Academic

The gift

By Michael Ralph

Would you pay attention? Cause if you would, then I could paint a picture, to give a gift to other visionaries.

-Little Brother, ?Visionary? 

Rapper Phonte begins ?Visionary? by reflecting on a trip to Ghana where he received unprecedented love from fans, especially female admirers (?gimme 5 weeks in Ghana, chicks will wanna marry a nigga; no sex, no figures?I bagged her off of conversation?), romance that created a ?vibe so intense? it was almost like he had ?a seventh sense.? Not a sixth sense, but something altogether inconceivable.  Phonte feels superhuman.

Maybe because Phonte?s nose is wide open, he starts to imagine life as someone whose powers of perception?whose senses?aren?t heightened but impaired, as he poses a series of rhetorical questions, first to listeners, then to his DJ, 9th Wonder, a connoisseur and pioneer of the vintage compositions Kanye West calls ?soul beats?: 

 If I had no tongue, could you tell me about taste?  Picture that.  Could you help me  ?picture that,? if I didn?t have eyes: if I could only hear for vision, could only hear your      vision? Could you paint a picture?…If you had what I was missin?, I would listen.  I            would listen, if it?s visionary?Could I make a dollar out of sense?  9th, could you       harmonize my experience?       

 The shift from invincibility to disability is odd but, perhaps, appropriate.

In Jon Favreau?s recent cinematic rendition of the classic superhero, Ironman, Robert Downey Jr. plays the imaginative engineer and billionaire tycoon Tony Stark, responsible for the cutting edge technology that brackets US military campaigns, especially those in the Middle East where he is traveling when his convoy is ambushed by erstwhile terrorists who kidnap, torture, and imprison him in the hopes that he might build them a prototype of his most sophisticated and devastating missile to date.  By the time he regains consciousness, Stark?s heart is powered by a dusty car battery that has become a makeshift pacemaker?the only thing keeping him alive.  Stark eventually replaces the cumbersome apparatus with a miniature reactor that he whips up using engineering insights he could never perfect in his home lab.  Still he is, from then on, dependent on an artificial energy source that sits in a console in the middle of his chest. 

To escape, Stark builds bulletproof?bomb-proof, missile-proof?armor: the prototype for an ?Ironman? outfit that he will develop after he returns home to abandon his weapons of mass destruction for technology that will benefit, rather than destroy, humanity.  Stark?s crime-fighting costume has the capacity for global positioning satellite (GPS) navigation, jet rockets for flying, and guided missiles for saving lives or incinerating bad guys, but the fact that captivity left him utterly and permanently disabled?the notion that he relies for the energy to live on a prosthetic device instead of a human heart?is the most extraordinary development. 

Stark?s hostage experience changes him in other ways.  Once an enthusiastic playboy, he later learns to appreciate?and ultimately falls in love with?his personal assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has always doted on him and managed all of his affairs, but whose hard work?and affection?passed unnoticed, until now.  Stark finally has a heart.  

What does all this teach us about the link between disability and superpowers?  Are all superheroes, in some sense at least, disabled?  In M. Night Shyamalan?s Unbreakable, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) was impervious to physical injury, except water short-circuited his powers.  Superman was invincible as long as he avoided kryptonite, a fictional green mineral that rendered him powerless.  Wonder Woman allegedly descended from the Amazons, a mystical tribe of women who removed or ironed the right breast so that it would not conflict with their proficiency as archers.  The X-Men are?especially in the recent spate of films by Bryan Singer and Brett Rattner?not just superheroes but mutants and their founder, Charles Francis Xavier (better known as Professor X) is a paraplegic, despite having superpowers of his own. 

Aquaman, in the fifth comic book series dedicated to his story, lost one arm due to a tragic accident with piranhas and replaced it with a harpoon before having scientists at S.T.A.R. labs built him a prosthetic of his own.  But then, Aquaman had a gang of support.  As a member of the ?The Justice League,? Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, and Green Lantern were all close friends and allies.

Little Brother belongs to a federation of superemcees that, inspired by the original crime-fighting squad, is likewise dubbed, ?The Justus League,? (though the hip hop cadre?s preferred spelling suggests they are both summoning and critiquing a concept their favorite superheroes take for granted).  Whether ?Visionary? is designed to address the tether between enhanced and diminished powers of sense perception, it explores this paradox exquisitely, and not just because Little Brother imagines what it might be like to lose some of the senses we take for granted.  People who have personally experienced losing one of the five senses routinely insist that all of the other senses are heightened, as a result.  To the extent that they can assign identities to the sound of footsteps or successfully navigate lived spaces without being able to see?because they can ?read? raised lettering with a touch or ?hear? music by the way it feels on their skin?this would seem to be true. 

But what is it about matters of the heart that made Phonte and Tony Stark gain newfound appreciation for what they can feel or experience?  Why are so many of our favorite superheroes so vulnerable, handicapped in odd ways?  In Living Color mocked this tension with Handiman, a drooling, bumbling, quasi-paraplegic mock superhero?who sometimes appeared with a midget sidekick, Tiny Avenger?but even he always managed to nab the bad guys, so maybe there is a lesson buried in there, somewhere, that might help us trouble the concept of talent or ability (like ?HUG,? Khary Jones? recent film about a superproducer whose apparent bi-polar condition is the source of his genius and his suffering and his bond with the people closest to him). 

?Visionary? suggests that if we empathize with each other, the imagination becomes a technology that can help us to improve the world.  If Ironman and Aquaman are disabled, and Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles are, as we know, musical superheros, maybe the idea of ?disability? is our way of confessing that we have less empathy for others than we should.  People not able to fully exercise the senses we consider fundamental (sight, hearing, taste, touch, or smell)?those who lack an intellect intelligible to us, and people with limited mobility?indeed deserve special services.  But if this is of particular importance in specific moments, it?s because the architecture of our world is usually insensitive to special needs. 

What about people who are emotionally disabled?  People who are excessively narcissistic, violent, and selfish?  People who treat other people as commodities and objects to be exploited, as Stark did before his accident?  To the extent that becoming disabled is what finally made him whole, we may wish to think more seriously about the prejudices and unfounded assumptions?the moral and intellectual disabilities?that cripple our social interactions.  We don?t know much about disability, though we consistently consider people disadvantaged if they lack the capacities we privilege.  But what of someone who knows music exquisitely?if exclusively?through rhythm?  Is that, necessarily, a bad thing?  What happens when we start to understand sight as something we can achieve through touch, and vision as something we can hear?  How might that enrich our lives?  Why do so many feel like empathy requires them to go out of their way (why, in other words, does empathy strike us as a superpower)?  How blessed might we be if the way we usually think of special needs could, somehow, be disabled?

 If I had no ears, and I could only see the people?s actions, would their singing              and laughing become closed-captioned?  Picture that shit: if you could move the                crowd, to the point that you could hear it when I feel it?If you could paint a picture,                  as they received the beat, if they react and spoke back to me?shit?then I would pay      attention.  I would take the time to take a picture.  I?d take a picture ?cause it?s visionary.

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Full post as published by BlackProf on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).