I
SHOULD WARN all of you at the very beginning this is an essay of
endless disappointment, anger and embitterment. As I have acknowledged
via this space many times before, I am accursed. The curse is dyslexia –
an indescribably horrible, bottomlessly depressing,
makes-me-look-like-an-idiot disability vividly demonstrated by the
mortifying fuckup that no doubt stripped me of all journalistic
credibility and reduced last week's essay to a textbook demonstration of
personal and political grandiosity.
It
is precisely because of dyslexia I have never been able to take myself
seriously as a writer. What is so embittering at this (final) stage of
my life is I have no choice but to embrace writing as my primary medium.
My physical ability to photograph – that is, to lug around the
requisite equipment and perform the essential contortions of the
Photographer's Ballet – is increasingly diminished: I am crippled by
worsening arthritis in knees and shoulders; I am hobbled by
deteriorating spinal injuries, the legacy of a Washington state
archetype, an obscenely coddled habitual drunken driver. My finances
are even more wounded: I can scarcely afford the expense of film and
processing; the cost of digital equipment and its prerequisite software
is forever beyond my reach. But to call myself a “writer” is a lie, a
gesture of phoniness, for no matter how hard I try to avoid it, my
twisted mental circuitry will inevitably do as it did last week: make
some horrendous mistake – typically a transposition – that will give me
the appearance of nothing more than a presumptuous moron.
Such
is dyslexia and the bottomless miasma of fear and self-hatred in which
the dyslexic is forever entrapped. It is no doubt the reason as a child I
came unusually late to speech, so late my mother had begun to dread she
would be publicly disgraced by having spawned a congenital idiot.
Probably – because dyslexia also destroys one's sense of balance and
thereby retards one's ability to learn to walk (for me a frightful
struggle during which my parents encouraged bipedal locomotion by
spanking me whenever I crawled) – my first recognition of selfhood was
acknowledgement of unacceptable inferiority. Obviously I was terrified
of making mistakes – or rather of the punishment so provoked – long
before I dared talk. I remained stubbornly silent until I felt
reasonably sure of my linguistic skill: what remained unsaid remained
unpunished. Finally I uttered my first word – “light” – and then, to my
parents' astonishment (or so I am told), I immediately began speaking
in complete sentences.
Dyslexia
is also why I was unable to read until I was rescued from illiteracy by
my mother's older sister, my Aunt Alecia Durand, dead of old age since
September 1993, but during her long lifetime a working artist and
professor of fine arts, the sole familial elder who did not either
despise me or regard me with embarrassment and scorn. My memories of
Alecia are uniquely fond and always uplifting, the only reliable
kindness and warmth in an otherwise cruel and chilly upbringing. It was
Alecia who understood what is wrong with me, who did not reject me for
my dyslexic failings, who gave me art supplies and encouraged my
creativity, who hired me a summertime tutor after I nearly flunked
second grade and who thereby freed me to advance so rapidly I was
reading at a 12th-grade level half way through third grade. Alecia was
my liberator, my childhood's first and only grown-up Muse. The tutoring
she arranged for me was the best, most pivotal, most affirming, most
cherished gift I was ever given by anyone in this life. It expressed a
depth of understanding and acceptance never approached by any other
adult in my family including my father, who – though he gave me my first
cameras – was so repulsed by my dyslexic disabilities he belittled me
as “goon boy” well into my early teens.
But
not even Alica could cure my loathsome penchant for dyslexic error.
For example though I grasp mathematical principles quite easily, I can
never do the actual arithmetic: my dyslexic brain invariably scrambles
the digits into the wrong answer. Elementary, junior high and high
school math was a nightmare of parental scorn and retribution, two
years of algebraic misery and a year of geometric stress, a three-year
sequence mandated by my father though my grade never once rose above an
unacceptable low C – my dismal performance the source of his judgment I
was “not worth sending to college.”
Two
decades later, my father already dead, I had the proverbial last laugh.
Much to my surprise, college math proved notably easy: I chalked up a
solid four-point average in basic physics and astronomy and the remedial
courses essential to compensate for my bottom-of-the-garbage-can math
score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. I even began to understand the
mathematically stated principles of physics as a kind of poetry. At
first I rejoiced, believing I had somehow been miraculously healed by
passage through the groves of academe. Later I learned it was merely
because in college I could smoke in class: nicotine, a potent
neurotransmitter, momentarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction.
