Vonnegut's Ballerinas

Kurt Vonnegut wrote the short story "Harrison Bergeron" in 1961, but 51 years later it still has a sting. It's a cautionary tale about trying to make everyone "equal," and the story goes:

Harrison Bergeron is a handsome 7-foot-tall teenager who in the year 2081 is in prison because he is not handicapped enough. The dystopia of the story is one in which the federal government makes everyone "equal" by "handicapping" them. The chief administrator of this program is the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. The story is framed by Bergeron's parents, who are sitting and watching a ballet on TV in their home. Both are "handicapped" in different ways. Since Harrison's mother has average intelligence, she is not "handicapped," but Harrison's father, who is above normal, is: he has a little device in his brain that sends out electrical shocks if he thinks too much. Plus the father has a 48-pound bag of buckshot strapped to him to physically make him equal. On TV, the ballerinas are also handicapped in the same manner. They also have to wear masks, the uglier the mask, the more beautiful the ballerina. In the middle of their dance, Harrison escapes from his bondage, strips away all the impediments bestowed upon him by the Handicapper General on live TV, and proclaims himself emperor, taking one of the ballerinas as his empress. In the end, Harrison is shot by Diana Moon Glampers, right on TV, right between the eyes. And the story ends with Harrison's mom and dad seeing the execution, but then forgetting about it a few seconds later.

I haven't read Vonnegut in many years. The desire to revisit this story came to me as I was thinking about artists with disabilities, what "outsider art" means, and all the whole weird, unnecessary routes we take to describe how we value art and artists, as well as how we construct "disability."

Reading the story again I see that often good intentions, like ensuring that everyone is equal, and that "handicaps" don't "matter," can be an unproductive experiment, because in altering the playing field to make everyone the same, you also lose the main reason you are playing.

Viewing and consuming visual art, without judgment, without the construct of geniuses and amateurs, is a boring, sad endeavor: "Everything is beautiful in its own way," Ray Stevens once sang, and boy is that really not a great song. What Vonnegut's story seems to be getting at is the absurdity of even wanting to create a Utopia based on making everyone the same.

Schools and programs often try to do this when dealing with "disabilities." They try to create a fake level playing field through programs like Everybody Counts where kids are told to put on blindfolds to pretend to be blind, a pretty explicit example, but also through "political correctness" often dictating that "We are all the same." We aren't. And by pretending to be, or by trying to enforce some kind of equality based on "disabling" yourself, you lose the essence of what "disability" and "ability" mean.

In looking at art created by people with developmental disabilities, this means that there are geniuses and amateurs within that demographic (of course). In other words, not every person with a developmental disability who makes art is an "artist." Not every person with a developmental disability has a keen, instinctive visual instinct, or even an urge to create. 

Setting up "arts programs," then, for people with developmental disabilities, and setting up an art studio are two very different situations. If you don't make this initial distinction, this "discrimination," then you start "handicapping" the actual "artists" in any program by enforcing the program's vision: everyone is equal here.

Not true.

Sometimes art can be used as the great equalizer, but art never equalizes: it discriminates because it needs to. Without discrimination, pictures, sculptures, and other works of art lose their meaning, and all you end up with is a wall full of smudges, a free-for-all. Art constantly creates and re-creates its own rules, aesthetics, judgments, and definitions through constructing "inspiration" and valuing it. Once you try to eliminate those albeit made-up distinctions, art becomes anything you want it to be. At the end of the day, that is a very depressing notion to me.

Look at Vonnegut's ballerinas in "Harrison Bergeron." All of them masked and weighted down, dancing but not dancing, trying to make sure they are all doing the same thing in the same way. They don't want to end up hurting anyone's feelings.

What Is to Be Done?

There's this ongoing collaborative project I've been working on for a while, stops and starts. Not a top priority, but it keeps coming back into my head as necessary. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912 book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard. The work was an extended case study of Goddard's for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness," a general category referring to a variety of mental disabilities including mental retardation, learning disabilities, and mental illness. Goddard concluded that an entire variety of mental traits were hereditary and that it was important for society to institute a check upon the reproduction of "unfit" individuals.

The book for a time was all the rage in America, and even though Goddard's science was disproven, and he eventually apologized for the book, its echoes and demons still permeate the way we often see people with developmental disabilities. Goddard kind of let a genie out of the bottle, and the eugenics idea that "developmental disabilities" were something wicked and wrong that had to be fixed and/or eradicated still is the way many (most?) people view the issue.

The last chapter of the book is titled WHAT IS TO BE DONE? In it, Goddard states that "morons" and "idiots" and other "mental defectives" need to be colonized and sterilized in order to preserve society.

The book itself is free on Google. I downloaded it and read it and made a couple copies. Above is a photo of Deborah Kallikak (a made-up name) from the book. She is the central focus of the book. The last name "Kallikak" is actually the merging to two greek words, one meaning ugly and one meaning beautiful. The tracing of Deborah's "bad genes" back to a dallience Deborah's great-great-great-grandfather had during the American Revolution with a slutty tavern waitress is the core narrative: Mr. Kallikak had sex with the tavern girl and the progeny were "morons" and "idiots." He married an upstanding landowner's daughter and became a landowner himself, and guess what? The children from this convergence were upstanding, intelligent, capable...

The simplicity seems obviously vulgar now in our politically correct culture, but that narrative haunts perception still... Check out the way people with developmental disabilities are represented on TV and other media, or the way their narratives are constructed for them by the agencies and organizations who "help" them (think "Jerry's kids," or the "We need your help" campaigns for charities and government funds).

The assumptions around class and intelligence and capability and privilege always go unchecked, except by people who no one really listens to.

SO: this idea I have is to "revise" Goddard's tome, update it in a way that is both absurd and sincere, freaky and dead-on serious. One phase was to use the book's pages as stationary for some people with developmental disabilities to write the governor and other policitans in Ohio to request they remove "mental retardation" from the state and local agencies who deliver funding for services. Another phase: a wood panel covered in the letters that make up KALLIKAK was given to Kevin White, an artists labeled with "Down syndrome", who painted over the letters, using the negative and positive spaces made by the print to define his composition. Yet another phase: I gave Xerox copies of some of the exhaustively pseudoscientific graphs and charts that are in the book to a few artists who came to an opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc.; these artists drew over Goddard's science, turning the letters and lines into the beginnings of portraits and caricatures.

Just recently I gave the above picture of Deborah to students in a creative writing class I taught at Miami University as a writing prompt. I asked them to imagine a life and a life-story for the woman pictured. Then after they wrote the piece I told them who she was in actuality (she WAS Goddard's fiction, but real as well), and told them to do some research about her, and the way she received her name, and then to use these "facts" in a revision of the story.

All in all I am developing a portfolio that eventually we'll try to publish at Thunder-Sky, Inc., during an upcoming 2 + 2 = 5 exhibit, set to debut in April,2011. By then I'll have come up with some more "phases" I'm sure. The book will be titled: WHAT IS TO BE DONE: THE KALLIKAK FAMILY REVISITED AND REVISED.