The deification of the perverse

I wish to draw the attention of your readers to certain facts, events and occurences of the last couple of months —

Two front page articles in the Saturday Dominion in successive weeks, detailing the processes by which a nine-year-old was hospitalised after a severe attack of asthma;

A second-page article in the Dominion, somewhat earlier again on a Saturday, concerning the death by heart attack of a person undergoing a sex-change operation;

A front page article in the Dominion soon after Easter concerning the travels during a storm of a noted paraplegic;

The week-long campaign mounted by a local radio station to case discomfort caused by power-cuts in this city, by means of volunteer community action. Special concern was expressed on numerous occasions for the aged and infirm;

A front page article in a recent Saturday's Auckland Star concerning the church-going habits of a crippled deaf-mute.

Numerous articles, often prominently displayed, in both of our local metropolitan newspapers, concerning bloody car accidents, unnatural crimes of the flesh, various deformities, whether physical or mental, whether naturally or culturally induced, various diseases, curable or not, but preferably painful and at least a little sordid.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Even point six barely identifies the tip of an iceberg whose better part is to be discovered in the murky depths of some collective national psyche; a psyche of which we are all, individually, manifestations. But it is the treatment given in our media to these unsavoury subjects that interests me above all. It is best described, I think, as a vicious sentimentality. The implications usually go two ways:

'Are we not, all of us who think in this way, which is the only correct way to thin; wonderful for the care and attention we give to the ugly, aged, deformed, disease-ridden, unfortunate, per-verted ones we find around us.'

'Are we not also, each of us, wonderfully fortunate in our normality; a normality which, though it may be totally undistinguished in every way, is nevertheless far superior to the conditioning of those we pretend to help.'

It is as if the shrine of our democratic masses is attended by the priesthood of the deformed; and its motto were "abandon grace all ye who enter here'. It is a kind of dragging down of human accomplishment to a level of ordinary or extraordinary incompetence. Two words we often find associated with the saga of some semi-detached man — heroic and tragic. Both were once noble conceptions, expressing the most notable human achievement, the most stirring of human emotions. Now we are likely to find the one, heroic, referring the ability of a paraplegic to negotiate swing doors; the other, tragic, will be used to describe the fall of some travelling salesmen from Wilton off the out-house roof.

I do not quite see what can be done to rectify this state of affairs. It would be too easy and of little use to attack the cripples, asthmatics, cancer-victims et etc themselves. Granted, they have never had it so good before, not even in the days of the Shit of Fools. But I do not resent the possibility of their happiness; it is those who persist in the virtual deification of all that is ugly and perverse that should be attacked. Perhaps we should turn them into their own heros. Perhaps we should take at face value their continual exhortation: "that dribbling idiot could be you", and make it them instead. We should at least recognise under what insidious labels these people attempt to sell their pernicious, indeed, anti-humanist, philosophy — I mean the label of Christian neighbourly concern, the label of pious concern for the misfortunes of others.

I believe that the opinions here expressed may strike a chord in many a student breast; my purpose in writing this letter has been, only only to relieve myself of pent-up feelings, but also to test the responses of others. I remain hopeful that there will appear other affirmations of the naturally, unashamedly diseased man and woman in these columns.

John Grimly