An autopen burns so we may keep warm

It’s been a struggle to write recently. The blame is plentiful and the excuses many, so much so that I should have just written those down and published them. I’d have a book ready to publish if I did that, but I keep it all inside. I expect your thanks to be mailed to me, naturally. The political turmoil of my home country is mostly to blame, why write when the vice-president has labelled me the enemy? Why work on books when it’s clear the administration only has an interest in banning them? Crimes against humanity are declared by the hour to the screaming applause of those who don’t realise that they will soon be next. As Reb Masel so beautifully put it, you have more in common with those declared the “enemy” than those you think have your interests at heart.

I could blame work, of course. Teaching, regardless of credit load, is a full-time job, one that requires I do a lot of writing and reading that chips into time I would normally spend writing and reading for myself. But I have days off, breaks, more time to dedicate to writing that I neglect.

Really it’s the disability and no, I refuse to elaborate, I am tired of elaborating, I don’t want to talk much about how my disability gets in the way of my happiness. Not today.

But I do think it’s fair to say that a sneaky combination of the political and the disabled is necessitated here. I mean, we can all agree that our president, both recent and present, is disabled. Donald Trump is functionally illiterate (as said by so many people around him) and clearly suffering from intense cognitive decline. Joe Biden is much in the same boat. The poor guy should’ve been put out to pasture long before he even announced a bid for the Oval Office and his frame and faculties were never there to fully support the loads of a United States presidency. He even had to use an autopen to sign many of his executive orders!

An autopen, can you believe it? He never actually signed any of that stuff! Trump glibly shouts from the safety of his social media platform as he revokes all pardons made by Joe Biden.

On the days I can’t write, the days where my eyes pound and ache beyond reasonable comprehension, I’ll think of Joe now, with his aged hands struggling to keep up with the signature duties expected from the office. His autopen, my cane, I’d like to think they make similar sounds when in use. Because that is what an autopen is, really. An accessibility aid. An accessibility aid used by far more politicians that Joe Biden. An accessibility aid that courts have decided, time and again, does not invalidate the document it is being used on. Trump doesn’t understand much about any and that ignorance is pointed with particular precision at his own job. He ignores the orders of the judiciary, he ignores the pleas of the people (even his own supporters), he ignores the burning planet around him, the warnings of fellow politicians, the signs that all say “stop, you’re not only on the wrong side of history, but you’re resurrecting the wrong side of history we fought so hard to kill.” His ignorance has found him, naturally, with his licked boots pushed deep into his mouth yet again as he blasély insults the validity of a commonly used accessibility aid in the pursuit of a broken political agenda.

I can’t say this hurts more than any other terrible thing done by this administration nor will I ever claim this to be the worst thing said or insinuated by the current US president. It’s clearly not. But I do think it opens a discussion about how we view accessibility aids in this country. Joe Biden needed an autopen to do his job, just as many other politicians have needed an autopen to do theirs, and Donald Trump survives signing his gauche signature only through the help of fuck off thick Sharpies that need far less dexterity to use than the pens used by his contemporaries. It’s speaking to this erasure of the accessibility aid, the othering of the disabled body, the habit society and the public have at staring at the accessibility aid as an extension of the disabled body. Of ridiculing the user. Alienating the disabled. Fearing the day they will need a cane, a wheelchair, an autopen. Donald Trump used his ignorance to attack political decisions he disagrees with, but he’s also admitting to a fear he has. A fear I take delicious jubilation in witnessing.

He is afraid, as all men are, of the day their body breaks. The day the flesh must be supplemented by the materials flesh has built.

This isn’t an unprecedented fear. FDR famously refused to be seen using his wheelchair as he considered it an object that made him look weak. I wish we lived in a reality where FDR could see the strength that wheelchair gave him; I like to imagine that world. Where Donald Trump perhaps celebrates Joe Biden for understanding his limits, for caring for his body by using an accessibility aid that allows him to do his job unfettered by the dying muscle beneath almost transparent skin. The one where FDR sat, in power, as he proclaimed our hatred of Nazis (in spite of the love for them in corporate American, a sentiment that lingers still and is now encouraged) and no one thought, “Oh, poor guy in a wheelchair, he looks so weak.” The one who is weak is the one who walks. The one who drifts through an easy life never knowing the toil necessary to do the benign. Never knowing the fear that kept FDR standing through great pain and greater private humiliation. Joe Biden isn’t weak for using an autopen, Donald Trump is weak for attacking it.

I talk about fear a lot, on both sides of the disabled coin. The fear pre-disabled people experience at the sight of a disabled body that could easily be theirs; the fear a disabled person holds for the persistence of their life in torment. We are, all of us, afraid. It is natural, but if fear is a lack of understanding then the way beyond fear is to understand that disability is inevitable and we have the tools to keep ourselves going. The tools, obviously, aren’t adequate, or else there would be less fear in the world, but tools do exist. But the cacophony of slashed government agencies and the rumblings of a butchered Medicare and Medicaid ensure, guarantee, promise a future where those tools are tossed even closer to the Stone Age. They do this out of fear. They do not want to see us. They do not want to understand us. They do not want to understand me. That perpetuates their own fear. They strip away my ability to live well and so ruin their own chance of survival when they inevitably join me. If they helped me, they would help themself. The Curb cut Effect is selfish even as it is selfless. Planning for the future, planting trees that my grandchildren will never see but whose grandchildren will swing from, is necessary for our own happiness.

But we seem to think felling the woods is the better way to go.

Disability stalks Donald Trump. It’s already in his bones, his bruised hands, his tilted stance, his uncertain gait. He is not well, but further disability peers out of the bushes and she is a clever girl, disability. She can be patient, but she knows nothing but total brutality. Trump’s messaging about autopens drives a further fervour into the crowd he rules as Führer, but the autopen is not all that will be in Trump’s future. Disability aids that he denies folks like me will be available to him, such is the way of the United States, and he will try to hide it just as he hides behind his Gestapo but someone will see it. A White House staffer. An employee in Florida. A reporter. Jesus Christ. Someone will see and someone will know. That as he draws ire onto the autopen, he draws breath with facilities beyond his lungs. As he steal my cane he will lean on one that he cannot be separated from. As he strips our access to doctors and medicine he will be pumped so full of chemicals as to never feel the normal heat of his red blood again.

We can comfort, but we cannot take the pain away. The pain will always be there, down in the marrow. Trump will burn, in this life and the next. He will suffer as I suffer. This is one of the few avenues of joy I can still stroll. Knowing that as my eyes blaze, his hurt comes from deeper than his flesh. The fire that burns me is mortal, but he burns with a divine flame inescapable.

I will die and be free. Trump will die and be burned.