Before this gets any more stale, here's my write-up of my March meeting with the Marcus Center's Don Mueller:
When robots or computer animated humans get too close to looking real without completely nailing the illusion they project something called the Uncanny Valley.
Don Mueller is the only human being that I have ever met who projects his own Uncanny Valley. I had never really noticed this effect before until I sat down with him in his office on the morning of March 16th, but once there it was impossible not to see it. There's just some little bit of humanity that people normally radiate that Mueller simply doesn't. Normally I might not mention this, but since Mueller is the Executive Director of the Marcus Center, whose whole reason for being is to, essentially, modify the behaviors of autistic children so that they can pass for normal humanity, his deficiency in this regard stands out with a particularly ironic clarity.
The meeting had been suggested by Mueller at the end of the previous month's Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting after he objected to my questioning of a speaker. I had speculated in an earlier post that I thought the purpose of this might be to lay the groundwork for my eventual banishment from future AAC and other Marcus Center related events. That's not how it turned out and now, three months later, I'm still somewhat unsure as to the nature of Mueller's original intent.
Attending this meeting, in addition to Mueller and myself, were Gregory Abowd, who runs the AAC meetings and my associate, Linda Styles.
It had been my plan to actually record the conversation and then produce a transcript. But when Linda brought out a mini-cassette player and placed it on the table, Mueller made clear that he would not consent to a taping. Such would not be, he argued, conducive to building an atmosphere of trust between us. "At this point, do you really think there's any danger of that happening, Don?" is a question I thought of asking. But didn't. In the very spirit of building an edifice of trust.
Still, recording undermines trust?
Hmm.
Since I began meeting with these behaviorists two years back, I have been been amazed at how the mediocrities (at best) that comprise the core of the behaviorist community continually project their own inadequacies onto others (and how frequently they do so in the name of science): Amy Wetherby claiming repetition is a danger sign in the course of delivering a painfully repetitive (by her own definition of the word) power point presentation; an ABA proponent who waxes on about the horrors of lack of eye contact who then refuses to look me in the eye even for a moment while I am asking him direct questions about his methodology; the parade of experts who claim that the people they study lack empathy or a "theory of mind" while they themselves clearly show themselves incapable of applying either to someone outside the narrowest parameters of their own comfort zones.
How many events have I intended at the Marcus Center in which a main theme was surveillance? Children, sometimes aware they are being filmed, and sometimes obviously not; their every gesture and utterance scrutinized, and judged by a series of juries they are unaware even exist. I remember all the many times that Mueller had spoken up that recording these children without their knowledge or consent would be inconducive to building trust with that child.
Oh wait. I got my numbers mixed up. It wasn't "many" times.
It was actually zero.
As always, there is one set of etiquette and ethical boundaries for those who would make the rules and another for those whom they would have live under them.
Whatever.
Mueller let me know that he considered my questioning of the speakers at the AAC meetings to be inappropriate. Abowd, sitting across from me, said that he did not consider this the case at all. Mueller then pointed out that there were those who had come previously to the meetings who no longer were attending because of me. I countered that I had a member of my smaller group who would no longer be attending the meetings because he could no longer stomach the barely-hidden derision of the so-called "experts." There are casualties on both sides in this war.
I related to Mueller how, as a member of Bob Morris's group I had spent two years discussing with Bob the nature of the behaviorist. Bob believed that the behaviorists that he engaged were misguided and that, with the proper argument, they could be reasoned with. I came to believe that the behaviorists were not scientists at all. They were pseudo-scientists, cast from the same mold as astrologers and creationists. While Bob was alive, I had, out of respect for him, stayed, for the most part, out of this arena. But I had also watched the eye-rolling derision with which he was been treated by this community of "scientists." Respect, for the behaviorist, is a one way street.
I had started coming to the AAC for one purpose. To demonstrate conclusively to my people that the behaviorists and their allies are frauds. And I believe that I have done so. Real scientists and researchers simply do not behave in the shameful and cowardly manner that the behaviorists at the AAC and other events I have attended have behaved. Who does behave this way? Con men.
If these really were men and women of science, how easy would it have been for them to meet my simple inquiries? After two years, how many of them have been able to answer the simplest question of all: what empirical evidence exists to classify everyone on the autistic spectrum as disordered? They base their science on this assertion.
Mueller's organization gets rich off of it.