Meanwhile
journalism – specifically photography and reporting (my efforts at the
latter always reinforced by cigarettes) – had become the one and only
intellectual endeavor at which I dared trust myself: film didn't lie
or distort its message, at least not in those days, and when the job
called for writing, I made damn sure I took accurate notes. There was
always enough nicotine to keep my brain focused and there was always a
sufficiently competent editor to make sure the demons of dyslexia hadn't
betrayed me with some inadvertent but nevertheless ruinous fuck-up. For
the first time in my life I acquired actual self-confidence: if there
was a story to be gotten, I knew I could reliably get it. Hence the
contents of my lifetime resume: about two-thirds of my income earned by
reporting and editing, mostly in staff jobs at various local newspapers
and a couple of major trade publications; the other third earned by
photography which – because it was blessedly immune to most forms of
dyslexic self-sabotage – brought me many years of local recognition as
an artist and occasionally garnered the imprimatur of credits from
genuinely significant journals: Newsweek, Paris-Match and The New York Times.
But
it was my reporting skill – my insatiable curiosity and my ability and
persistence at asking pointed questions – that opened the greatest
number of newsroom doors. Never mind my dyslexia-tainted spelling was
always less than perfect; never mind that was another of the failings
that proved to me I could never be a real writer. Even when I was a
teenager, covering sports as a part-time stringer, my editors applauded
my reportorial talent, suggesting – absurdly I always thought – I was
destined for journalism's upper echelons.
Obviously
none of these people recognized me as a dyslexic; had they done so they
would have dismissed me as my father had : “goon boy,” at worst an
embarrassment, at best a creature of no value. But by the time I was
doing newspaper work I had learned to hide my affliction behind
eloquence, to never allow anyone close enough to discover my
dysfunctional family's lurking scandals – madness, attempted murder,
divorce, brutality – much less to see my own repugnantly flawed mind.
As a result I was alone, profoundly lonely and without hope of
alleviating my loneliness. Not only did I “talk funny” – I had never
completely shed the accents of my mother's Michigan, my father's Boston
and my own native New York City – I was also spastically clumsy, a
dyslexic affliction impossible to hide and especially repellent to
females raised to lust after only the most gracefully athletic males.
My fellow teens saw my body-language as contorted and grotesque; their
disgust was palpable enough to keep me on the sidelines at the few
dances I dared attend. Better I not dance at all; better I stay home –
or content myself with covering the event for the school paper, of
which, by my senior year (1957-1958), I was managing editor.
In
September 1962, near the end of a miserably off-and-on marriage to
pretty but untrustworthy Baltimore art student and after my completion
of the three years active-duty required by a six-year Regular Army/Army
Reserve enlistment, I took a sports writer's job on The Knoxville Journal,
which had employed me as a stringer from September 1957 through
November 1959 and offered me full time work when I returned from Korea
to civilian life. All went well for the next nine months, but on 3 June
1963 – 49 years ago today – I was swept up in the flagrantly illegal
mass arrest of “40 Negroes and whites, most of them students at the
University of Tennessee” – suspected Communists, Communist sympathizers,
artists, intellectuals, bohemians and Civil Rights Movement activists
targeted by the local One Percent, a vindictively racist clique of
haughty southern aristocrats. (Have patience; this is a revealing
story – I promise – and what it has to do with dyslexia will be clear in
a moment.)
Quickly freed on the strength of my press card, I naively believed The Journal
would right the outrageous wrongs I had witnessed firsthand: an
unprovoked raid against a quiet gathering of graduate students and
faculty members, arrests without cause, the savage beating of a
Panamanian vice-consul named Milton Vargas, the brutal invasion of an
academic couple's shrubbery-enclosed yard and home by Knoxville city
police and Knox County sheriff's deputies, sneering thugs-in-blue who
rousted the bewildered guests, awakened and terrorized the couple's
hitherto soundly-sleeping three-year-old daughter and then trashed the
dwelling itself. But Editor-Publisher Guy L. Smith was uninterested in
what had really happened. Instead he demanded I write a racist lie –
that I substantiate a carefully contrived frame-up that would have
convicted and probably jailed 39 innocent men and woman on false charges
and in many cases ruined their lives or at the very least destroyed
their careers. I refused; Smith retaliated. He had me arrested in his
newsroom and charged – again falsely – with disorderly conduct. Ron
McMahon, Smith's disciple, star reporter, and chief journalistic
factotum then knowingly slandered me and the other arrestees on Page
One. Josef Goebbels would have been proud.
