Sunday Afternoon Hodgepodge for April 5, 2009. Sadly, Just Hodge Today.

-It seems that CSI:NY will be featuring computer-assisted speech devices on Wednesday. The case will involve a man who can only communicate by blinking at a computer screen to form responses. I admit it; I'm pleased by this development, even if it is yet another dollop of gratuitous technopimpery. It means that, however superficially, the show will be exploring disability and the secretive--to the uninitiated, anyway--world of assistive technology. For a brief, shining moment, it will acknowledge that, egads, disabled people exist. Granted, this particular disabled person will be used as nothing but a handy plot contrivance with which to stymie our heroes, but this is nothing new in a world that regularly preys on our distinct Otherness by trotting us out once or twice a year under the pretense of hocking for charity. No one wants the handicapped until there's a tragedy to be exploited, and then we're the perfect face to splash on the evening news, pinched and weak and helpless and wishing that they'd turn off the camera so the world won't notice we're stewing in our own piss because our toilet was demolished in the tornado, or because our aide quit because of cuts to the already-anemic home healthcare system.

So, yes, I'm glad that someone who looks just a little bit like me will be on TV Wednesday night, and I'm keen to see how the main characters react. I have a vested interest in Flack, of course, since my NY ficverse is predicated on the idea that he's yoked himself to a mighty seated Aphrodite and I've long wanted to think the best of him, but I also want to see Stella's reaction. She and Flack are the most hard-charging characters when it comes to interrogation. I want to see if they would change their customary approach when confronted with a disability. Flack has always demonstrated a marked empathy and quiet sympathy for the sick, as we've seen in "Wasted", but terminal illness is a different kettle of fish than chronic illness or disability. He had nothing but contempt for the skeevy ex-boyfriend of the deaf murder victim in "Silent Night"("What Det. Taylor means to say is that you're a scumbag with an eighty-dollar haircut.", be still my heart), but we've never seen him interacting with a disabled person. I could see him being more cautious than usual, almost deferential in his treatment, unless or until he suspects he's being played for a sucker. Then the gloves would assuredly come off, and Flack would gladly chew him a new asshole, never mind that that particular spot wasn't easily accessible through seven alternating layers of plastic and taco fart.

Stella has interacted with disabled folks before, in "Super Men" and "Love Run Cold". In the latter, it was she who pointed out that loss of mobility didn't mean a loss of life. In the past, Stella has said all the right things when it comes to disability. She's been the voice of political correctness, as it were. If we're looking for the voice of common truth, we need look no further than Danny, who, when confronted with a blind murder victim, asked plaintively, "Who strangles a blind girl?" As if there might be acceptable reasons for throttling a sighted woman. Yes, I know what he meant, and his heart was in the right place, but I wanted to rabbit punch him for that unthinking moment of abled condescension. An asshole throttles a blind girl, and he's probably the same asshole who'd strangle a sighted girl for having the audacity to dump him.

I digress. Apologies.

Stella says all the right things, but her lip service goes out the window when she's exposed to HIV in "Heart of Glass". Then Stella, who has heretofore been the model of chutzpah and the belief that life is what one makes of it metamorphosizes into your standard--and more credible, frankly--Everywoman emo angst queen, wangsting endlessly that life might not be worth living if she has to live it with HIV. She doesn't express this sentiment directly, mind; that would be gauche. Rather, it's implicit in her answer to Adam when he asks her how she feels after her negative test.

"I feel like I can dream again."

Yes, because people with HIV are sad, dreamless husks who retreat into their shuttered homes and wait to die. I'll be sure to send a copy of that notice to Magic Johnson, who's still going strong fifteen years after his diagnosis. "Love Run Cold" is what the world knows it should say when faced with disability. "Cold Reveal" is what they really think. Again, there is a difference between disability and terminal illness, and I realize that HIV could become AIDS, which is a terminal disease, but the idea that HIV patients can no longer dream is absurd.

Perhaps a better example of the disconnect would be in "Here's to You, Mrs. Azrael". A recently paralyzed girl was smothered in the hospital, and the team is questioning her mother. At one point Flack says, "C'mon, she was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That's no way to live for a girl like her. Maybe you just decided to put her out of her misery." The ugly truth from such a pretty mouth. People aren't supposed to think like that. They're supposed to think like the bereaved father, who said he'd take his daughter "any way she came to me." But propriety doesn't hold much sway in the secret human heart, and Flack was simply saying what most people think when they see a limper rolling down the street. It was a politer version of, "Thank God I'm not like that, or I'd blow my brains out."

Hopefully, this episode will out the characters' attitudes on disability once and for all, though I'm sure it'll be fraught with more lazy doublespeak and thought-action disconnect.

And no, I didn't post this on Talk. Few people there know about me, and I'd like to keep it that way, lest I be subject to obnoxious, there-there, silly cripple head-patting the next time I attempt to engage in discussion or debate.

All of this was meant to say that there has been a profound disconnect between the implicit and the explicit on NY when it comes to disability issues