Barbie, Disability, and the Death of Formal Rhetoric

Ben Shapiro expresses his well-thought-out opinion in a totally reasonable manner.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the capacity to discover the possible means of persuasion concerning any subject.” Pointy-headed and abstruse, yes, but a reasonably concise description of what I tried to teach in Freshman Composition. When structuring our language around contentious issues or painful controversies, we must think in terms of what will persuade our intended audience. That standard is often subjective, and moves almost whimsically.

Two recent events have re-centered this difficult process for me. I recently witnessed an unpleasant online dispute quickly spiral out of control. A disabled person noticed that a friend’s anecdote about helping a disabled stranger contained certain ableist prejudices. The story was well-intentioned, but fit a genre of short narrative sometimes disparaged as “inspiration porn.” All such stories mean well, but misfire by showcasing able-bodied generosity over disabled autonomy.

As sometimes happens when disadvantaged persons ask for consideration, some observers saw this criticism as personal attack. Like The Former President, who saw kneeling football players as disloyal “sons of bitches,” the OP’s friends closed ranks defensively, lambasting the critic for “attacking” their friend and “ripping him to shreds.” The defensive posture became so energized that they persisted even after the OP cautioned them to back off and cool down.

When Ben Shapiro, the massively online full-time professional offense-taker, protested Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie this summer by lighting two Barbie dolls on fire, he apparently thought he was making a serious point. The entire internet, however, responded with aggressive disdain. Shapiro evidently thought this fire was an appropriate synecdoche for his internet-friendly outrage. But even his staunchest allies had little support for a petulant boy destroying his sister’s toys.

Shapiro makes most of his living doing personal appearances on college campuses, engaging undergraduates in “debate.” He organizes his public persona around the motto “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings.” Superficially, Shapiro seems to advocate Aristotelean rhetoric as persuasion through evidence. Yet the Barbie incident demonstrates something Shapiro’s critics have long noted: he cares only about winning, usually by personally demolishing anyone who disagrees with him.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

The disability debate pushed me into an awkward position. Both the OP and his critic are friends, whom I respect dearly. I struggled to triangulate a position where I supported both while clarifying that I considered the criticisms justified. This meant finding ways to say “you’re wrong” without making the statement personal, and managing the feelings of defenders whose emotions already ran high. Therefore my participation mainly consisted of overthinking and extended paralysis.

Rereading the debate afterward, I noticed something I missed in the moment: the critic and the defenders kept talking past one another. The critic offered copious evidence, including cited sources and hyperlinks. The defenders hand-waved all the evidence, focusing on the perceived personal slight in the original callout. Because the critic intended no personal slight, she never addressed it. Therefore, both sides’ core concerns never got addressed.

When Ben Shapiro mistakes destroying toys for pitching an argument, the core problem probably resides in who he thinks his audience is. Shapiro has garnered acclaim by performing stunts designed to embarrass progressives and dissidents. Such displays help unify his hard-right audience and create a base primed to listen (and, importantly, to buy his advertisers’ sketchy products). But it’s more likely to alienate anyone who doesn’t already agree.

In other words, Ben Shapiro, his Daily Wire media company, and similar massively online conservative outlets like Daily Caller and The Blaze, create loyalty to an ideological brand. As I’ve noted before, these outlets generate an almost religious sense of unity. Sure, the ideological sense of aggrieved White masculinity coaxes new converts through the door. But once inside, the politics generally matter less than the sense that we’re traveling together.

That, I realized (with some pain), happened with the disability debate. While the critic attempted to structure a formal argument supported with evidence, the OP’s defenders formed a perimeter around group loyalty. Rereading the previous sentence, I realize it sounds pejorative. Not so; when disadvantaged groups face systematic challenges, group membership enables them to organize and support one another.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not here to call out or condemn anyone individually. Rather, to return to classical rhetoric, I believe the two groups had “mixed stases,” that is, they were having two different arguments. But that’s become the problem with online ideology. Too often, we care more about defending the group than seeking the truth; that goes double for us White able-bodied cishet males. The group becomes paramount; the truth gets lost.

