From The New York Times, which actually seems to "get" that making fun of someone's blindness is inappropriate, whereas making fun of a politician's behavior or decisions is fair game.David A. Paterson’s emergence as governor was an inspiration to many people with disabilities, especially the blind.
As surely most New Yorkers know by now, Mr. Paterson can’t see much. A childhood infection left him legally blind, with no vision at all in his left eye and no better than 20/400 vision in his right one.
But across the years he triumphed over affliction, aided mightily by his sense of humor.
Even though his ascension in Albany last year was a fluke — thank you, Client 9 — it gave the sightless new reason to take heart. Here was proof that being unable to see didn’t mean one was unable to succeed. By the same token, it has not insulated the governor from criticism, as in the debacle of Caroline Kennedy and the vacant Senate seat.
But we’re witnessing a creepy side effect to the Paterson phenomenon. Comedy writers with frat-boy sensibilities seem to feel they have a license to go for cheap laughs about blindness, as if Mr. Paterson were Mr. Magoo come to life.
Some news writers also suggest that the governor’s disability is being exploited in television commercials that attack him for health care cuts that he has proposed to help close a huge budget deficit.
The shabby blind-man humor comes by way of “Saturday Night Live.”
Granted, the show has a tradition of mocking politicians’ stumbles, figurative and literal. This goes back to its earliest days in the mid-1970s, when Chevy Chase built a career by sending up President Gerald R. Ford as a hopeless bumbler.
But a lot of people felt that “S.N.L.” crossed a line of decency in December when one of its people, Fred Armisen, made repeated fun of Mr. Paterson’s blindness (pictured). As “Paterson,” he held a chart upside down, rolled around aimlessly in a chair and wandered cluelessly into a camera’s path.
The level of humor might fairly be described as sophomoric were that not an
insult to sophomores.
Groups that deal with blindness were outraged by this “idea that blind people are incapable of the simplest tasks and are perpetually disoriented and befuddled,” as the National Federation of the Blind put it at the time. If Mr. Paterson shared the anger, he didn’t say so. But a spokeswoman for him issued a strong statement denouncing the skit as an insult to people with disabilities.
(O.K., we can hear some of you asking why the Paterson bit was any more offensive than the thorough “S.N.L.” skewering of Sarah Palin. The answer is simple. “They were picking on Sarah Palin for what she did, not for what she was,” said Carl Jacobsen, president of the New York State affiliate of the Federation of the Blind.)
You’d think there might be a learning curve at Rockefeller Plaza. Apparently not. Mr. Armisen was back as “Paterson” last Saturday night. This time, he pulled out a huge pair of binoculars to read a piece of paper. “Just kidding,” he said.
Yuk, yuk, yuk. Among those failing to see the humor was Marcie Roth, executive director of the National Coalition for Disability Rights. For her, it reflected a “ridiculous, ongoing, permissible bigotry.”
More nuanced is the case of the health care attack commercials that began this week, paid for by the state health workers’ union and the association of hospitals. It goes after Mr. Paterson personally, and conspicuously includes a plaintive appeal from a blind man wearing sunglasses and sitting in a wheelchair. “Why,” he asks the governor, “are you doing this to me?”
The inclusion of this man, Juan Pietri of the Bronx, led to acid suggestions in some newspaper articles that the governor’s critics were exploiting his blindness. Definitely not so, said representatives of the union and the hospital association.
Through them, Mr. Pietri issued a statement of his own asserting that “nothing could be further from the truth” than to say he was put in the commercial to highlight the governor’s disability.To the relief of those groups, Mr. Paterson himself said he had “absolutely no problem with their ads,” and rejected any notion that they had hit “below the belt.”
But some still had questions about the propriety of including someone like Mr. Pietri. The commercial was clearly an attempt to “pull at the heartstrings of the public,” said Mr. Jacobsen, who is blind himself.
“The people running those ads probably feel that the most pitiful thing you can do is be blind and in a wheelchair,” he said. “Well, blind isn’t that pitiful.”
Carl R. Augusto, president of the American Foundation for the Blind, was less troubled by the advertising campaign than by offensive “S.N.L.”-style routines. But Mr. Augusto, who is also blind, figured than even the boobs on the boob tube will come around.
In time, “more and more visually impaired people” will become political and corporate leaders, he said, and then “I think the appetite to use their disability as a cheap shot is going to be lessened.”
