Stewart McLean and Vinyl Cafe promote disability bigotry

Stewart McLean, CBC Vinyl Cafe host, we are not amused by disability bigotry

Stewart McLean, the popular radio personality on CBC’s Vinyl Cafe, is offensively bigoted to persons with disabilities and seniors. Pretty good aim, Stewart: with one shot you are able to hit two visible minorities protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We politely request that Mr. McLean apologize for the bigoted remarks in “The Cruise” episode (Jan 10, 2009), that the apology be on air and in a press release to ensure his 700,000 listeners understand the difference between a character and a pejorative stereotype of a visible minority. The episode should be removed until he has “cleaned it up” and refrain from further displays of bigotry towards the disabled and seniors again.

We call on the CBC to remove the program from their broadcast website and apologize as well.

Frankly since bigotry is in the eye of the beholder, we are not interested in any self-serving rationale McLean, who wrote the script as well as read it, has to offer. Good writers don’t need to resort to racial, sexist or disabled stereotypes to develop characters. An apology and positive action will suffice.

In “The Cruise” broadcast McLean portrays the positive impact the narrator Dave, an able bodied person, has on meeting “a man in a wheelchair” who is portrayed in negative, stereotypical fashion: helpless, weak in the head, detached from society and lost in a rut of hopelessness. The endless cruise story was rich in negative, stereotypical imagery.

Imagine if McLean had used “a black man” to describe his character before slowly spinning out the name, personality, age and deficiencies of the man. How would we imagine him: eating fried chicken and watermelon with a prodigious sexual capacity? How about “a gay man in a pink shirt”, or “a hard nose business woman.”

For McLean’s edification there are 4.4 million Canadians with disabilities, and 1.7 of them are seniors. One third are severely disabled. Even among them, wheelchairs manual and powered along with other assistive devices allow them to live independent and useful lives. You can be a quadriplegic with restricted use of your legs and arms and drive a car plus a power wheelchair.

Stewart, we don’t need your pat on the head, your care and assistance nor your patronizing attitudes. Stephen Hawking is one of us and so are millions of other capable people with disabilities who face discrimination every day. Yet we somehow manage to become world famous musicians, writers, politicians, business people and best of all just happy people.

McLean’s Dave-hero rescues the hapless “man in a wheelchair” with help by pushing his wheelchair outside in a violent storm, encouraging exploration of new experiences, re-uniting with his family and becoming a creative writer.

I kept waiting for Dave to take the man to a brothel for some good old sex he probably hadn’t experienced, another cliché for both the disabled and seniors.

At first our “man in a wheelchair” doesn’t have a name, This is the character development part of the story when the disabled man is an object, like a well-endowed woman in a low cut dress or a big black man.

Our “man in the wheelchair” is a cranky dinner companion who wants to be pushed outside in the storm.Is this a Clint Eastwood assisted suicide story, sort of “put the disabled on an ice flow”?

The resilience of the “man in the wheelchair” who now sports a name is amazing. With Dave’s help, our man develops a love of bungee jumping off the ship clutching his walker another stereotypical image of the senior with a walker.

The “man in the wheelchair” plot and his personal development at Dave’s careless assistance comes just before he is killed off. The former paralytic, helpless creature, now swinging off the bow of the ship, is revealed to be 90 years old. It’s preposterous but it does get McLean out of his plot corner.

One can only assume the death was an afterthought on McLean’s part who realized if he encouraged the feeble to bungee jump and write books, the world would go to pot.

The story is insulting and the writer’s prominence as a quasi-small-l-liberal makes it all the more offensive.