The
criminal case was soon dismissed, but I had volunteered my reportorial
skills to the Civil Rights Movement my first hour out on bail. I
agitated judicial resistance to the mass arrest and wrote
I-don't-remember-how-many accounts of what had truly happened. Among
these was a detailed report eventually published under my byline by The Knoxville Flashlight Herald, a
local African-American newspaper. Though a (white) Congress of Racial
Equality activist named Phillip Bacon edited the piece to death – he
reduced my angry prose to coldly emotionless academic dreck – the text
nevertheless revealed the basic facts of the atrocity. Meanwhile Ruling
Class Media throughout the nation methodically suppressed the real
story, either repeating the racist lie or affirming it by silence, never
mind the beating of vice-consul Vargas had escalated the arrests into
an international incident. But the formidably skilled reporters of Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza – Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (aka TASS) – soon assembled all the relevant details, and Pravda
published them on Page One of its Moscow and International editions,
the first public disclosure of the incident's ugly truth, a welcome
exposé of capitalist “democracy” and an enduring lesson in the varied meanings of journalistic freedom.
Though
I had nothing to do with the Soviet press coverage – at least nothing I
know of – the notoriety of the arrests themselves soon ended my
already troubled first marriage. I will never forget the concluding
conversation with my first wife:
Carolyn: “Are you getting involved with Communists and stuff?”
Me: “Probably.”
Carolyn: “Then I'm gone.”
Obviously
she did not realize I was “involved with Communists and stuff” at least
from the moment I became my father's son and – if reincarnation is
anything more than fantasy – for a lifetime before that as well.
Given
Carolyn's personal goals, which despite her bohemian facade included
many of the conventional milestone/millstones of success, she was
undoubtedly right to have left me, and I was relieved to see her go.
Indeed her departing question was typically, definitively hypocritical: she was
well aware of the red-star/hammer-and-sickle politics that for as long
as I can remember have been and remain the ideologies of my heart, yes
even during the years when – stupefied with anger at my betrayal by a
social-service agency – I was trying vainly to transform myself into a
“libertarian conservative.”
But
that is getting ahead of the story. Suffice it to say I was able –
despite the 1963 incident, despite also my penchant for the occasional
dyslexic error – to make a comfortable post-arrest home for myself at a succession
of small and mid-sized newspapers merely because I had an indelible
reputation as a competent reporter. Nor did I conceal the fact I had
neither personal regrets or professional contrition for my defiance of
Smith and his Ku Klux-minded effort to purge UT of its “troublemakers”
and “outside agitators” – the latter the source of this blog's title.
Often I made it clear that, were it necessary, I would go to jail again –
an assertion I frequently used to determine whether a prospective
employer and I would be a suitable paring.
Then
as now, the episode's only lingering bad taste is the astonishingly
ungrateful silence of the 39 men and women my journalistic integrity and
personal honor saved from conviction on trumped-up charges. Not one of
these intended victims – some of whom went on to distinguished academic
careers – has ever thanked me for the protection I gave them. None even
deigned to acknowledge my defiance of Smith, much less the penalties I
paid for it. Apparently U.S. academics regard newspaper reporters – even
reporters who dare rise up against oppression – as beneath their
notice. It is a prejudice I have observed many times since, another
manifestation of our nation's allegedly “nonexistent” class-warfare.
The
point though is the Knoxville incident, the odium of which undeniably
imposed an ideological ceiling on my career, nevertheless left me at
least marginally promising prospects for employability as a journalist,
thereby further encouraging my foolish belief I could overcome dyslexia.
I was especially emboldened in the Northeast, where in 1965 I quickly
learned my seemingly odd combination of cynicism and open-minded
curiosity was welcomed as an indigenous trait. Back in Manhattan during
the middle '80s, it appeared I would prosper there as I had during the
'60s – that is, until my first serious (medically mandated) effort to
quit smoking resurrected my dyslexia in all its dysfunctional
destructiveness. The result not only cost me a superb job but ended my
career: when you get the boot at age 46, you're done; the cause of your
termination is irrelevant. After that event – in 1986 – my life
spiraled steadily downward. Dyslexia always wins.
Its
triumph was also victory for the clinical depression induced by the
1983 fire. Though its mysteriously ignited flames destroyed my life's
work, consumed my identity and burned away any rational hope my efforts
would ever achieve meaningful recognition or significance, gainful
employment had dampered the depression itself. But it had nevertheless
smoldered like stubbornly persistent embers, and the career-loss
inflicted by dyslexia fueled it into a slow-motion inferno, an
all-consuming conflagration of inextinguishable magnitude and
paradoxically glacial result.