Mueller asked what I'd like to see from the Marcus Center. I did not give my standard line that I wished to see everyone who worked there live a life of regret and eventually end up cursing my name on their deathbed. Such statements, I know, are not conducive to building an edifice of trust.
Instead, I simply stated that I wished to see it go out of business. Even this pared down statement seemed to catch him off guard for some reason. I don't know why since he had already heard me say, at that very meeting, and several other gatherings, I'm sure, that I considered behaviorists to be engaged in scientific fraud. Why would I, or anyone else, wish to see people whom they believed were engaged in fraud continue on in their fraudulent activity?
I don't know. Perhaps Mueller simply lacks a theory of mind.
At the end of the discussion, which ended up running about 70 minutes, it was time to sum up. I told Mueller that I intended to continue at the AAC meetings exactly as I have been. If he wanted any change, then he would have to ban me.
And with that, Mueller coldly thanked me for coming.
Walt Guthrie
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Anthony Weiner and the Charles Woods Dilemma Part One
What did Charles Woods get for Christmas?
A pair of glasses and a staple gun.
That is probably the first political joke I ever heard. Not so much a political joke, really, as a joke about a political figure. There were lots of jokes about Charles Woods on my elementary school playground while I was going to school in Alabama in the '60s. I don't recall hearing any jokes around that time about Wallace who was then governor and leading the state and the region down a truly monstrous path.
Charles Woods did not lead anyone down a monstrous path. He was simply a monster. In the crude, simplistic, purely physical way that monsters exist to sheltered children.
Woods had been shot down in World War II and as a result suffered extreme burns on his face and hands. With virtually no real facial features at all, he resembled Dr. Phibes from the Vincent Price movies. Amazingly, he decided to enter Alabama politics and had some success at it.
I was a political cartoonist for the Birmingham Post-Herald for twenty years and during that time I would occasionally consider the Woods dilemma.
An editorial cartoonist uses caricature to exaggerate the features of political figures and others into representations of their true selves, at least as seen by the cartoonist. It's an easy tool to abuse. This is, of course, highly unfair. .But politics itself is unfair.
Still, there is a line
It's one thing to render, through caricature, a fat senator into a bloated hog or over-emphasize the unattractive features of a homely governor. (I took particular pleasure in drawing the loathesome one-time Attorney General Charlie Graddick, who, over the years devolved in my cartoons into a doughy fish-lipped Mr. Potato head). It 's quite another to apply these same techniques to the deformed features of a burn victim!
Even though Woods remained in the political arena through my years at the paper, I somehow never found myself in the position of having to actually caricature him so I don't know what I would have done. There were, however, some pretty butt- ugly characters who did land in my sights and I did not hold back from exploiting their physical deficiencies in the least.
So, what, other than degree, is the difference between exploiting the natural everyday ugliness of a politician and doing the same with a Charles Woods?
I'll attempt an answer in the next post. An answer that, I think, bears on the media reaction to the Anthony Weiner affair.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Giving That Rapture Guy His Due
So the world didn't blow up. Or get raptured. Or whatever the fuck was supposed to happen this weekend that didn't.
There's a lot of people out there now heartily mocking Harold Camping's apocalyptic prediction and the dumb people who took it seriously. And they should.
But, you know, Camping's stupid religion isn't stranger or more "out there" than any of the other competing faiths. At least Camping put his set of beliefs up for an actual empirical test. And now we can see it's Grade A bullshit.
Many of the people who are now laughing at his believers owe their owe allegiances to religious institutions pushing claims that are equally or more absurd. But almost all of these institutions, even the ones with their own specific brand of End Timeism, have long ago learned the secret to keeping their lucrative fraud rolling: Don't be specific!
Keep it all vague and murky.
God is coming. The Promises will be fulfilled.
"But no one can know the hour or the day." Blah blah blah.
Just don't lose your faith. You'll be rewarded...eventually. Whatever, dude.
It's a con that can run forever. And probably will.
That's how it's generally done. But Camping, somehow, never got the memo. He --as opposed to,say, the Catholic Church or your local Baptist preacher-- actually did give his followers the oppurtunity to empirically test the mettle of his claims.
How unchristian of him.
There's a lot of people out there now heartily mocking Harold Camping's apocalyptic prediction and the dumb people who took it seriously. And they should.
