Edge-centric

PopMatters' Associate Film and TV Editor Todd Ramlow does as good a job of laying out the show's premise as I've found:

[T]he over-sentimentalization and pitying protocols of dominant culture towards disability frame the show. Each episode focuses on two "tragic" victims of various disabilities and the doctors who will "cure" them. The narrative structure is predictably manipulative: each person's disability, difficulties, and family are introduced. We meet the medical team, and hear about their "ground-breaking" procedure. We are shown the patient's apprehensions, some complications during surgery, and the emergence of an altered individual at the end.

The first two episodes featured Todd, "blind since childhood due to an allergic reaction to penicillin"; Vanessa, "who suffers from degenerative bone and joint disease"; Emily, a 19-year-old "with a severe form of Tourette Syndrome"; and Adrian, a toddler with Vater's Syndrome (born with five fused ribs on one side, which radically changed the shape of his spine). Through the "miracles" of modern medicine, Todd has stem cells and full corneal transplants that return his sight (though to what degree is never mentioned), Vanessa's spine is fused so she can move without chronic pain, Emily receives Deep Brain Stimulation treatment, and Adrian has an expandable titanium prosthesis attached to opposite top and lower ribs, which will afford the little boy "the chance to stand tall." It's not so much that the medical treatments for these disabilities are a problem, especially in the case of Vanessa, who experiences chronic pain. Certainly, helping individuals to live without ongoing and intense pain is a good thing. Rather, the problem has to do with the able-bodied presumptions that underlie Miracle Workers. Todd, for instance, is perfectly "normal" in every respect except one. He is married, has several children, and a full time job as a nurse's assistant. His "tragedy" is that he has never seen his wife or children. (Read Ramlow's article.)

I'm sorry to say the show's premise doesn't surprise me one bit. I think it's only to be expected in a culture that adulated Christopher Reeve, that couldn't see that his "walking by 50" cure-or-bust mantra was the opposite of disabiilty pride. A culture that still doesn't seem to have a clue that the quest for cure isn't the end-all of every disabled person's life.

There's plenty of blame to go around. Sure, blame the mass culture and the media. They deserve it.

But blame disability rights movement activists, too. We simply haven't made it clear enough that the problem is not "broken bodies" but broken policies and broken laws. That the problem is a denial of rights. We don't stay on message. We don't raise hell enough. We don't write enough letters to editors. We don't blog enough. We don't write enough op-eds.

Chicago ADAPT activist and freelancer Mike Ervin did an op-ed for the Progressive Media Project that so far -- as of the time I write this blog entry -- has been picked up by the Tallahassee Democrat and the Myrtle Beach Sun News Irvin calls the show "insulting to people with disabilities," but predicts it "will become a feel-good hit" -- simply because it "reinforces the comforting myth that if people with disabilities are on the fringes, it is up to us alone to try to fit in better by seizing every opportunity to change who we are. It relieves everyone else of the daunting obligation of doing the hard work of creating a culture that is more welcoming and just."

Ervin's op-ed is going to need to be picked up by more than a few papers if it's to make a real dent in consciousness.

In the kind of everybody-gets-linked-to-everybody-else villaging that is the blogosphere, John E. Smith wrote of precisely this thing in the Washington Post back in January. It's a Life, Not a Feel-Good Moment, he said, referring to media's penchant to turn a disabled person's reality into what might less charitably called news entertainment. (Earlier today Smith posted a comment on our MediaCircusBlog entry by Lawrence Carter-Long: he wants us to let him know if he got it right. Yes, he did. Exactly.)

Smith was referring to feature stories about his son, a wheelchair user who goes rock-climbing and kayaking, among other sports. Now we've got an entire reality show to contend with.

Ramlow also gets it exactly right when he writes,

Disability, then, is the individual's problem. The "cure" is out there, Miracle Workers suggests, and if you, person with disabilities, can't "overcome," "we" can't be bothered.

For confirmation of this we need look no further than California's North County Times, a San-Diego area online paper that's been carping about access for months now, carrying on an ongoing diatribe against crips who file lawsuits to gain access to inaccessible businesses. No matter that it is the businesses who have been breaking both federal and state law in refusing to modify their premises; the ongoing story line is that the problems are all being caused by the crips. A recent installment has William Louis complaining that wheelchair users are using the wrong kinds of wheelchairs. It's their own fault, in other words.

This kind of thinking is really all around us today. So Miracle Workers isn't all that surprising. It's an artifact of our reactionary times, a climate that no longer believes in re-making society along egalitarian lines -- not when we can get individuals to have themselves remade in our own likeness. Which is a lot of what "cure" is all about. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

And even those who rebel at the idea of other minorities remaking themselves to fit into society don't seem to "get it" when the "minority" is someone disabled. Even a feminist, we learn, can be a Step Nazi.

The bottom line? People love this kind of cure stuff. And there are millions of disabled folks out there who want to be cured, too. The disability rights sensibility just hasn't permeated very far into folks' consciousnesses. The Louisville Courier-Journal's TV critic likely got it right when he wrote that the show is "sure to bring a flood of mail from people pleading for the Miracle Workers team to take their cases." ABC told reporters that the show would "help people." But producers, wisely hedging their bets, were also sure to tell reporters that even if the show got lousy ratings, it would still be "helping people." Disabled people, after all, need "help." That's the conventional wisdom. And people who rain on that parade are seen as mean-spirited. But Miracle Workers seems headed for the basement in the ratings department nonetheless. Not, I'll wager, for the right reason, though.

I wonder what would happen if ABC decided to do a reality show on getting businesses to make themselves accessible? There could be on-air fighting and screaming as small business owners denounce wheelchair crips. The crips could file suit. Then we could have live courtroom drama, too...