...and the Dogs Licked His Sores

The Rich Man and Lazarus (undated Orthodox icon)

Two friends, in two completely different circumstances, have quoted Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) at me recently. This forces me to turn inward and contemplate one of Christianity’s more opaque passages. This narrative, which only appears in one Gospel and has no explanatory text, doesn’t easily admit one-to-one interpretation. It reads more like modern literature than religious text, meant more to disquiet readers than enlighten souls.

The rich man—nameless in the text, but christened Dives in the English theological tradition—lives comfortably inside a fortress-like enclosure, never having to see the squalor around him. Jesus contrasts Dives’ comfort with Lazarus’ suffering. Not only is Lazarus hungry, he is “covered in sores,” presumably leprous, which makes him ritually unclean under Jewish law. He’s so unclean, in fact, that “dogs came and licked his sores.” Dogs, under Abrahamic law, are filthy scavengers.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t contrast here between rich and poor. He contrasts between a man so rich he never needs to touch the ground, and a man so poor he can’t get off the ground. One lives so richly rewarded by this world’s standards that he never needs to participate in this world, and the other must plead for crumbs so he doesn’t leave this world prematurely. Despite this, they’re separated by one thin door, and when the time comes, they seemingly die simultaneously.

Read from a conventionally middle-class moral position, the story seemingly culminates in rewards for earthly suffering, and punishment for earthly indifference. That’s how my childhood preachers interpreted this story. Lazarus ascends to heaven, not because the poor are particularly righteous or deserving, or because pain creates holiness, but because God favors the poor, and casts away those who don’t use God’s earthly blessings to assist the needy. Seemingly straightforward.

Except, as I’ve recently become conscious of widespread systemic ableism in Western society, the story has unwelcome creases. Jesus doesn’t only make Lazarus poor, he also makes Lazarus sick, and so thoroughly sick that he’s vulnerable to scavenging bottom-feeders. But Jesus seemingly offers the ultimate counsel toward patience. Wait your turn, he seemingly says; in the afterlife, God will comfort the afflicted, and consign everyone else to Hades. Just shut up and wait.

The Rich Man and Lazarus
(Sir John Everett Millais, 1864)

In practice, that’s how Christian theologians have utilized this story. Shut up and remain patient, countless bourgeois ministers have asserted, and eventually, God will reward your patient suffering. Those same ministers counseled Dives’ luxurious descendants to gift charity from their surplus, an attitude that still survives whenever you hear anybody say, “charity belongs to the church, not the government.” But an economy based on resource hoarding never gets truly fixed.

Because of Lazarus’ leprous sores, lepers’ hospitals in Victorian England were termed “Lazar-houses.” Mostly run by religious charities, these hospitals let professional Christians scoop lepers off the street, so they wouldn’t beg at the gate. But they walled lepers inside massive, fortress-like sanitoriums. Where Dives lived inside his palace, and Lazarus begged on the street, wealthy Victorians walked the street unmolested, while lepers lived inside their Lazarettos. The upshot remained unchanged: Get them out of sight!

These aren’t historic oddities. Nancy Isenberg describes the degrading language America’s founders, including Thomas Jefferson, used to describe chronically impoverished and ill White people. America’s last “Ugly Laws,” which saw people jailed for being poor, disfigured, or unpleasant to look at, weren’t repealed until 1975. P.T. Barnum built his entertainment empire by displaying disfigured, congenitally disabled, and otherwise outcast persons in his “freak show.” Barnum’s “freaks” accepted this treatment because, otherwise, they had no means to earn a living.

Conventional bourgeois interpretations of the parable focus on Dives’ earthly prosperity, and everything he loses. Middle-class pastors warn parishioners to remember the poor, and to provide sustenance from their worldly excess. Perhaps this interpretation isn’t unfair, since Jesus himself focuses his greatest word count on Dives, and everything Dives lost. But Jesus himself isn’t neutral. Jesus does something disability rights advocates deplore: he reduces Lazarus to a mute prop, with no agency, in his own story.

