Can I Pretend I Didn't See That?

Do you ever have those moments where you wish you hadn't seen something? Last night, I was bored and faffing about on Youtube when I stumbled across a video on the making of "Ich Will." In the video, each member of the group has a defect--Till a club foot, Richard a fake hand, Christoph a bad eye, etc. Pretty cool, I thought. Until the director said this:

"I wanted to give each of them a defect to illustrate their status as outsiders and underline their evilness."

Yes, because all physical ailments and deformities are a reflection of a moral failing or an aberrant psyche. No one with a defect can be a sane average Joe just trying to scrape through life without getting shit on by the rest of the narrow-minded populace. They're all slavering freaks and deviants who want to spread the pain.

It made me stop and wonder about Rammstein's attitude towards disability. By all accounts, they're wonderful, gracious people who eschew prejudice of any sort, and I don't think for a nanosecond that they've got swastikas hiding behind their extra bog rolls. I do wonder if they've succumbed to the German cultural norms of fitness and sport and efficiency. Disabled folks aren't much for any of those things and are thus devalued in a culture that prides itself on all these things. Rammstein might not think that I should've been drowned in a bucket in the delivery room, but it wouldn't surprise me if they thought people like me were alien, incomprehensible Others better placed in their own segregated world away from the efficient, aesthetic "real" world.

And no, I don't think that's a purely German attitude. The Greeks, Romans, and indigenous peoples routinely left sickly, deformed, and disabled children to die because they couldn't contribute to the village or family. I know everyone loves to trot out the Nazi pony whenever Germans are involved, but the Nazis weren't the first to demonize disabled people; they were just the forerunners of being obvious about it in a post-industrial world and appallingly brazen in their solution to the "problem." Since then, Dutch doctors have advocated euthanasia of disabled children to age three, and even purportedly "enlightened" American doctors have recommended abortion of any child suspected of a defect. Peter Singer, an American bioethicist, thinks disabled people of any age should be euthanized to "prevent suffering" and end the economic and emotional drain on society. I hope the bastard breaks his neck and has to spend what remains of his life proving his worth to his colleagues who so fervently share his ideas.

So, the Germans haven't cornered the asshole market, and I don't think Rammstein are advocating either Otherization or euthanasia. I suspect that they're so busy playing with the trope of inner evil reflected by outer circumstance that they haven't stopped to consider the signals it sends to those of us at waist-level. And I don't want them to stop playing with those tropes if that's what they're doing. If those tropes weren't explored, the world would be short a phantom of the opera, and three blind witches. I just wish I knew for certain that that's what they are doing, because the thought of my favorite band wishing me dead makes me a sad panda.

I'm not sure I'm going to post this to any of the Rammstein comms or foras, because I'm likely the only one invested in this, and I'm not in the mood for a rousing round of, "Stop being so oversensitive and paranoid, cripple," or a spate of condescending head-patting.

I just wish I didn't have to wonder about things like this.

ETA: I've done some digging, and apparently, their manager is a handicapped black man, so I guess I can climb out of my pessimism parapet now. They wouldn't hand the keys to their multi-million-dollar empire to a cripple if they wanted to segregate or drown him.

Now that I think on it, I've never seen Emu Fialik standing...