But, you know, Camping's stupid religion isn't stranger or more "out there" than any of the other competing faiths. At least Camping put his set of beliefs up for an actual empirical test. And now we can see it's Grade A bullshit.
Many of the people who are now laughing at his believers owe their owe allegiances to religious institutions pushing claims that are equally or more absurd. But almost all of these institutions, even the ones with their own specific brand of End Timeism, have long ago learned the secret to keeping their lucrative fraud rolling: Don't be specific!
Keep it all vague and murky.
God is coming. The Promises will be fulfilled.
"But no one can know the hour or the day." Blah blah blah.
Just don't lose your faith. You'll be rewarded...eventually. Whatever, dude.
It's a con that can run forever. And probably will.
That's how it's generally done. But Camping, somehow, never got the memo. He --as opposed to,say, the Catholic Church or your local Baptist preacher-- actually did give his followers the oppurtunity to empirically test the mettle of his claims.
How unchristian of him.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
I Do What I Have To Do For "What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?"
Matt Bartholomew practices his game face (photos by Tom Robertson)
Had the premier of my film at Atlanta's Plaza Theatre last night.
By film I mean the one minute and forty second short that I originally wrote and shot for Sketchworks last month. And by premier I mean: "Hey Luke, you want to show my piece before the monthly Splatter Cinema film?" "Yeah, okay."
So, yeah. Going on before the 1984 horror turkey "Ghoulies" isn't exactly opening at Cannes but nevertheless it does technically make me eligible for an Academy Award nomination.
The cast and crew of What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?
The piece, What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?, was originally written a couple years back for Sketchworks but never made it into a show. It's a simple joke: What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" "I'd kill my wife for a Klondike Bar." "Well, here you go." Gory domestic crime follows.
I've found that the more murder I put into a comedic script, the harder it is to get it accepted for stage. When I put on my own show last year, Crimes Against Nature, which consisted primarily of the scripts Sketchworks thought were too extreme to include in their main shows, I ended with Klondike and was pretty happy with the crowd response. So when I started shooting short films for Sketchworks last year, I put this script near the top of my list.
I demonstrate to Matt the proper way to stab Sasha Friedman (left) to death.
The important thing was that, given the deadline, this be a quick and cheap production. No using colored gels and constructing a Goblin-esque soundtrack in an attempt to mimic a Dario Argento feel. Just get in and out. We shot just a little over two hours and most of that was just rehearsal. Once the fake blood started covering actors, reshooting would be extremely difficult.
Matt after another application from Shane Morton's bloodhose
It went more or less according to plan. Sasha Friedman, who starred in Crimes Against Nature along with George Faughnan, reprised her role as the wife and Sketchworks-regular Matt Bartholomew replaced Faughnan, who was unavailable, as the man driven to madness and murder by the temptation of a momentary pleasure. Atlanta horror jack-of-all-trades Shane Morton provided his bloodhose expertise.
So a few days of furious editing and then a just-in-time delivery of the product for the show and...
Denied.
"It's just not right for the show." Too much blood.
Fuck!
Too much blood my ass!
So anyway... "Hey Luke, you want to show my piece before the monthly Splatter Cinema film?"
"Yeah, okay."
In this business, it's all about who you know.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
How Southern Incompetence Freed the Slaves
One hundred and fifty years ago this week the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter.
This is the beginning of a long sesquicentennial commemoration, so there will be plenty of time to hash over the various historical controversies in the four years to come. I would like to make just one observation at this point.
The modern world should be grateful for the brief existence of the Southern Confederacy. Without the Confederacy, and its complete and utter political and military incompetency, the institution of slavery would probably never have been abolished. On the contrary, the slave holding states were probably just one southern-dominated Supreme Court decision away from extending the logic of the Dred Scott case in such a way that slavery would be the law of the land, south and north. The South, prior to succession, had at its disposal all the political muscle that was required to protect its interests.Only by abandoning these institutions to form the Confederate states did the South deliver up to the abolitionists the necessary political power and raw numbers that would be required to make the legislative and constitutional changes necessary to abolish slavery forever.
Then, having put all its eggs into the lone basket of southern sovereignty, the South proceeded to wreck that as well by pursuing a military strategy that was out of sync with its resources as well as with its actual political objectives.
