Persistent Vegetative State

I, Smart Ass Cripple, wish to publicly declare that if I am ever in a persistent vegetative state, I do not want to continue on. Please pull the plug.

I’ve seen people in persistent vegetative states who try to keep on going. It’s a sad and depressing sight. I would never want to live that way. And I know it would be heartbreaking for my loved ones to see me in such condition.

And now, I, Smart Ass Cripple, wish to publicly declare how I define a persistent vegetative state. I know that it is characterized by a total lack of brain function. But beyond that, I can only define it the same way former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography: “I know it when I see it.” And I, Smart Ass Cripple, see people I consider to be in a persistent vegetative state when I watch the Republican National Convention.  Especially disturbing to behold are those who actually try to draw attention to the fact that they are attending the Republican National Convention.  They dress up like Uncle Sam, accessorized with a bullet sash and assault rifle. They get revved up with joy and hoot and howl like a tasered moose. It takes a lot to stand out in an endless sea of white people.

As I watch this spectacle in horror, I have to remind myself that in spite of our differences, we are all humans and every living human contributes something of value to life on earth. If nothing else, we all exhale carbon dioxide, which is good for plants. But then I wonder if the steady decline in brain function that plunges one into this state of being eventually reaches the point where that person drifts across the line into planthood and begins exhaling oxygen and ingesting carbon dioxide. As I watch these frenzied conventioneers dancing with glee in a blizzard of red, white and blue confetti, I figure this must be the case. There’s no other explanation.

This is what I mean by a persistent vegetative state. It’s tragic.

I pray with all my might that I will never find myself in this persistent vegetative state. But you never know for sure.  Here in Chicago, there are these evil machines all over town called red light cameras. If you turn right on red without coming to a complete stop it snaps your car’s picture and in the mail you receive a ticket for $100. Fascist bastards!  They’ve stuck me for $300 so far! It’s enough to make me want to join a survivalist militia. But then I come to my senses.

But maybe someday I’ll crack. First, I’ll make a star-spangled, stovepipe hat out of cardboard. And before I know it, I’ll find myself on the convention floor.

If that happens, please have mercy and smother me.  I would never want to live that way.

Home of the Midgets, Part II

 (Smart Ass Cripple Disclaimer: Once again it is my sad duty to report that the following story is true.)

Some people will track the beginning of the collapse of American society to a cataclysmic event that occurred in  December 2012 in Cranston, Rhode Island. It was the day Michelle “Chelley” Martinka went grocery shopping.

Chelley came across a jar of Cains brand pickles called kosher dill midgets. This disturbed her. Her eight-month-old daughter,  Adelaide, had recently been diagnosed with Achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism.

So Chelley made a video and put it on YouTube. It’s more or less an open letter to the distributor of the pickles. Over a montage of pictures of Adelaide, she gently but firmly explains that a lot of little people think the word midget is deeply offensive. About a month later, she was contacted by a representative from Gedney Foods, the distributor of the pickles, who informed her that the word midget would be dropped from future labels.

The news spread fast through a lot of media outlets.  Chelley wrote about her pickle adventure on her blog.  Here’s a small sample of the hate mail comments her action inspired:

Idiot A: Dwarfism is genetic. She should be mad at herself and the child's father....not a pickle company.

Idiot B:  It scares me that this type of hyper-political correctness is threatening our First Amendment right to free speech… Let me enjoy my pickles with the original name printed on them. ..You are an unbelievably pompous ass. .. The truth is, you’ve been dealt a card you’re not comfortable dealing with and the shame lies within you about your daughter. You’re the one who is small.  Shame on you.

Idiot C: Maybe you shouldn’t have been shooting herion (sic) during your pregnancy… Where’s the dad? Do you even know him? By the looks of it ET is the dad.

Chelley says someone even tracked down her street address and sent a scornful (and anonymous, of course) letter to her home. “It was amazing,” she says about all vitriol. “At first I cried a little bit and then I said ‘This is dumb.’ People are reacting from behind a screen. It feels like bullying. Adult bullying.”

But Gary Arnold, president of Little People of America,  has Chelley’s back. His letter of inquiry to the U.S. Department of Agriculture prompted a review of what the agency calls its Commercial Item Descriptions for food products. USDA discovered  that the term midget is one of its official description categories not just for certain pickles but also for shelled pecans, canned lima beans, processed raisins, canned mushrooms and trail mix. Arnold has received assurance from the FDA that this language will be updated soon.

