THE LONDON PARALYMPIC GAMES. "SO NICE TO FEEL GOOD"

This is a posting that large numbers of people may find distasteful. Even unpalatable. This is because it challenges you to question your personal attitudes to these recent games for disabled athletes.

Don’t worry, it’s not you alone at whom I am pointing a finger but also the television presenters, trackside and events commentators and newspaper journalists gushingly and patronisingly involved and making a sweet living off the London 2012 Paralympics.

In a way you were all in it together. Whether admiring the courage or the successes of the athletes, particularly those who are British, you were all getting something from their infirmities. Sure, they loved your adulation, but adulation is also a two way stretch. Don’t deny that it also made you feel good because you were cheering, supporting something so worthy. In short you were getting something out of it too. The misfortunes of others were also making you feel good about yourselves. Maybe, just maybe making you think how lucky you are to be well, to be whole. In that sense too you were getting something out of these athletes. Dare I say it, getting off on them.

The London Paralympic Games of 2012 for disabled athletes has been comprehensively dominating the news from all the media outlets over the last week. You were reading it, watching it, listening to it, so you’ll know that politically correct attitudes were almost a legal requirement. Quite frankly, watching television presenters fawning over every disabled athlete and drooling over each and every class of disadvantage, borders on the ghoulish. As for the involvement of the British public in this current disability fest, as pointed out above, interest and admiration can run both ways, especially in a nation where drunkenness, anti-social behaviour, child neglect, domestic violence, uncontrolled obesity and abusive conduct are rampant along with attacks on disabled people.

In a nation where people care less and less about each other, the Paralympic Games provided these self-same people with an opportunity to feel good about themselves because for a few weeks they could think they were doing the right thing. Having the right feelings for those put up by the media as worth it. And of course, there was no television channel more self-righteous and worthy to present an Olympic Games for disabled people than Channel 4, home of political correctness. It must have paid serious money to the London Olympic Games Organising Committee to get them because coverage of events has been effortlessly and endlessly broken up by commercial breaks mainly featuring Sainsbury’s, seamlessly announced with superb casualness by Clare Baldwin’s endlessly grinning side-kick. Both of course are politically correct appointees but it is the former who is riveting with her strange almost mechanistic nodding when things are said to her, her cold unsmiling eyes and general lack of any effusive spontaneity or warmth that endears her to so many viewers ever eager for gold.

Yes gold and more gold! It’s fascinating that whenever a silver medallist was interviewed track or pool side they were first congratulated and then questioned about their failure to win and how they felt about it, especially when they only fractionally missed out on a victory. That kind of behaviour was heartless. It put pecuniary gain before sentiment and came across as callous. Couldn’t they imagine how the athlete must felt, having put themselves through so much to lose by only a fraction and then have it rubbed in on national television by some insensitive commentator. Little wonder that their faces more often looked miserable when they walked away.

However, if there was anything really noticeable in these Games it was the delicious contrast between this kind of thing along with the too often patronising manner of the presenters and the downright spontaneity and exuberance of the athletes themselves. Those with neurological disorders such as spina bifida and cerebral palsy are impaired, not mentally ill and generally know better than most of their non-impaired fellow human beings where they’re at, but they are also often possessed by the exuberance referred to above. It wasn’t something sweet to be patronised. It’s more like the freedom most people don’t have. That’s been socialised out of them. Helped them become people who can control their lives and often the lives of others. Given them the authority to become authoritarian.

Maybe that’s why in ultra-conservative, fascist regimes, the controlling authoritarian mentality is well suited for judging spontaneous joyous exuberance as defective. Not entirely human. Well suited for suppressing and murdering such people or locking them away in institutions. The Nazis did the murdering, the British did the locking away bit for years, stopping the practice only recently. Also worthy of mention is that in the 1940s and 50s, countless children from working class backgrounds with seeming learning disorders were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Australia to work as servants under child labour programs. Today Romania and some of the ex-Soviet republics still practice the same out of sight out of mind trick.

Sorry to digress but I thought you should know. We can admire the dedication and achievements of disabled people in athletics or whatever else they do, but let’s cut the crap and stop pretending we’re virtuous. The truth is that it’s these people who were giving us something, not the other way round for the few lousy benefits that get grudgingly handed out. It’s not something manifest like a performance but a thing that’s rather more subtle. They are showing us another side of the human condition. Something we don’t want to be and in truth really don’t want to know. Okay, once every four years or occasionally on the street, but see it all the time, or live with it? Then perhaps we become rather less accepting.

It’s alright on television every four years and this is home soil after all but have to deal with these people and their problems on a daily basis? Best done in special places privately by carers out of sight, or when you see disability on the street its hey look it’s one of those… Disabled people force us to confront another side of the human condition. Okay, see it. Fine on television. Just as long as it’s not part of our lives.

The London Paralympic Games gave us the chance to see disability in full flowing achievement. It tickled our altruism for a couple of weeks then we’ll forget it. Go back to joining the gutter press carping about benefit scroungers.

Yes we forget. Those gutter press journalists and their mobile phone hacking! Those banker bonus scroungers in the City of London! That last Labour Government who put the infirm and disabled under such threat. Threats and cuts that the Liberal Democrat partners in the present Government are so happy to go along with.

Liberal and Democrat? Yeah, go tell it to the students you lied to, Nick Clegg. Go tell it to those you promised Parliamentary Reform. Go tell it to those who thought you’d get a grip on the bankers. I see you’re wearing a Paralympics badge these days Nick, so why not go tell it to the disabled!

Now that it’s over, with any luck you’ll remember some of the multiple gold medal winners in a few months’ time, maybe even some of the big name stars, but the silvers and bronzes and those who won nothing like most of the athletes, British or not, will sink below the horizon. They’ll remember what they  did and how they competed. Not for you but for themselves. Up there for that big personal moment far more than a mass public audience before the candle goes out. For you it’s an hour, a month or a year. For them it’s forever. You joined in the festival to watch people you’d never heard of just a few weeks ago and be part of their show while the drooling television presenters turned them into temporary heroes.

The act of going to watch these Paralympic athletes was cathartic for spectators in more ways than one. You indulged in flag waving patriotism, indulged in wearing funny clothes, indulged in feeling good about being there, indulged in feeling good about supporting the disadvantaged. Indulged in watching courage in action. Why else did you go? Was it because you really care about these people?

Yes of course we care, you’ll indignantly protest!

Sorry to disabuse you but you really ought to stop kidding yourselves. For most, such a belief is only part of your imagination. A kind of fantasy about wanting to do the right thing, a ghoulish never-land that exists between fantasy and reality that you temporarily inhabit when you see someone walking with a stick or no arm in a sleeve. You’re a disability ghoul like so many others, occasionally escaping into a world of good intentions then choking at the sight of a limb hacked off at the elbow or someone with severe cerebral palsy. You’re not up for it and who can blame you.

You’re just not as human as the disabled are so often forced to become.

 

Comments welcome