Raising ‘awareness’ always ends in lunacy

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.