Jesus undoubtedly intended this story for rich audiences. Luke’s Gospel is uniquely blunt in scolding the wealthy: where Matthew’s Beatitudes promise blessings to the poor, Luke’s parallel passage promises punishments to the rich. These warnings remain as relevant today as when Jesus spoke them. Yet in targeting the rich, Luke’s Jesus strips agency from the poor. Jesus makes Lazarus an object of rich people’s pity, and disability advocates know, pity is one step removed from contempt.

Another New Front in the Disability Wars

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s bizarre handling of Twitter, formerly a reasonably respected outlet for minority voices, took a weird turn this week. Musk’s argument with an Icelandic product designer revealed not only internal business practices whereby contracted employees have no idea whether they’re still employed, but a top-level willingness to mock the disabled. It also further exposes the moral rot inherent in America’s—and by extension the world’s—economy.

When Elmo bought Twitter last autumn, I speculated aloud that he’d moderate his increasingly weird opinions. Not because he’d change his mind (his formerly center-left views have drifted into fascist-adjacent territory over the last three years), but because he’d learn quickly that advertisers wouldn’t pay him if their product appeared beside commercially unpalatable content. Outright bigotry hurts your bottom line anymore. Just ask “Papa” John Schnatter.

Rather than learning, however, Elmo’s most recent Twitter spat reveals how money insulates executives from consequences. Since the buyout, Twitter’s workforce has fallen by over two-thirds, including the entire staff responsible for finding and purging bigoted content. As a result, “hate speech,” defined as language targeting blanket groups for aggregated disparagement or threat, surged five-fold in just the first twelve hours. Anecdotally, the incidence of bigoted language remains worse than that.

I realize some readers may consider this a non-issue. If the bird site collapses, why not let it? Nobody particularly mourned when MySpace collapsed under similar mismanagement. But I’d contend it seriously matters, because Twitter provides an important venue nobody else is offering. As journalist Sarah Kendzior writes, Twitter provides a platform where minorities, LGBT+, and the disabled have the same chance as anyone else to be heard.

Product designer Halli Thorleifsson represents probably the least-heard among those categories. While antiracist voices and pro-LGBT+ voices remain active, and have entire months dedicated to resisting their diminishment, the disabled have remarkably few allies. Even those who, like me, have personal stakes in disability rights advocacy sometimes forget the groups with whom we’re nominally allied, because their voices get lost in the brouhaha.

Halli Thorleifsson

Though not disabled myself, life circumstances and personal relationships have taught me recently how widespread ableism is in America’s economy. Our society openly disparages anybody who cannot shape their lives around a forty-hour work week. The fact that Elmo initially answered Halli Thorleifsson’s inquiries with a laugh emoji, and refused to believe that anybody with diminished physical capacity could work for him, is only a highly visible example.

According to government statistics, disabled Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as the general public. I can’t find statistics on underemployed disabled Americans, that is, Americans working below their training or mental capacity simply because they can’t perform heavy labor. As I learned during my teaching days, people who struggle with diminished physical abilities, but aren’t paraplegic or otherwise stereotypically disabled, often aren’t counted as disabled at all.

That’s why it matters that Thorleifsson got a fair hearing through Twitter. The platform gave him an opportunity to draw public attention to his maltreatment—something few other disabled workers often receive. Halli Thorleifsson proves the lie behind the argument that “nobody wants to work anymore.” He’s living proof that, given the opportunity, most people prefer productivity and usefulness. But a dollar-value economy won’t grant them that.

The implications go beyond one social media platform. Historically, small-F fascists targeted disabled people before racial or ethnic minorities. Not just in Germany or Italy either, but here in America: the SCOTUS decision in Buck v. Bell, which permits the involuntary sterilization of the disabled, has never been formally overturned. Even the Former President (mostly) knew to use coded language in disparaging minorities, but evidently considered the disabled fair game.

Elmo’s distrust of public mockery isn’t entirely unjustified. He probably remembers, more acutely than us civilians, the public furor surrounding the Ligma/Johnson hoax and other similar fake callouts last October. I can’t entirely blame him for meeting an open-sourced accusation with initial distrust. But the fact that he didn’t have somebody present to remind him not to answer a developing disability rights argument with a laugh emoji is disheartening.

