By Douglas Lathrop
With the holidays approaching, I thought it might be fun to take a second look at Tiny Tim.
You could stuff a million Christmas turkeys with the scorn disability activists have heaped on this character. The very fact that he's one of the most beloved characters in literature makes him even more fiercely hated by disabled people. He is an archetype of helpless crippledom: cheerful and optimistic, but doomed, placed here for a brief moment to thaw the frozen hearts of everyone he meets before making a quick - and convenient - exit from this vale of tears.
Just makes you want to grab that crutch of his and beat him to a bloody pulp with it, huh?
Maybe. But on the other hand, he's such a big part of our collective holiday consciousness that I feel the need to reclaim him, to make him a strong figure instead of a pathetic one. In the trendy lingo of the Movement, I want to "empower" him.
If you look at him the right way, Tiny Tim isn't helpless at all. In fact, he's the savviest character in the story. He is - to put it bluntly - a stone-cold manipulator.
As disabled people, we're well-schooled in the fine art of manipulating others. It's a survival skill, it's how we get our needs met. Any Gimp who tells you otherwise is - well, trying to manipulate you.
What Tiny Tim has really done is take his (unspecified) disability and parlay it into a pretty cushy life for himself. Sure, he's going to die, but why would he want to live to adulthood in 19th-century England, anyway? Life sucked there if you were poor. Debtor's prisons, workhouses, orphanages, employers like Ebenezer Scrooge . . . his folks are the ones who've got it hard, not him. All he has to do is smile and say, "God bless us, every one," now and then. The little snot gets carried around town on his father's shoulders, for chrissake!
Would I have done differently, had I been alive back then? I doubt it. Of course, I'm not living in Dickens' time. I'm living in the high-tech 1990s, so I've got options. I want rights, I want a job, I want respect, I want to get laid - I want everything ABs have got. Hell, I want more than what most ABs have got. I'm greedy.
I'm also a Gimp, which means I can be a manipulative little bastard, when I want to be. And as such I want to learn from the great masters of the art. I want Tiny Tim to teach me everything he knows.
If anything, his passive-aggressive gambit works too well, in that it causes Scrooge, at the end of the story, to have a change of heart and buy him the medical care he needs. That cures Tiny Tim's disability, but it also takes away his meal ticket. He was probably kicking himself about it 20 years later.
We Gimps may not want to admit it, but in many ways, Tiny Tim is a paradigm of our community. To understand that paradigm, let's look at his creator, and the audience he wrote for.
In his politics, Charles Dickens was what 20th-century Americans call a "bleeding-heart liberal." Although he identified as a socialist, his socialism was of the milder, don't-upset-the-middle-class-applecart Fabian variety. The aim of his writings was to guilt the bourgeoisie into reform, not goad the proletariat into revolution. It was Marxism Lite.
Dickens was also a bit of a hack as a writer. His work was serialized - published one chapter at a time in magazines or disposable little booklets, to be read and then discarded. If he were alive today, he'd be writing for TV. His characters and storylines were as over-the-top, as cheaply sentimental, and as painfully earnest in their attempts at social consciousness-raising as anything you'll see on the tube tonight.
There's a reason that every sitcom ever produced has done a parody of A Christmas Carol during the November ratings sweeps. The story is the Victorian equivalent of the Very Special Episode - as in "Tonight, on a very special `Blossom...' "
Dickens might not have been a very deep writer, but he had an acute understanding of his readership. Send a cripple or two hobbling across the pages of your novel and your readers are reduced to soft, wet, blubbery masses of pity: It's a principle that persists to this day. It's why Jerry's Kids raise so much money, why we're subjected to disease-of-the-week movies, and why playing a disabled character in a film is an automatic Oscar.
And let's face it, we've gotten a lot by tugging on the very same heartstrings. We may not get carried around on anyone's shoulders, but we get special parking spots, and all sorts of other Gimp perquisites. Even the ADA owes something to AB society's guilt-pity mechanisms. There's opposition to our movement, to be sure, but it's not like the civil rights battles in the South, with Klansmen roughing up Freedom Riders and redneck sheriff's deputies turning attack-dogs on demonstrators; even the most committed foes of the ADA know that trashing disabled people just makes you look like a bully. Dump on gays, feminists, or illegal immigrants all you want, but cripple-bashing is still political suicide.
Of course, paternalism can be just as oppressive as hatred - and I can see a lot of the people reading this right now, sitting up in their wheelchairs, stabbing their PISS ON PITY buttons into their chests, and proclaiming, "I refuse to be exploited!" That's all well and good. But if ABs are going to feel sorry for us regardless, why not turn that feeling against them and use it to get what we want? We're skilled manipulators - we're experts at using people's emotional responses as weapons against them. Why not use that skill to get us our rights? We've already got the tools - we just need to learn new ways of using them.
Fittingly, the best practitioner of the art today - the heir apparent to Tiny Tim - is another controversial figure: Christopher Reeve. As nauseated as I and many others might have been by his appearance at the 1996 Democratic convention, I have to concede that it was a masterful performance. In a few short minutes Reeve managed to fuse Tiny Tin with yet another Gimp archetype, the Supercrip - a double whammy that left thousands of Democrats weeping in their Birkenstocks.
A lot of disability activists think Reeve's harping on "cure" hurts the Movement. I don't agree - his cause isn't mine, but I don't believe that seeking a cure for one's disability is incompatible with fighting for one's rights. Mostly, I'm jealous because his years in Hollywood have made him so damn good at what he does. Why can't I be that much of a flim-flam man?
But back to Tiny Tim. Politically, the world he lived in isn't all that much different from ours - we have nasty I've-got-mine conservatives like Scrooge (the very name of Newt Gingrich has a Dickensian ring to it), as well as pity-mongers like Dickens himself, awash in middle-class guilt and writing for readers who were likewise.
Unlike Tiny Tim, however, we can be manipulators for a higher cause.
Back in 1996, MAINSTREAM secured me press credentials for the Republican convention, held here in San Diego. One morning I went to Balboa Park for a press conference/photo op with GOP candidate Bob Dole. He was using his own Gimp status to great effect that day - having breakfast with Paralympic athletes, shaking hands with local disability activists, nuzzling puppies that were going to be trained as service dogs. Seeing Bob Dole holding a cuddly, whimpering ball of fur was one of the most surreal things I witnessed that week.
Some of the Gimps in the audience were getting cranky. It was hot, and Dole was late, and here they were being made to sit in the sun so the GOP could score political points. The press corps noticed this, and the lead story on the evening news began forming in their heads: "Disabled accuse Dole of 'using' them. Film at 11."
Eventually, they saw my press badge, and for a brief moment I became a pundit - a "spokesperson for the disabled community." Suddenly, every news organization from CNN on down wanted a sound-bite from me.
"Don't you think Dole is using his connections with disabled people to manipulate the voters?" one of them asked.
I replied, "Yeah, so? That's what politics is about, isn't it? When you're running for President, and you go to New York, you put on a yarmulke and get your picture taken with Jewish leaders. How is this any different? This just shows that people with disabilities have become a constituency to be courted, and I think it's great."
God bless us, every one.
Did my hair look OK?
Douglas Lathrop was a regular contributor to MAINSTREAM, and now is associate editor of New Mobility.
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