Blogger, poet, activist, and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has portrayed America as a laboratory, a place where experiments are run on large groups of people. After reading his new post, in that spirit, I thought of one experiment America has been running for decades: How long can you bring tens of thousands of rural people into poverty and isolation, and how low can you make them go, before they rise in protest?
But Kuusisto, who I know from college days, often focuses on lives lived here by the disabled. (See if you can read his moving and instructive first memoir, Planet of the Blind, or his new book of poems, Close Escapes, without learning quite a bit on the subject.) Part of a recent blog post goes this way:
America is a biopolitical nightmare, one might call it a laboratory for the subjugation of human beings. This is why people in the United States can’t have diversity though they talk about it. Diversity without biopolitical awareness, without recognizing the role of the state in determining which bodies have or do not have value is just fluff. When will the Americas become a laboratory for freedom? I wish the wood cutter would wake up.
At the end of the blog post, Kuusisto shows how to tell in a flash exactly what bodies America values. Just check to see what bodies are being policed, he suggests:
Policed bodies are inherently devalued bodies. Black Lives Matter. Disabled Lives Matter. Women’s Lives; Migrant Lives—but not so much in the breech. ICE raids are what happens while we were busy making other plans. Apology to John Lennon ’s ghost.
The lab experiments are ongoing all around us.