So the idiots better hurry before all is lost.  They need to organize and launch a campaign to pressure the USDA to stand up for traditional family values and retain the word midget. Like Idiot B says, if they can’t call their favorite pickles midgets anymore, they just won’t taste the same.

Home of the Midgets

(Smart Ass Cripple Disclaimer: It is my sad duty to report that the following story is true.)

I used to say that one good thing cripples have on other oppressed minorities is that nobody names sports teams after caricatures of us. You never see the Seattle Spastics, the Pittsburgh Palsies or the Detroit Droolers.

But I was sooooooooooooooooooooooooo wrong!

Gary Arnold is president of Little People of America. One of his duties is to vigilantly monitor the use of the word midget in our culture. A lot of little people consider midget to be a slur. It doesn’t matter why. They just do, okay? That ought to be good enough.

Keeping track of how cavalierly we throw that word around is a big job. “Every day I get a Google alert for the word midget,” Arnold says. And every day between two and 10 references pop up. Some of the references are about Penn State assistant football coach Anthony Midget. But most of the rest are about the midget classification in Pop Warner football.

And a few years back, Arnold got an email from a Midwest mom who said her local high school football team was named the Midgets. “She said she hopes by the time her kid goes to high school that name will be gone.”

So Arnold and an LPA colleague did some research and found seven U.S. high school teams called the Midgets. And yes, they were all in small towns. It seems like there’s some sort of David and Goliath overcompensation syndrome going on. We’re small but we’re mighty, dammit!

 Arnold wrote a letter of complaint to the school boards in all those places. Most ignored him. Arnold and his colleague were invited to Freeburg, Illinois to visit Freeburg High School, home of the Midgets. They were received cordially. But as far as Arnold knows, none of the schools have dropped the Midget name.

Some people get pretty irate when you try to take their “m” word away. The sports teams at Dickinson High School in Dickinson, North Dakota are called the Midgets. In 1996, the Dickinson school board voted to drop that name. This riled the locals so much that three board members were recalled and the name was restored.

I don’t get it. There are a lot of different ways these schools could keep the small but mighty thing while losing the midget thing. If they want to promote that whole David concept how about this for a team name: the Davids. It’s simple and direct. Or why not the Mosquitoes? Mosquitoes are small and mighty, especially the ones that spread malaria. The team logo could be a pissed off mosquito that’s morbidly obese because it’s full of malaria. But even the regular old American mosquito is a pain in the ass. I tried to meditate once. I was sitting by a lake and all was quiet and peaceful. So I tried to close my eyes for five minutes and just be in the moment. But I couldn’t do it for more than five seconds because I kept getting buzzed by fucking mosquitoes!

 It looks like it will take a lot more than letters to bust this thing. Arnold will probably have to marshal up a couple hundred little people to chain themselves to the turnstiles at high school football and basketball games. And in response, governors will probably send in the National Guard.

And it’s not just in small towns or at Pop Warner games. The word midget is batted around like a beach ball even in the highest levels of the U.S. government!

More on that is coming up next time in part two of Home of the Midgets.

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Everything Must Go!

I fear that for me all will end with neither a bang nor a whimper but with a somber yard sale.

Everything must go!

If the day comes when they haul me off to the Happy Haven nursing home, I’ll have to leave 99.9 percent of my shit behind.

Austerity!

It will be a painful triage. Forget about my music collection of roughly 300 cds. No room for that at Happy Haven. Pick four or five “deserted island” cds, or in this case “nursing home” cds.

And all my rows and piles of books, too. Liquidate! Pick four or five.

The same goes for clothes. How many shirts will fit in my one lone personal closet and/or nightstand at Happy Haven? Six? How many pants?

Furniture? No need or room for that anymore. Dump it all! Dump all those kitchen gadgets, too.

I suppose it’ll be a whole lot less traumatic if I can convince myself to embrace austerity. Austerity, they say, is good for the soul. Buddha says suffering is caused by attachment. I could welcome my banishment to Happy Haven as an opportunity to experience the joy of unencumbered purity, like the Buddha.

