But _Million Dollar Baby_ is a fiction, not a documentary, so choices made by characters are not existential choices of real human individuals but narrative choices made by the director Clint Eastwood (as well as others involved in the making of the film), in consideration of his own preferences and what he imagined the predominantly able-bodied audience's preferences to be, rather than those of disabled individuals in the real world. The director could have made Maggie and Frankie make any of countless other possible choices, but having Maggie choose to die and having Frankie choose to kill her were the choices made by the director.
alessandro coricelli acoricelli at mac.com, Sun Feb 27 11:16:01 PST 2005:
>Years ago there was this debate about cochlear implants. The
>opposition to the procedure (and to its " false hopes") of the Deaf
>Culture was fierce, and, at least partially, rightly so. The Deaf
>Culture was convinced that cochlear implants (again, the climate
>that that less than perfect procedure would have determined) would
>have undermined its conquered status (arguably the highest example
>of the autonomy, as a group, of a movement). However, the opposition
>to individual choices of deaf people who wanted to try that
>procedure wasn't equally uplifting, imho.
There is a documentary about the conflict over cochlear implants called _Sound and Fury_ (Dir. Josh Aronson). Implants are apparently more helpful for children than adults, so the question is more complicated than collective decisions of deaf communities versus individual decisions of deaf persons. It's also the question of parents' rights to make their own decisions about how to raise their children versus children's rights to make their own decisions concerning their bodies. What if deaf parents decide not to have their deaf children receive cochlear implants against the children's wishes? What if hearing parents decide to have their deaf children receive cochlear implants against the children's wishes? At what age can children make their own medical decisions? I don't believe that there are any easy answers to myriad questions raised by the cochlear implant controversy.
alessandro coricelli acoricelli at mac.com, Sun Feb 27 11:16:01 PST 2005:
>During this academic year, apparently, the fastest growing foreign
>language of choice of college students is ASL.
"In both our high schools and our colleges, there is a characteristic dropout rate of about 50 percent from one year to the next in the language study. . . . In both high school and college, the bulk of enrollments are in the first or second-year courses. In the autumn of 1990, of the 3.2 million public high school students reporting language course enrollments by level, 48 percent were in a first year course, 32 percent in a second year, 13 percent in a third year, and seven percent in a fourth year or above. Similar enrollment gradations are apparent in higher education. In the 1989 ACE survey, at the university level 62 percent of the enrollments in Spanish were at the introductory level, 23 percent at the intermediate level, and 15 percent at the advanced level. The same situation obtained in French and German" (Leon E. Panetta, "Foreign Language Education: If 'Scandalous' in the 20th Century, What Will It Be in the 21st Century?" 1999 <http://language.stanford.edu/about/conferencepapers/panettapaper.pdf>). That's hardly enough to achieve proficiency in any foreign language. Are student enrollments in ASL courses any different from those in other languages?
Marta Russell ap888 at lafn.org, Mon Feb 28 10:37:29 PST 2005:
>I was rooting for Ray because I saw there was a healthy choice the
>Academy could have made. If it had given to Ray what it gave to
>Eastwood, some hope would be affirmed for Hollywood. Alas, it was
>not to be.
_Ray_, naturally, has a wonderful soundtrack, and its portrayal of Ray Charles as a blind man is pretty good. It's an achingly conventional biopic, though, and its depiction of Ray Charles and the Civil Rights movement is scant and poor. The movie makes it look as though, in 1962, Ray Charles, solely on account of happening upon and listening to one young Black civil rights activist on his way to a concert, suddenly made a decision on the spot not to perform before a segregated audience, perpetuating a myth of spontaneous action not unlike the myth of "Rosa Parks the Tired" that Herbert Kohl documented (cf. <http://www.thenewpress.com/books/shouldwe.htm>). The movie is mainly celebratory, so it conveniently ends before Ray Charles' later political turn, including taking such controversial actions as performing in South Africa in defiance of the anti-Apartheid boycott:
<blockquote>His best-known transgression was performing in South Africa when the United Nations-sanctioned cultural boycott was in full effect -- a boycott supported by the African National Congress and all the liberation movements.
When Charles played there in 1981, the Black Consciousness Movement (of AZANIA) made it clear that they loved him but that this was not the time to appear in that racist state. The appeal didn't faze him, and as a result he faced pickets in South Africa and 15 cities in North America, including Toronto, Albany, New York City and Los Angeles.
All that the UN asked for was a simple apology and a pledge not to return to South Africa until apartheid was abolished. But Charles wouldn't utter the "sorry'' word and instead told his detractors that they could "kindly kiss the far end" of his anatomy. (Norman Otis Richmond, "No Ray of Hope," The Black Commentator 116, <http://www.blackcommentator.com/116/116_ray_charles.html>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>