Thus
began my interminable journey on the highway of woe that descends to
the lowest most frigid circles of dyslexic hell. Familiar with
Washington state's formerly generous approach to rehabilitative services
– knowledge imparted mostly by years of award-winning reportage
(1970-1983) – I returned here from New York City in late 1986, stupidly
believing the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation run by the
Department of Social and Health Services would help me find some line of
steady employment with which to replace my dyslexically ruined
journalism career. Indeed I had a prospective occupation in mind,
something for which an extensive battery of DVR tests soon indicated I
was both intellectually qualified and psychologically fit. But DSHS,
apparently viewing me as a “white male oppressor,” chose to destroy me
instead. In 1989, after a long and bitter controversy over my
eligibility for rehabilitative services, DSHS labeled me “permanently
unemployable” and thereby forced me onto Social Security. Twenty-six
years before I was due to retire, I was condemned to live out my
remaining years inescapably imprisoned by the increasing loneliness and
isolation imposed by ever-worsening, eventually fatal poverty. The ruin
so inflicted was total and irreparable – not just economically fatal,
but a psychological death-sentence as well, anathema to anyone for whom
life and work were not just inseparable but synonymous.
Whether
ousting me forever from the workplace was the agency's revenge for my
earlier history of truthful and therefore invariably adversarial
reporting on its outrageous arrogance and habitual malfeasance, or
merely another example of the bourgeois-feminist fanaticism with which
it defied legislative intent by enforcing secret and illegal gender
quotas, or some malicious hybrid of both, I will never know. Nor do I
care; it no longer matters. What does matter is DSHS ended my life as
anything more significant than a complex lump of protoplasm; its damning
decree – ironically rescinded only by the formal conversion of my
disability stipend into my old-age retirement pension – informed the
world for the next 26 years I had been nullified, finished, canceled
out.
Had
my quest for a new career been successful, I would have continued
writing even if most or all my income came from unrelated sources. I did
just that during my year as a commercial fisherman (engineer/deckhand
on a salmon seiner, 1982-83), likewise through the years I earned most
of my pay working in printshops (1972-1976), during which I was also the
founding photographer of The Seattle Sun. But the fire had
made it impossible for me to pick up a camera without being felled by
grief; its most agonizing loss had been thousands of irreplaceable
prints and negatives, many of historical or sociological value. Though I
would once more take up photography in the mid-1990s, writing seemed
after the fire as if it were fated to remain my primary medium. Because I
assumed the label affixed to me by DSHS guaranteed I would never again
be credibly published, I now wrote purely for recreation: journal
entries, attempts at poetry, even reportage. The utter absurdity of
seeking significant publication was a backhanded blessing; it ensured I
was never dyslexically compromised by the absence of competent editors
and so absolved me from fear. In an eerie parallel to my early
childhood, what went unpublished went unpunished.
But
deteriorating health forced me to quit smoking again, this time
permanently, and 23 September 1995, my first day as a non-smoker, seemed
to be my last day as a writer of any sort. To attempt to write was to
trigger an intolerable nicotine fit, its physical sensation a massive
jangling of nerve-ends, its mental image my brain reduced to a writhing
double-handful of spaghetti-like worms from which I was trying vainly to
extract a word, a sentence, a paragraph, even a single character or
letter. For the next seven years I was so paralyzed by dyslexia I could
compose nothing more complex than grocery lists. Eventually – because I
discovered I missed the emotional release provided by recreational
writing, I taught myself to write again – practice, practice, practice –
though I knew my post-nicotine ability would never equal (or even
approach) the intellectual focus or the verbal speed and fluency I had
achieved by the suppression of dyslexia with tobacco.
Eventually
I did learn how to construct workable sentences and paragraphs without
nicotininc self-medication. But as I said before, dyslexia always wins.
Last week's unforgivable error proves I am as angrily disabled by
dyslexia today as I was on my first day without cigarettes, as ravaged
as I was on that awful 1946 morning in first grade I was proclaimed the
class dunce after the first public demonstration of my inability to
read. All that is different now are the manifestations: though I am no
longer revealed as an imbecile by my former inability to distinguish
between “went” and “want” or between “from” and “form,” I am still
effectively reduced to imbecility by the fact – no matter how good I am
at editing the work of others – I cannot catch a glaring blunder like
the one that utterly destroyed the credibility of last week's essay and
in all probability also obliterated the credibility of every word I have
ever written: misstating the title of Richard D. Wolff's Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism.
Of
course I eventually corrected my horrific fuckup – I had dyslexically
typed “Challenging Communism” – but I did not discover it until nearly
12 hours after the irrevocably damning fact of its electronic
publication, and by then the damage was done. Now you see why the
prospect of dyslexic errors always terrifies me, as well it should;
blunders like these have ambushed me for as long as I can remember. As a
smoker I nearly always caught them; when I failed, my editors came to
my rescue. The one exception throughout my entire career in paycheck
journalism – the still-nauseating public mortification of a
dyslexia-induced mistake on Page One of a suburban Seattle paper – was
allowed into print by a soon-to-be-ousted boss because his malice toward
me trumped his concern for the thrice-weekly's quality and reputation.
