Brotherhood of man
Influencing what?
When they show me the video, I don’t make a judgement call, except the rather mild, given the content, ‘That’s sick,’ and ‘Does it make you feel voyeuristic?’, as if, for all the world, I don’t have an autistic kid. The video is of Joshua Block, a young American autistic man, who began his social media life (if you can call this a life/living), during the pandemic. One day, as a lark, he crossed over to Mexico, which has a lower legal age for drinking than the States, and there, he bought a bottle of Strongbow. In that early video, he lifts the bottle up, as if toasting someone (himself, the millions of viewers he’ll soon have). He looks happy, beautiful, even. Fast forward four years. He’s now become so addicted to the booze that he’s an alcoholic. His Tik Tok and Instagram handle is ‘World of t-shirts'. He calls himself an influencer. His videos make money, serious money. I ask my students if they know what Joshua does with all that money and one of them shakes his head forlornly and says, ‘There’s a man who follows him around, his manager, maybe?, and...’
In the clip my students show me, a podcast host calls Joshua in. ‘Here’s Joshua!’ Joshua no longer looks like the kind of boy a mother looks after; he no longer looks beautiful. He looks like the kind of autistic person people at bus stops, train stations, supermarkets, turn their backs on.
The host smiles, offers Joshua a seat and then begins, not even subtly but operatically, to mock Joshua. The host continues smiling. The mockery doesn’t stop. It’s like artillery fire.
What you learn from being around autistics – stereotypical autistics, though, of course, differences can be huge, is that, language-wise, they can’t decode (metaphor, symbolism is lost on them) and relationship - wise, they can’t decode (the meanings behind words, actions are lost on them.) They don’t do masks, and don’t see that the rest of us do; tired masks, shattered masks, glow- up masks.
On the show, Joshua talks of how much money he makes. The braggadocio would be off-putting if we didn’t wonder if he’s been robbed of that money. And then, dressed like the Klan (only in black), a gang of men enter the frame and taunt Joshua with the line, ‘Eat the fries!’ It’s like a Frat party gone mad. ‘Eat the fries!’ the caped ones say again and again, coming in closer and closer for the kill. Joshua begins flapping his arms, goes ballistic. The caped men double over, laughing. There’s nothing as satisfying as a trigger that never fails.
‘It’s like “The Truman Show.”’ one of my students says. ‘You want him to get out, but you also can’t stop watching.’
We got to this point from ‘Hamlet’. We’d discussed the play and were about to begin our close reading. I asked my students to put on accents – people get stuck in RP (received pronunciation) land with Shakespeare, whereas, I think, silliness, perhaps, opens Shakespeare up. Some of my students chose to do Joshua’s accent; a distinct and slow Jersey drawl. They showed me the video afterwards.
Aside from two students who may be reading this because they’re also writing on Substack, my students don’t know I’ve got an autistic son and therefore, how deeply uncomfortable the video made me.
The video leaves an aftertaste. There’s pity. But also, something else. I feel as if I’ve sold out. I’m the woman on the crashed plane who looks at her fellow survivors and thinks: Lamb chops.
All parents look surreptitiously at their child and think: Will he/she find his/her passion in life (though one of my friends, after our earlier stint at idealism, has taken a pragmatic turn and now sniffs at this idea -and who’s to say she’s not right), and: Will he/she love and be loved?
Parents of autistic kids also have another will he/will she question, but one they kinda already know the answer to.
Will my child/young adult be mocked?
Yes, he/she will because he/she already is. If you could build a tent around your child, protecting him/her from the bastard cruelty of the world, you would. A tent built of 3 ply steel. One thing my journalistic work – writing investigative stories on human rights taught me - is that people can be shits and a whole lot of those people together – a crowd - can be shittier still.
Kids are not innocent, perhaps never were innocent. Before language, there are the hours of observation - of seeing and taking in how the world - and power- runs. The first knocking down of another kid’s blocks, the first ball stolen. Before the verbal insults then, comes this. And then comes secondary school, where new and strange battles are played each day, making Fortnite look like a game for nursery school kids.
I talk to a friend who has a neuro-typical daughter the same age as my son. That friend’s not happy with the style of education in Britain, indeed, anywhere. ‘But your girl’s at a private school,’ I say. She shrugs. ‘It’s all the same.’
I talk to another friend who also has a daughter the same age as my son. They were together at primary school. Her daughter is a high-functioning autistic. I tell my friend how long my son’s been out of school. ‘Five months!’ she says.
‘Five months,’ I say.
‘Why don’t you send him to my daughter’s school,’ she says.
‘Is it good?’ I ask.
‘She sits there all day, doing nothing.’
I’ve just had a year and a half of that at my son’s former school - the school I pulled him out of - so, I pass.
I haven’t, since I was very young and very political, wanted a good world, an utopia, where people can push through that stiff Aristotelian door - push, push - and flourish. In these dark political days, it’s perhaps to a framing of an utopia that we need to turn.
What if we were to look at ideas as either hot or cold. The cold Rousseauian idea of society is that it is held together by a contract. The warm Rousseauian idea is that dependence is the basis of morality. Reading Rousseau, Peter Alexander Meyers says, that people read Rousseau wrong and that Rousseau’s idea of a contract, as a glue for society, was a foundation principle. The contract, the rules and laws we agree to live under/by, then, is an origins story. Of dependence, Rousseau says, ‘[It] is both the source of evil and a practical potential for its solution that is always inherent in the social condition.’
Dependence can be a (physical, emotional, spiritual) crutch, but it can also be a chain that holds us together, a chain of being. We are, it is obvious, dependent on others. Children on parents; later, parents on children; dependent on those who help keep our bodies ticking (farmers, shopkeepers, doctors etc.) and those who keep our souls fluttering alive. We do not, perhaps, grow independent. We find new people to be dependent upon and who can depend on us.
What if the autistics, who we see being led by parents and carers are, on one level, as they clearly are, dependent, but on another level, it is we who are dependent upon them, for challenging us to a new idea of what it means to be human.
I talk to a friend late at night. She apologises for her tiredness; it’s water off a duck’s back. We’re always tired. I was so tired I was going to write: duck off a water’s back. (Perhaps, one of my most ingenious ideas). That friend says, ‘It’ll never change. Autistics will never be accepted.’ We talk about the changes we’ve seen in our lifetime: The growing tolerance to different ethnicities, different religions, different genders (but given how the political landscape is shaping, we know this could all, in an instant, blow out of the window). She agrees, then says, ‘Autistics? Nah.’
But it might all change. We have a saying in Urdu which will not, I know, translate well into English: Omeed per hum zinda hai/We live in hope. In English, it sounds bland, the kind of comment a grandparent might crack open as they pass around a tin of biscuits, looking pleased with themselves. In Urdu, it has a tenor of depth.
Our response to each other is everything. It can be gnarled, or, as the Germans, with their rational language which relishes in loose hanging threads say, oder/or..