The end of slavery in this nation stands as something of a miracle. The Constitution, as written by the Founding Fathers, is rigged to make the ending of the institution all but impossible. The successive political crises of the 19th century leading up to Lincoln's election make clear that the South was not prepared to give an inch on slavery and the North had neither the political muscle nor the focused will to make a sustained frontal assault on slavery, as it existed, in the South.
Yet, in just a few years, slavery, as a legal institution, was gone.
Only the South itself had the power to end slavery. Through its own pathetic incompetence, that's exactly what it did.
This is the beginning of a long sesquicentennial commemoration, so there will be plenty of time to hash over the various historical controversies in the four years to come. I would like to make just one observation at this point.
The modern world should be grateful for the brief existence of the Southern Confederacy. Without the Confederacy, and its complete and utter political and military incompetency, the institution of slavery would probably never have been abolished. On the contrary, the slave holding states were probably just one southern-dominated Supreme Court decision away from extending the logic of the Dred Scott case in such a way that slavery would be the law of the land, south and north. The South, prior to succession, had at its disposal all the political muscle that was required to protect its interests.Only by abandoning these institutions to form the Confederate states did the South deliver up to the abolitionists the necessary political power and raw numbers that would be required to make the legislative and constitutional changes necessary to abolish slavery forever.
Then, having put all its eggs into the lone basket of southern sovereignty, the South proceeded to wreck that as well by pursuing a military strategy that was out of sync with its resources as well as with its actual political objectives.
The end of slavery in this nation stands as something of a miracle. The Constitution, as written by the Founding Fathers, is rigged to make the ending of the institution all but impossible. The successive political crises of the 19th century leading up to Lincoln's election make clear that the South was not prepared to give an inch on slavery and the North had neither the political muscle nor the focused will to make a sustained frontal assault on slavery, as it existed, in the South.
Yet, in just a few years, slavery, as a legal institution, was gone.
Only the South itself had the power to end slavery. Through its own pathetic incompetence, that's exactly what it did.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Amy Wetherby, Red Flags, and Female Genital Mutilation
I'm going to discuss Amy Wetherby's talk last month at the Atlanta Autism Consortium. But before I do, I need to touch on the subject of female genital mutilation.
Specifically female circumcision.
Female circumcision is the removal of a girl's (and I say "girl" because it is usually performed on children) outer sexual organs including, but not limited to, the clitoris. This procedure is performed primarily in certain Islamic and African societies. By removing the primary source of physical sexual pleasure, the parents and religious leaders who engage in and sanction this practice hope that the girl will have less incentive to follow their physical desires and engage in sexual activity which would bring shame to their families. Of course this is an issue that that can be looked at from many angles but for the purposes of what is to follow let's understand the essence of what female circumcision is. It is parents, in collusion with enabling authority, and justified by ideology, attempting to suppress the natural inclinations of a child so that that child will be more likely to behave in a culturally prescribed manner. The child, for her own good, cannot be left to lure of her own essential nature.
Now, hold that thought.
Amy Wetherby is on the faculty of Florida State University where she is associated with something called the First Words Project, which is, as the name might suggest, another attempt to push the "diagnosis" of autism to a still ever-younger age. What Wetherby is currently working on is a test that would allow a "diagnosis" of autism straight down to the toddler level.
Starting off her talk, Wetherby put on an impressive demonstration of her own compete intellectual mediocrity. Coming off as particularly overly-needy, she spent the first few minutes all but begging for someone to collaborate with her on some future project. Finally, we got down to why she was here: detecting autism is in the very young. To that end, the First Words Project has developed a questionnaire for parents, sample questions of which were presented in her power point presentation. Such as: Is the child interested in objects? Does he collect things? Blah, blah, blah.
Now this would be the point where, if I had decided to pursue my usual line of questioning, I would have popped in. One slide on the power point listed autism as consisting of entirely negative traits. One single graph used the word "deficit" at least seven times. No autistic- like trait could pass without the words "warning" or "red flag." Children who didn't get the diagnosis of autism "passed" the test.
But, it turns out, according to Wetherby, that "diagnosing" autism at 18 months is "way harder than you can imagine." To be honest, Amy Weatherby, during her talk, came across as, at least to me, borderline stupid. So I actually would have no problem imagining that almost any project that would involve a moderate level of intellectual rigor might indeed be "way hard" for someone of Ms. Wetherby's intellectual caliber.