If Elmo succeeds in his ongoing campaign to constrict the bird site and silence dissenting voices, disabled workers like Thorleifsson will have even fewer channels for distributing their word. And, let’s be honest, that constriction seems likely. Elmo is exceedingly thin-skinned when criticized, and is unlikely to permit such public criticisms to happen again. It seems a question of when, not if, he’ll close another door for disabled workers’ rights.

Disability Chic and Toxic People

Don't be fooled, this badge is a lie

Check out this masterful piece of PR. According to circulating reports, two women are selling these lanyards around Gretna, Nebraska, a small town between Lincoln and Omaha. They purport that wearing this badge gives wearers liberty to enter public places without masks. Gretna mayoral candidate Angie Lauritsen reports that the makers actively sell their lanyards by claiming their magic powers derive from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

I won’t waste time debunking this claim; smarter reporters than me have done it already, and extensively. Briefly put, it’s complete bullshit. More interesting to me is the attitude that these vendors, and the people who buy from them, have about disability. They apparently believe that, first, disability is something you can assert, like joining a church, or supporting a political party. And second, that claiming disability gives them some kind of super-rights under American law.

The underlying philosophy behind these lanyards, and other similar scams sold by online hucksters, is that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) permits blanket exemptions from private rules, public laws, and common decency. If you simply assert you have some disability—which, the vendors say, you needn’t justify with evidence—private businesses must play dead. Voilà, you’re instantly special; you have rights other people don’t.

Functionally, this attitude is identical to people who believe that African Americans, LGBTQIA+, and other designated groups have “special” rights simply because their rights are protected. When groups who have historically been marginalized start having their rights recognized and defended, those who’ve been protected by the status quo have a pathetic tendency to whine. They apparently can’t imagine others having rights, except at the expense of the majority.

I’m reminded of Mitt Romney, Senator and former Presidential candidate, who in 2012 appeared on a smuggled video recording claiming that, were he Hispanic, his election campaign might be easier. This statement was, admittedly, ambiguously phrased. He might’ve simply meant that more Hispanic voters, a growing and lucrative voting demographic, might support him. But he might’ve also meant life is easier for protected minorities, which Romney isn’t.

This insistence that protected people groups live on the gravy train achieves a particular level of silliness with disabilities. Unlike African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or women [sic], people with disabilities often look remarkably similar to the general population. Though our stereotype of disabilities remains stuck on paraplegia, a stereotype reinforced by the wheelchair-using parking spot, we’re increasingly aware that many disabilities don’t have obvious external markers.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

Respiratory problems like pulmonary fibrosis or extreme asthma may diminish a person’s ability to perform routine mechanical tasks. Same with movement disorders like Huntington’s disease or dyskinesia. I’ve recently become aware of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which erodes a person’s connective tissues, leaving them progressively fatigued from even minor exertion. All these conditions leave sufferers severely disabled, without the photogenic disfigurements of traditional disabilities.

Briefly put, we’re aware, in ways we weren’t just fifteen years ago, that not all disabled people look disabled. This means a gold rush for people who want some form of protected status. White, male, heterosexual Americans who feel aggrieved that their rights don’t need spelled out (because the deck isn’t stacked against them), now believe they can claim protected status, just by asserting they have some undefined “disability.”

Which returns us to the Gretna lanyards. I called them a “masterful piece of PR,” and I meant it. The rhyming slogan makes them memorable and lets them occupy a piece of your head rent-free, like “birds of a feather flock together,” or “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Stating “please be kind” makes it look like they’re seeking mercy. The final tag, “disability rights are human rights,” ties the lanyards’ lie to a verifiable truth.

But that doesn’t make it any less odious. Healthy, able-bodied people attempting to circumvent science-based prevention measures, by pretending to acquire disabilities, disgusts me. Not only do they think they have some God-given right to inflict their infectious microbiome on everyone around them, they’re ultimately damaging the infrastructure of protections for people with actual disabilities. This will create long-term consequences for vulnerable people.