Now, today, as last week so emphatically proved, I have no defense at
all against dyslexia. And I presume it is only politeness that protects
me from a comments section justifiably overflowing with hurtful jeers.
Verily, I thank you for your silence.
Again,
such is dyslexia, a source of self-hatred that can never be ameliorated
because its demonstrations of disability are unrelentingly merciless.
Nor, in my case, is it dyslexia alone. This affliction in concert with a
long and depressing litany of other dismal autobiographical facts – the
fact I was conceived not with love but to entrap my father into
marriage; the corollary fact my mother tried to murder me on the Summer
Solstice Eve of 1945 (apparently, or so the evidence indicates she
believed, to pay the Devil for facilitating her entrapment of my
father); the subsequent fact my father – who had saved me from my
mother's knife – tried only weeks afterward to dump me in a Virginia
state orphanage – all this I take as irrefutable proof the infinitely
sadistic god of Abraham (if indeed he exists at all) not only regards me
as an abomination and hates me accordingly but takes cruel glee in
inflicting just enough suffering to ensure the core characteristic of my
life is constant obstruction – omnipresent gloom that now in old age is
intensified by the mostly low-grade but nevertheless relentless pains
of physical disabilities.
Such
too is the awful fate – or so say any number of mythologies – of the
intended sacrificial victim who somehow escapes or is rescued from the
altar of doom.
Because
dyslexia frustrates all its victims, anger and bitterness are among its
clinical hallmarks, but my own frustration is radically intensified
by the fact I have an exceptional intellect. Depending on the
measurement of intelligence-quotient, whether I was hung over when I
took the test and whether I was allowed to smoke, my IQ scores range as
high as 145 and have never been lower than 135. My verbal skills are
even more exceptional: they test in the topmost one-tenth of the
nation's uppermost one percent. Worse – at least for me – is the
corollary fact such abilities invariably foster irrepressible
“callings” – the instinct to be productively useful and win recognition
thereby. But now that I am forever denied the clarity of nicotine and
the protection provided by editors, dyslexia invariably reduces these
alleged “gifts” to liabilities, reducing the associated “callings” to
nothing more than invitations to grandiose disaster. Talent and the
instinctive need to properly apply it thus become, via dyslexia, a mechanism of indescribable vexation – literally an
internalized torture machine.
That
is the real horror of dyslexia: whether by the neurological clusterfuck
of “went” versus “want” or by its adult counterpart in “capitalist”
versus “communist” or by some other failure too hurtful for me to
remember or imagine, it forever obstructs my purposes. It obliterates
the joys of my achievements and replaces those rare pleasures with
unspeakable agonies of failure. Such is dyslexia as I know it: the
eternal triumph of a genetic flaw over which I am utterly powerless to
do anything save curse the god in whom I mostly don't believe for
damning me with an affliction the ruinous totality of which I cannot
doubt – a perfect example of divine malevolence, its tribulations
escapable only by death and perhaps not even then.
Do
not misunderstand: this is not my resignation from an always
disappointing and increasingly miserable life that given the realities
of capitalism can only become more desolate. As I have said so many
times before, the savagery of capitalism redefines survival itself,
elevating it to an act of revolutionary defiance. This is especially
true if one is, as I am, part of the bottom-most 99 Percent, those of us
who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are
ever-more-brazenly targeted for extermination by genocidal abandonment:
the unspoken policy behind the threats to Social Security, reductions in
Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare, and the slashing of every other
government service vital to our survival. Hence I will continue to
write; I will even – when I am so moved and assuming I am physically and
economically able – continue to photograph.
But
after last week's capitalism/communism fuckup I will never dare
imagine my writing has any merit beyond the fact it fills my remaining
hours and maybe weeks and months or even years and thus rescues me from
the overwhelming boredom that alternates with politically or medically
induced fright as the dominant conditions of the cast-off worker's
long slide through the carefully muzzled ghettos of old age downhill
into the ultimate silence of the grave. Such is the final lesson taught
by dyslexia, the ultimate proof life itself is at best a cosmic joke, at
worst a terminal illness. Never since the Summer Solstice of 1945
have my actual prospects risen above temporarily abated misery. It
cannot be said too often: dyslexia always wins. I am again my
disparaging father's “goon boy,” again my hateful mother's “clumsy
little oaf.” Dyslexia prevails.
LB/3 June 2012
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