Wetherby then proceeded to show a series of short videos of very young children seated with their mothers in clinical settings and asked the AAC audience to play, in essence, Find the Autism. As she showed each video, she would ask the audience questions like "Is there something different about this child?" and "Are we worried?" The audience, which was, to the best of my memory, about half filled with ABA and PBS clinicians, responded like they were sitting in for a taping of Oprah. Little gasps or soft cries of "He's not looking at his mother!" were elicited with each new video.
Now among the "red flags" that the spectators of these cherry-picked mini-movies were supposed to look for was, of course, meeting eye gaze, but also things like whether the child was "overly focused."
"Overly focused?"
After the meeting I asked her about this. She told me this would include a child doing the same thing over and over in an hour period of play. So, I asked if the child playing with blocks for a full hour would count as overly focused. Her reply: It depends. If the child is working on building one thing then the answer would be yes. If the same child instead spent no more then ten minutes on any individual block construction then the answer would be no. So, I guess, "over-focused" really means "focused."
One video moment that particularly stands out: a toddler sits at a table with his mother. A "researcher" (or whatever the woman in the video purports herself to be) puts a little wind-up spring-loaded toy in front of the child to walk across the table. The child reacts with delight. Next video: It's six months later. Same kid. The SAME toy is put in front of him. Rather than react with the same wonder to yesterday's news, the kid picks up the toy and brings it close to his face, seeming to, at least to my eyes, closely examine the toy's locomotion mechanism. Little gasps of horror from the audience.
At this point Gregory Abowd, sitting directly in front of me, turned back to me and noted that this kid had the makings of a future engineer. His comments happened to precisely mirror my own take on the matter. In fact, for perhaps the first time, our thinking seemed to be precisely in sync.
The two of us proceeded to push back on the interpretation that a child's display of precocious intellectual curiosity should be viewed as a "red flag" for anything. Wetherby's defense was to simply state that this sort of behavior is outside the normal "baseline" for a child in this age group.
Barbara Dunbar at this point chimed in to agree with Wetherby. The behavior displayed by the child in the video was not in accord with what a child in that age group should be doing.
Now the Floortime Atlanta website describes Barbara Dunbar as a "licensed psychologist... (who) specializes in assessment and treatment of young children with developmental and learning disorders. Her focus is on working with children with autistic spectrum disorders and their families" so I guess she knows what she's talking about.
"So," I asked her, gesturing to the child in the video, "what is he doing?"
Dunbar could only shrug that she didn't know.
She doesn't know what he's doing.
But she knows he shouldn't be doing it.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, Ms. Dunbar doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about after all.
And so it went. Wetherby noted that they tried to gauge whether the child was engaging in repetitive behavior, another "red flag." Behavior was not counted as repetitive unless they saw it three times in a row. Well, that's simply not the definition of "repetitive," an everyday word that everyday people understand. If I write a paragraph about ABA and mention "ABA" in three successive sentences that is not necessarily repetitive. If I were to thrice-use a phrase like "primal reckoning," that most certainly would be. If there's a hard yardstick for measuring an easily understood but subjectively defined word like "repetitive" I sure would like to see it. Adding an arbitrary parameter (Why three? Why not two? Or four?) in and of itself doesn't accomplish anything. In her own talk, Wetherby used the words "red flag" so many times I gave up counting and on three completely separate occasions compared autism with cancer for the purposes of making exactly the same point. Whatever else you might say about her talk, it certainly was repetitive. That doesn't make her autistic. It just demonstrates that she's a meandering and uninteresting speaker.
According to the FSU site, one of Ms. Wetherby's area of interests is "Diagnosis of language disorders." Perhaps this faculty member of the School of Communication Science and Disorders might consider seeking a grant to study tapes of her own sub-par power point presentation skills. It might be all around win-win for all concerned.
And it just kept going. If the toddler shows interest in the wobbling of a spinning plate, look out, that's a danger sign! Now I'm no child expert like Barbara Dunbar but I would argue that a wobbling spinning plate is inherently interesting. It's a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end with myriad variations that all stay within some very confined physical parameters. And it may be the perfect introduction for a youngster to unstable systems. A toddler repeatedly spinning a plate and observing the simultaneously chaotic and systematic way that it comes to rest is probably absorbing all manner of information about how the physics of the world he finds himself in works.
