November 3, 2015

Voted at Saint Eugene’s. Received a doughnut.

Humanities debacle yesterday. Will talk it over with the class. The theme was “Disability as Diversity,’ which has nothing to do, they admitted, with our study, but provided a day which didn’t have to be planned. My belief is that a person with a severe speech impediment should probably not take up public speaking. To replace speechmaking with writing or painting or teaching or any other thing in this world is overcoming the handicap. To take up public speaking is to impose it.  If I were a bad actor, would I expect to be cast anyway on the basis of my wanting to be an actor? Should my bad acting be taken as noble defiance of the gifts which were dealt me, and the others which were withheld? Or just a test of everybody’s patience? Just willfulness? Our speaker could barely be understood, and much of his testimony– about forced sterilization in the 30's-- was lost. Nor could I quite understand why it was scheduled in the first place. The topic is not provocative, for not one person in the room could be expected to disagree with him or have another reasonable perspective. Another opportunity for easy indignation? He couldn’t mention the perps without identifying them as “white men,” a buzz word that sank immediately into everyone’s receptors, whether it was relevant or not. He victims he spoke of were white women. But if you didn’t know about eugenics, now you do, if you had the patience to unravel the smear of sounds.

Three nail-spitting blaspheming meltdowns already, and the day is little more than half over.