If you think asserting a “disability,” which you don’t have, makes you glamorous, or that there’s anything sexy about falsely claiming membership in a historically dispossessed people group, you’re worse than wrong. You’re a garbage person. Because any ill-informed or misguided wingnut can be wrong. But it takes a special self-infatuated asshat to go from merely not knowing the facts, to actively hurting others. That’s what this lanyard does.

Fear of a Disabled President

President Trump has evident difficulty drinking water from a glass. Everyone from late-night comedians to basic cable pundits to America’s social media clusterfuck has reminded us that the President occasionally struggles to drink gracefully. His intermittent need to double-fist a drinking glass has become, alongside his famous struggle to descend a ramp, a metaphor for the President’s opponents about his struggles to execute his constitutional duties in office.

One year ago, I probably would’ve joined this pile-on. I would’ve participated when left-leaning media figures mocked his evident difficulty, comparing him to a toddler with a sippy cup. I would’ve jeered at the twitter video macro that called him “the greatest president ever” when, at his June 20th Tulsa rally, he demonstratively drank water with only one hand, I would’ve laughed along when that great authority on political decorum, Fonzie, showed up the president’s water-drinking panache.

Because it really is funny, in isolation. President Trump likes mocking any perceived weakness or shortcoming in his opponents. During the 2016 campaign, his attacks on Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for being “low energy” and lacking “stamina” were clear metaphors for what he considered their moral weaknesses: if they can’t be constantly frenetic, he implied, they couldn’t have moral fiber enough to lead. The water-drinking jibes simply turn that back on him, and reversal jokes are funny.

But life circumstances have made me conscious of public ableism recently. When we use people’s physical shortcomings to belittle their moral character, I’ve realized, that redounds on us. I don’t dare get into too much detail about what’s made me conscious of this, since it’s not entirely my story. However, in brief, when people with serious physical disabilities struggle to perform common tasks, while attempting to remain useful to society, that’s on us.

One hand pic.twitter.com/nrCOW27Yuk

— Henry Winkler (@hwinkler4real) June 22, 2020

Like most of my generation, I grew up considering disability as synonymous with paraplegia. I was among the first generation who had to internalize the reality that you mustn’t park in the designated “handicapped spot,” a term I realize is now considered offensive, but still commonly used. And the “handicapped spot” was signified by a wheelchair icon. Disabled people must necessarily have immobile or missing limbs.

Worse, if anybody uses the “handicapped spot” who doesn’t visibly, obviously need it, my generation internalized the attitude that this person is committing a moral offense. Reserving the “handicapped spot” isn’t just a positive good, it’s a moral imperative. So if somebody emerges from their car in that spot, and walks away, we feel moral outrage akin to witnessing sexual harassment or public urination: this person has transgressed the unwritten law.

Thus disability becomes a moral indicator. People who transgress our idea of what constitutes a disability have committed a sin. But what about people who have invisible disabilities? Fibromyalgia, neuromuscular disorders, connective tissue problems, and chronic pain place severe limits on people’s ability to perform routine acts. They can’t necessarily work eight consecutive hours, carry their groceries unaided, or walk across a long, hot parking lot.

Watching the President struggle to drink water, I see a man facing common musculoskeletal problems which come with age. Most of us past age thirty recognize that we can’t always perform physical tasks with the grace and equanimity we once had. The man might have a minor age-related disability which needs insignificant accommodation. We could make serious accusations against this administration; struggling with drinking isn’t one of them.

Humans, though, think in metaphor. Outsiders watching Trump struggle with his water glass and who, unlike me, haven’t been jolted into awareness of how society treats invisible disabilities, see an external manifestation of moral culpability. It’s difficult to grasp the years-long “kids in cages” scandal, cozying up to nuclear-armed dictators, doubling down on systemic racism. These issues are big and decentralized. Drinking-glass difficulty is small and easy to see.

So, when small-screen pundits belittle Trump’s difficulty drinking water, they mean their insults poetically. His real scandals are so big, and hard to see, that our outrage dissipates. So we pull focus onto his physical infirmities. But in so doing, we reinforce the message that everyone facing invisible disabilities is actually concealing moral failures. We’re bolstering the idea that the disabled are just bad people.