Personally, I'd rather watch an hour of spinning plates wobble to their respective stops than listen to another five minutes of Wetherby's red flag bigotry. From what I gather from her presentation, it would seem that one of the primary symptoms of autistic "regression," which must be guarded against at all costs is simple intellectual curiosity about how things work. Well, it's easy to see how Amy Wetherby could engage in such a pathologicalization since, as demonstrated by the parade of speakers to come through the AAC, curiosity is clearly outside the "baseline" of the average behaviorist and their assorted allies.
In the end, Amy Wetherby does what she can, for a buck, to suppress the natural inclinations of the child so that he or she will be more likely to behave in a more culturally prescribed manner. For their own good, Amy Wetherby and her kind cannot leave these children to the lure of their own essential nature.
One may argue about exactly how slicing a young girl's clitoris off morally compares with the targeting and deliberate squashing of a young's boy's budding intellectual focus and natural curiosity about how the world works. But I think its fair say that those engaged in either practice are engaged in variations of the same tyrannical theme.
Simply put, they are both monsters.
Walt Guthrie
Specifically female circumcision.
Female circumcision is the removal of a girl's (and I say "girl" because it is usually performed on children) outer sexual organs including, but not limited to, the clitoris. This procedure is performed primarily in certain Islamic and African societies. By removing the primary source of physical sexual pleasure, the parents and religious leaders who engage in and sanction this practice hope that the girl will have less incentive to follow their physical desires and engage in sexual activity which would bring shame to their families. Of course this is an issue that that can be looked at from many angles but for the purposes of what is to follow let's understand the essence of what female circumcision is. It is parents, in collusion with enabling authority, and justified by ideology, attempting to suppress the natural inclinations of a child so that that child will be more likely to behave in a culturally prescribed manner. The child, for her own good, cannot be left to lure of her own essential nature.
Now, hold that thought.
Amy Wetherby is on the faculty of Florida State University where she is associated with something called the First Words Project, which is, as the name might suggest, another attempt to push the "diagnosis" of autism to a still ever-younger age. What Wetherby is currently working on is a test that would allow a "diagnosis" of autism straight down to the toddler level.
Starting off her talk, Wetherby put on an impressive demonstration of her own compete intellectual mediocrity. Coming off as particularly overly-needy, she spent the first few minutes all but begging for someone to collaborate with her on some future project. Finally, we got down to why she was here: detecting autism is in the very young. To that end, the First Words Project has developed a questionnaire for parents, sample questions of which were presented in her power point presentation. Such as: Is the child interested in objects? Does he collect things? Blah, blah, blah.
Now this would be the point where, if I had decided to pursue my usual line of questioning, I would have popped in. One slide on the power point listed autism as consisting of entirely negative traits. One single graph used the word "deficit" at least seven times. No autistic- like trait could pass without the words "warning" or "red flag." Children who didn't get the diagnosis of autism "passed" the test.
But, it turns out, according to Wetherby, that "diagnosing" autism at 18 months is "way harder than you can imagine." To be honest, Amy Weatherby, during her talk, came across as, at least to me, borderline stupid. So I actually would have no problem imagining that almost any project that would involve a moderate level of intellectual rigor might indeed be "way hard" for someone of Ms. Wetherby's intellectual caliber.
Wetherby then proceeded to show a series of short videos of very young children seated with their mothers in clinical settings and asked the AAC audience to play, in essence, Find the Autism. As she showed each video, she would ask the audience questions like "Is there something different about this child?" and "Are we worried?" The audience, which was, to the best of my memory, about half filled with ABA and PBS clinicians, responded like they were sitting in for a taping of Oprah. Little gasps or soft cries of "He's not looking at his mother!" were elicited with each new video.
Now among the "red flags" that the spectators of these cherry-picked mini-movies were supposed to look for was, of course, meeting eye gaze, but also things like whether the child was "overly focused."
"Overly focused?"
After the meeting I asked her about this. She told me this would include a child doing the same thing over and over in an hour period of play. So, I asked if the child playing with blocks for a full hour would count as overly focused. Her reply: It depends. If the child is working on building one thing then the answer would be yes. If the same child instead spent no more then ten minutes on any individual block construction then the answer would be no. So, I guess, "over-focused" really means "focused."
