The deaf are beginning to annoy me. They seem, paradoxically, more voluble than the blind. Perhaps this is because, understandably, deaf people suspect that their voices are not being heard. Which of course they are not, literally, by other deaf people — and in some cases this must lead to a state of suffocating paranoia.
Anyway, the severely deaf American singer Mandy Harvey has received death threats from some of her country’s deaf community because she, er, sings — i.e., she is promoting a ‘hearing’ activity and is thus guilty of perpetuating something called ‘oralism’. It is always a pleasure to bring you a new ‘ism’ coined by a new tranche of enraged victims. Oralism is the favouring of lip-reading techniques over sign language in the education of deaf people, and a hefty bunch of militant deaf people believe it to be a form of cultural imperialism because, they would assert, signing is every bit as rich as the spoken language.
So they have their victim bunker and they are hunkering down behind it, rather like the militant deaf people who object to people getting cochlear implants because it somehow betrays the cause and removes someone from their pristinely deaf community. Any connivance with the hearing world is a betrayal, be it singing, or indeed being afforded the ability to hear. Anything which helps the deaf better integrate with the rest of us.
This is a militancy which defies rationality, I would suggest. A controversial argument, I know, but I would advance the proposition that it is better to be able to hear than not to be able to hear and that any technique applied to that cause is to be commended, rather than construed (with fury, death threats and bile) as a kind of Uncle Tom-ism, a sop to the oppressive hearing scum who rule the planet.
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