There are multiple serious accusations to make against this administration. In pulling focus, paid pundits are trying to create a capsule argument for Trump’s moral degradation. But they’re doing it in a way that paints with an unsustainably broad brush. And whether they realize it or not, they’re creating an environment that’s going to be even more hostile to people facing regular, day-to-day difficulties. That doesn’t help anyone.

Changing the Rules In Mid-Game

I struggle sometimes when friends share something publicly, which they intend as uplifting and encouraging, but which reveals their unexamined biases. Do I draw attention to the implicit bias, knowing this likely causes hurt feelings for limited social gain? Do I ignore the situation, knowing it allows wrong ideas to ratify themselves? Spoiler alert: I’m so conflict-avoidant that I usually do the latter. But this time I’m speaking up.

This weekend, several friends shared a story on social media about a developmentally disabled boy named Shay who, seeing other boys his age playing baseball, asks to play. He gets placed low in the batting roster. When he’s at bat, the opposing team literally bobbles every available play to ensure Shay bats a run, even knowing it’ll cost them the game. This is presented as a heartwarming story of kids granting a disadvantaged boy the opportunity to feel loved and useful.



Having limited experience with similarly disabled kids, I appreciate the sentiment. These kids seldom get to feel included, or welcome with peers. Because developmental disabilities often manifest in parallel physical disabilities, such kids are often denied the opportunity to compete equally. Yet, for all I appreciate the underlying motivation, I think the expression is potentially dangerous, because it makes the story all about what we, the “normal,” do for them.

We can find the first problem in the name. Though the story got new traction this month, Snopes identifies the story originating in a book published in 1999. Shay’s name, though, has been anglicized from the more assertively Jewish “Shaya.” I’m reminded that a bowdlerized version of Taylor Mali’s poem “What Teachers Make” continues circulating, with the cusswords excised, and the narrator renamed “Bonnie.”

Setting this subrosa colonialism aside, I still struggle to understand how it’s ennobling to change the rules of a game already in progress to ensure desirable outcomes for certain kids. It creates the idea that their successes are something we, the arbiters of normalcy, permit them to have. It establishes the disabled, including all categories of the disabled, as requiring our pity. Ultimately, the story exists to make “normal people” feel good about themselves.

Part of the nature of sports is that we follow the rules. We don’t do so because the rules are morally right, like rules against murder or theft; nor because the rules standardize social interactions, like traffic laws. Rather, when playing baseball, football, or whatever, we follow the rules because they are rules. Because doing so puts every participant on equal footing, allowing distinctions to arise from comprehensible and consistent foundations.

That isn’t what happened here. In this story, players deliberately ignored the rules and biffed the game to elevate one kid above others. While I can understand maybe throwing the disadvantaged kid a slower pitch, the coördination necessary for this many kids to deliberately manipulate a game’s outcome seems particularly unlikely. Sure would be nice if kids really gathered to protect and advance their own this way.

Both teams could, hypothetically, huddle together—with Shay in their midst!—to create nonce rules that keep everybody participating equally and make the game about something other than winning. Existing leagues have done that. But that isn’t what these kids did. Instead, they created rules that only applied to one player, for one at-bat. Then they celebrated that kid for accomplishing the remarkably low standards they set him.

The celebration, therefore, cannot be about Shay, though he, surrounded in the excitement of the moment, may perceive in that way. Ultimately the kids celebrate themselves for showing magnanimity do somebody they consider deserving of pity. Like the temple leaders whom Jesus castigated for loudly pouring their coins into the copper kettle, these kids celebrate so they can publicly affirm, to themselves, what good people they are.

Please don’t misunderstand. I laud and praise these children’s motivation, even if, as Snopes admits, the story is more likely a parable than something which actually happened. They wanted to make a chronically excluded child feel included, and I cannot disagree with that. If something like this happens in your view, please reward this behavior, and help the children find ways to pursue their goals that aren’t condescending.

But as told, this story extols “normal” people bestowing largess from their places of power. It creates a temporary endorphin boost for one disadvantaged child, but teaches his peers that generosity is something they bestow from atop the hierarchy, with only minor sacrifices that won’t impact their lives very much. And that, sadly, is no kind of message for today’s children.