I could learn to see my abrupt, involuntary downsizing as my big chance to live like Jesus. Jesus didn’t own a damn thing except his sandals and gown. But the problem is, millions of people have tried to live just like Jesus and the only one who has succeeded is Jesus. That’s because there’s a key difference between Jesus and everybody else: Jesus knew magic. Jesus could make sculptures out of lightning if he took a notion. He could catch a lightning bolt in his bare hand and twist it into the shape of a poodle or a giraffe or anything he damn well pleased.

It’s a helluva lot easier to renounce all worldly possessions when you know magic. If Jesus had a big craving for something like a beef sandwich, all he had to do was conjure one up. Either that or any of his thousands of acolytes would have been more than honored to go fetch one for him. We’re all taught that Jesus used magic only for the public good and never for personal gratification, just like on Bewitched. But I don’t really believe that, do you?

In the mortal world, austerity is like apple picking. It’s okay and maybe even beneficial if it’s voluntary. A favorite autumn day trip for urbanites is to drive to a distant orchard and pay to pick apples. It’s a relaxing escape. But if you’re the guy who has to pick those apples all damn day every damn day for a buck a bushel, it ain’t much fun.

I’m still full of denial. I’m not ready to accept the inevitability of a final, irrevocable yard sale. So if the day comes when the grim Happy Haven reaper kicks down my door, I’ll rent a storage locker.

I was a College Marxist

Shortly after I went off to college, I became a Marxist. Since I grew up in a homogenous, middle class, straight-down-the-middle neighborhood, I was never exposed to anything like Mark. But in college, I was introduced to the works of Marx and I was captivated by his political brilliance. I wanted to be part of his revolution.

Soon I found myself quoting Marx, much to the annoyance of others except my fellow Marxists. My favorite Marx quote was, “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” And: “She gets her looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon.”

I studied all the works of Marx but I was particularly mesmerized by Duck Soup. Nothing molded my emerging political consciousness more than that work. 

My comrades and I belonged to the Grochonian school of Marxism. The other sects within our school were the Chiconians and the Harpoites. (Nobody was a Zeppoist.) But they were all posers! The Grouchonians were the only true revolutionaries!

I tried hanging around with the devotees of that other Marx—the guy with the long beard. I went to a few of the weekly meetings of their Marx reading group, which was pretty much like Bible study for commies. But I wasn’t jazzed up. That Marx wasn’t very funny.  I kept waiting for a punch line that never came.

Groucho busted the chops of the rich in a much more entertaining fashion. And I also felt vaguely threatened by the philosophy of the long-bearded Marx. I now can see that I was worried that if he had his way, I might have to give up my cripple privilege. It seemed like in his paradise, everybody toiled happily in a factory.  But what I liked most about being a young crippled adult was that it got me out of having to do stuff like working in a factory or at McDonald’s or going to church or joining the army. I was not without ambition. I aspired to make as much money as possible working as little as possible. I aspired to be like the guy that thought up the idea of the star registry. People send you money so you’ll name a star after them or their dead poodle, Fluffy.  Brilliant!  You sell the naming rights to something you don’t even own. Your biggest physical exertion of the day comes from endorsing all the checks.

Call me lazy. I don’t care. Laziness is a major motivating force for me. I don’t mind busting my ass in service of laziness. I’ll work three jobs overtime if that’s what it takes to make another installment payment on a new hammock.  I keep my eyes on the prize.

The March of the Dumb

I want to take a moment to commemorate the 85^th anniversary of the historic “March of the Dumb.”

It was 1928. People who couldn’t speak were getting fed up with always being referred to as dumb by those who could speak. So they got organized.

They held a convention.  The first order of business for the delegates was to adopt an official, universal method of non-verbally expressing their outrage over being called dumb. And this, my friends, is how giving the finger was born.

Then they decided to have a big march. So thousands of them gathered in Washington and descended upon the Capitol, carrying signs that said stuff like I’M NOT DUMB and IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE. This was probably the best political march and rally of all time because no one had to sit through a bunch of boring speeches. Instead, when they reached their destination, all the marchers turned toward the Capitol and, in unison, they gave the finger. I really wish I would have been there. Can you imagine how politically empowering that must have felt?