One video moment that particularly stands out: a toddler sits at a table with his mother. A "researcher" (or whatever the woman in the video purports herself to be) puts a little wind-up spring-loaded toy in front of the child to walk across the table. The child reacts with delight. Next video: It's six months later. Same kid. The SAME toy is put in front of him. Rather than react with the same wonder to yesterday's news, the kid picks up the toy and brings it close to his face, seeming to, at least to my eyes, closely examine the toy's locomotion mechanism. Little gasps of horror from the audience.
At this point Gregory Abowd, sitting directly in front of me, turned back to me and noted that this kid had the makings of a future engineer. His comments happened to precisely mirror my own take on the matter. In fact, for perhaps the first time, our thinking seemed to be precisely in sync.
The two of us proceeded to push back on the interpretation that a child's display of precocious intellectual curiosity should be viewed as a "red flag" for anything. Wetherby's defense was to simply state that this sort of behavior is outside the normal "baseline" for a child in this age group.
Barbara Dunbar at this point chimed in to agree with Wetherby. The behavior displayed by the child in the video was not in accord with what a child in that age group should be doing.
Now the Floortime Atlanta website describes Barbara Dunbar as a "licensed psychologist... (who) specializes in assessment and treatment of young children with developmental and learning disorders. Her focus is on working with children with autistic spectrum disorders and their families" so I guess she knows what she's talking about.
"So," I asked her, gesturing to the child in the video, "what is he doing?"
Dunbar could only shrug that she didn't know.
She doesn't know what he's doing.
But she knows he shouldn't be doing it.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, Ms. Dunbar doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about after all.
And so it went. Wetherby noted that they tried to gauge whether the child was engaging in repetitive behavior, another "red flag." Behavior was not counted as repetitive unless they saw it three times in a row. Well, that's simply not the definition of "repetitive," an everyday word that everyday people understand. If I write a paragraph about ABA and mention "ABA" in three successive sentences that is not necessarily repetitive. If I were to thrice-use a phrase like "primal reckoning," that most certainly would be. If there's a hard yardstick for measuring an easily understood but subjectively defined word like "repetitive" I sure would like to see it. Adding an arbitrary parameter (Why three? Why not two? Or four?) in and of itself doesn't accomplish anything. In her own talk, Wetherby used the words "red flag" so many times I gave up counting and on three completely separate occasions compared autism with cancer for the purposes of making exactly the same point. Whatever else you might say about her talk, it certainly was repetitive. That doesn't make her autistic. It just demonstrates that she's a meandering and uninteresting speaker.
According to the FSU site, one of Ms. Wetherby's area of interests is "Diagnosis of language disorders." Perhaps this faculty member of the School of Communication Science and Disorders might consider seeking a grant to study tapes of her own sub-par power point presentation skills. It might be all around win-win for all concerned.
And it just kept going. If the toddler shows interest in the wobbling of a spinning plate, look out, that's a danger sign! Now I'm no child expert like Barbara Dunbar but I would argue that a wobbling spinning plate is inherently interesting. It's a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end with myriad variations that all stay within some very confined physical parameters. And it may be the perfect introduction for a youngster to unstable systems. A toddler repeatedly spinning a plate and observing the simultaneously chaotic and systematic way that it comes to rest is probably absorbing all manner of information about how the physics of the world he finds himself in works.
Personally, I'd rather watch an hour of spinning plates wobble to their respective stops than listen to another five minutes of Wetherby's red flag bigotry. From what I gather from her presentation, it would seem that one of the primary symptoms of autistic "regression," which must be guarded against at all costs is simple intellectual curiosity about how things work. Well, it's easy to see how Amy Wetherby could engage in such a pathologicalization since, as demonstrated by the parade of speakers to come through the AAC, curiosity is clearly outside the "baseline" of the average behaviorist and their assorted allies.
In the end, Amy Wetherby does what she can, for a buck, to suppress the natural inclinations of the child so that he or she will be more likely to behave in a more culturally prescribed manner. For their own good, Amy Wetherby and her kind cannot leave these children to the lure of their own essential nature.
One may argue about exactly how slicing a young girl's clitoris off morally compares with the targeting and deliberate squashing of a young's boy's budding intellectual focus and natural curiosity about how the world works. But I think its fair say that those engaged in either practice are engaged in variations of the same tyrannical theme.
Simply put, they are both monsters.
Walt Guthrie
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)