thinking is eugenic in its origin.
>
> Psychology or psychiatry which defines the "normal" then calculates who
> doesn't fit that norm creates a division of "normal and abnormal." Such
> societal division can be traced back to eugenic thinking which groups
> disabled persons with the "unfit.".
>
> One example -- Karl Pearson a leader in the eugenicist movement who headed
> the Department of Applied Statistics in London, defined "unfit" as "the
> habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculocous, the insane,
> the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from
> excess" (cited in Kevles, 1985, p. 33)
>
> Society has created a harmful association between disability and criminal
> activity, mental incompetence and other conditions. The conflation of
> disability with depravity expressed itself in the formulation of a
> "defective class." (see L. Davis, "Constructing Normalcy" in The
Disability
> Studies Reader)
>
> Such correlations were used against immigrants as well. Charles Davenport,
> an American eugenicist connected to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, thought
> the influx of European immigrants would make the American population
> "darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature...more given to crimes of
> larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality." (cited in Kevles, p.
> 48)
>
> And such thinking infiltrated the left. Emma Goldman, socialist and also a
> eugenicist, wrote that unless birth control was encouraged, the state
would
> "legally encourage the increase of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics,
> dipsomaniacs, cripples, criminals, and degenerate" (Kevles 1985, p. 90)
>
> This is no critique of capitalism, it simply reinforced survival of the
> fittest social darwinist thinking and justified the social exclusion of
> these groups -- essentially letting capitalists off the hook to providing
a
> just economy that would accommodate all. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew
> Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell were all saying the same thing as Goldman.
>
> Societies continue to produce these ideas. James Watson, winner of a Nobel
> Prize for his work in genetics, still spews this kind of deterministic
> biology. Watson has linked disability to criminal proclivity and suggested
> to prospective parents that they should use genetic engineering to weed
> disabled persons out of society:
>
> "The truly relevant question for most families is whether an obvious good
> to them will come from having a child with a major handicap. Is it more
> likely for such children to fall behind in society or will they through
> such affliction develop the strengths of character and fortitude that
lead,
> like Jeffrey Tate, the noted British conductor, to the head of their
> packs?" ......
>
> "But we perhaps most realistically should see it [handicap] as the major
> origin of asocial behavior that has among its many bad consequences the
> breeding of criminal violence."
>
> [...]
> The 19th century construction of the "norm" is one of the most dangerous
> notions that the disability movement has had to confront. Here we must
> confront the conditioned use of such thought.
>
> For instance, another associate wrote "What you [those labeling terrorists
> as insane] are really trying to do is to be as insulting as possible
toward
> the perpetrators of the WTC disaster, and to say that they are really evil
> and you really hate them.
>
> [...]  The easy way out is for "norms" to use polarized conceptions of
> normal and abnormal, sane and insane, healthy and sick in order to demean
> and make the objects of public scorn subhuman. Well, then it is OK, is it
> not, to carpet bomb them or in the case of actual disabled persons
> segregate, institutionalize, or "put them out of their misery."
>
> I object to the use of "insane," "psychotic," and "sick" in the public
> language to describe the violence and hatred unleashed in the past weeks
> because it fosters the idea that disabled people are a social problem; in
> our instance, even a menace to society. Secondly, such labeling is
> reactionary and offers little direction for political action.
>
> In fact, to use individual mental/emotional/physical capacities as an
> explanation for terrorism or state sponsored atrocities depoliticizes what
> we are experiencing. It completely removes any possibility of
> historical/materialist analysis.
>
> The hegemony of "normality" is a bourgeois construct and we must recognize
> it as such.
>
>
> -- Marta Russell author, Los Angeles, CA http://disweb.org/ Beyond Ramps:
> Disability at the End of the Social Contract
> http://www.commoncouragepress.com/russell_ramps.html