But the organizers of the march soon became discouraged. Everybody still kept calling them dumb. The media dubbed their march The March of the Dumb. Of course, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that it was unrealistic to expect any single action to bring about such a major cultural change. In every civilized, orderly human society, there has to be some group of people that the majority considers to be dumb. So an uprising of the dumb was seen as the beginning of the slippery slope into anarchy.

So the organizers devised yet another innovative political tactic. They formed the first “Mothers Against” group. They figured that if you call your organization Mothers Against whatever, you can morally intimidate your opponent into submission because nobody wants to be seen as against mothers against. It doesn’t matter what the mothers are against. So they formed Mothers Against Calling People Who Can’t Speak Dumb aka MACPWCSD.

But everybody still kept calling them dumb. Nobody took MACPWCSD seriously. Again, when viewed through the lens of history, we can clearly see that the flaw was not in the idea but in the execution. We now know that for a political acronym to have traction it has to spell an actual word or at least be rhythmic like NAACP. Otherwise all you have is a bunch of Roman numerals. It can’t just be Mothers Against any old thing. It has to be Mothers Against something that spells something, like against pornography or nitroglycerin or yodeling or serial killers. And it has to be a word with a positive or at least neutral connotation. You’ll never get much sympathy with, say, Mothers Against Ovens.

At any rate, this story has a happy ending. We don’t call people who can’t verbalize dumb anymore. And society at large owes the leaders of this liberation movement a huge debt of gratitude. Because remember, they invented giving the finger.

Ask Smart Ass Cripple Ad Nauseam

Dear Smart Ass Cripple,

Does your blog have a mission statement?

Yours truly,

Bored in Schenectady

Dear Bored in Schenectady (which is redundant),

I can’t believe you asked me a question like that! Any blog that’s worth the time it takes to click it up has a mission statement. A mission statement expresses the morals, principles, goals and values of the blog’s proprietor. A blog without a mission statement is nothing but pointless, narcissistic ranting.

So if you ever bothered to take a few minutes to read Smart Ass Cripple you’d know that the answer to your question is no, of course I don’t have a mission statement.

Dear Smart Ass Cripple,

Is Popeye crippled? I mean, he talks funny. I can barely understand him sometimes. Does that count as crippled?

Sincerely,

Curious

Dear Curious,

The best way to respond to you is to cite the work of Dr. Martin Faux PhD, J.D., LLC,  ZZZ, the world’s most renowned Popeye scholar. He poses this very question in his seminal work, “Popeye’s Struggle: An Examination of the Epistemological Nexus Between the Incapacity Paradigm and Expressionistic Convolution.” The number of people who have read and been influenced by this research paper will never be known for sure, but it’s believed to be somewhere around a half a dozen.

Professor Faux writes, “Within the Machiavellian persona of Popeye exists a quid pro quo. The innate convexivity of Popeye’s prolaxis is draconian vis-a-vis Olive Oyl. However, it can be stated unequivocally that Popeye’s modus majorum transfixes the representational modicum when posited beyond the parameters of his linguistic concubine.”

I hope that answers your question.

Dear Smart Ass Cripple,

Have you thought about being a Smart Ass for Hire? I mean, in the tradition of the Old Wild West.  Hired gun.  Rough frontier justice.  Have spiteful tongue, will travel.

The other day I really needed to slap down a snippy little twit, but just didn't have the energy or time.  I would have paid good, hard cash on the barrel for someone else to do it.

Just a thought, albeit a mean one.

With all due reverence,

Mad Woman in Madison

Dear Mad Woman,

There are times in life when smart asses are called upon to be the first responders. This is especially true when the nation is reeling in the aftermath of a brutal disaster, such as the election of republicans.

This is why I’m currently lining up investors to help me realize my dream of creating a worldwide network of smart ass rapid response squads. Subscribers to this service will receive a call button on a necklace. One simple push of the button and a nearby van of roving smart asses will speed to the scene of a situation such as the one you so vividly described. It is my hope that once the purpose of these buttons becomes well-known, it will serve as a powerful deterrent and people will think twice about messing with you. But if not, our highly-trained smart asses will make every attempt to arrive on the scene to dispense justice before the perpetrator escapes.

Our motto will be: If we’re not there in 30 minutes, it’s free.

(Contributing to the tip jar, purchasing books and subscribing through Amazon Kindle keeps Smart Ass Cripple going. Please help if you can.)