The Politics of Cleft Palate - An outline of the path forward.

 

The Politics of Cleft Palate is an example of identitarian analysis of targeted minorities.

The problem is that identitarianism itself is a form of discrimination. A contrary formulation, such as liberalism’s “we the people,” avoids such discrimination.

For race, there are many examples of policies to combat racism, and public law to that effect. There publicly funded agencies to combat law violation when it comes to racial prejudice. There are public policies about cerebral palsy. For example www.disabilityrightswa.org mentions “Cerebral Palsy.”

It does not mention Cleft Palate, or any of its synonyms, according to a Google site search.

Our discourse is full of what political commentator Andrew Sullivan calls Neo Marxism. Where for original Marxism, the enemy is the new class, the bourgeoisie, and those targeted are the workers (proletariat), Neo Marxism’s targeted identities are minorities, women, and LGBTQ people and the enemy is those who have “privilege,” generally white or European people, and males. Neo Marxism is essentially silent about clefted people.

Two major differences between Neo Marxism and the Enlightenment Liberalism of the Founding, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Democratic Party. Liberalism, including democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, does not assume an enemy; and it includes everyone, not just the oppressed. And its solution to problems is to seek information and devise a better way of doing things.

Liberalism seeks to fix the problem; Left Marxism seeks to fix the blame.

The absence of a public program, with funds, for cleft palate is an obvious area for a new civil rights effort.

Such a program might include:

Identify how many people with a visible cleft are in the jurisdiction. (Attempt to gather a representative sample and find out what they think should be done.)

Create a clearinghouse where clefted people can meet. (Many clefted people have never had a conversation with another clefted person. That standard element of activism for targeted populations, “the community,” is absent for the clefted population.)

Address problems identified by the representative sample.

Problems I personally have encountered:

A Washington State driver’s license photographer prompted, “Cheese, Whisky, Harelip.”

As I was consulting an Employment Office counselor, another counselor nearby teased a mustachioed employee about his “harelip.”

When I was a Ph.D candidate at the State University, the professor kept addressing me as “Jones” (my last name is “Smith.”)

(At many public universities there are obstacles to clefted students because the institution does not want a person with the cleft facial markings publicly identified with them. At the above State University, I also experienced targeting in an adult education program in object-oriented programming, and in their adult auditing program.)

Clefted newborns need surgery. Mine was done, starting during FDR’s presidency, by Children’s Orthopedic Hospital, as charity. (The Depression still lingered, and my parents were quite poor.) We get sown up, because the public would otherwise be horrified. But how is it financed?

What, if any, are the cases at law concerning the constant disability rights (such as the three State of Washington cases above) discrimination we encounter?

Thus, additional suggestions for a pioneer (perhaps first in the nation) program for the clefted:

A number clefted people can call, if merely for consolation - or when our civil rights are violated.

Make competent legal advice available, for example, if being bullied in the public schools, or if a clefted worker is being verbally or otherwise abused on the job.

In theory, we can contact our legislative representatives. We could ask:

What is the public policy concerning people who have a cleft?

Could you print me a copy?

What is the enforcement mechanism when the policy is violated? And is meaningful corrective action taken?

Are any funds at all being spent to improve the lot of people who have a cleft?

Are we proportionately represented in the public work force? In the State universities? If not, why not?

If they don’t have a printed policy, they don’t have a policy. If no policy, they freely discriminate, as in the three specific examples I listed above.

I’ve never encountered a government program for cleft palate people. If, more than half a century after MLK’s civil rights revolution, there is no program for us, no public monies, action is long overdue.

What would have happened if, when the Washington State Driver’s License Examiner used the h-word on me, I had said, “May I speak to your supervisor?”

The Social Changes of Today - Increased Identitarian Thinking - and the Clefted

     Non discrimination once betokened a tolerant, egalitarian outlook. So long as everyone abided by general civic standards, good citizenship meant, Don’t stick your nose in other people’s business. Let them pursue happiness. It is the standard of a liberal society which leaves you alone and lets you be.

     A recent article on how to be an anti racist imposed requirements which go beyond the standard of a liberal society. A selective, some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others standard prescribes caution about those highly ranked in the politics-of-identity hierarchy. Minorities, women, and LGBTQ people are treated with caution. Everyone else, you can probably diss. This is not to the advantage of the clefted.

     What has happened is that today, groups are more likely to think of themselves as a collective. An in-group which has its own group interests. The specific example: Until recently, dwelling in an apartment building was relatively anonymous. Populated by individuals from all walks of life. In this and the previous building I lived in, there’s been something new - the sense that “You’re not part of our in-group. Nobody likes misfits. We have the right to say, you’re not wanted here.”

     The general increase in prejudices that the civil rights laws of the mid-sixties had been thought to discredit - increasing hostility toward minorities, different gender orientations, etc. - is also adverse to disabled people.

     The liberty intended in The Declaration and the Bill of Rights was founded on a non-identitarian outlook. “We the People” is the classic statement that identity should not matter in a free society. The classic opposite was Marx’s announcement that the proletariat was inherently good and the bourgeoisie - their exploiter - was inherently bad. Columnist Andrew Sullivan suggests that we have a “Neo-Marxism” in which women, minorities, and LGBTQ people are good, and the rest are guilty of “privilege.” Born good and born bad, in effect.

     There was already a tendency against those who were born “different”  - tragic Oedipus, whose name means “swollen foot,” and the scriptural “Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born thus?” Again, this undoing of the gains of the civil rights laws of the mid-sixties does those who have a cleft little good.

     Identitarianism implicitly elevates some identities at the expense of others, at the cost of the ideal of human equality.

Selections From an Email to a Couple of my Relatives

 Selections from an email to a couple of my relatives:

I’ve been writing a pioneering blog about cleft for almost a decade. Some things that have come up:

If not for private charity, we’d be almost completely neglected.

Society gets us sown up, so we won’t be so scary. For the adult clefted, there’s nothing.

Other minorities have a discourse: Racism. Sexism.

I use the non-existent terms Cleft Phobia. Cleft phobic. So sue me.

Leftism, Socialism, is for those who are “in a state of society.” We the clefted are not, and the left are dangerous to us. Our best chances are with middle class people, who are fewer than before.

Please tell me if there is anything about clefted people, or by clefted people, in the media or the institutions, instead of the charities that “help” us.

One of the things that drew my attention to the prevalent Original Sin assumption of, for example, Saint Augustine, was that Original Sin (which violates Due Process’ “presumption of innocence”), “we are all sinners,” makes it easier to debase, degrade, and humiliate the clefted. It’s ok to target us; after all, we offend people.

/******/

I would like to have a part in initiating a pioneering program for the clefted, although organizing or leading such a public program is not in my skill set.

I’m guessing it would include the following steps:

1. Sociological data such as How many have visible cleft, and are the most stigmatized; and how many simply have speech and eating difficulties. (What percent of the populace are we?)

2. Civil rights cases at law, if any, concerning commenting, gesturing, verbal abuse, rejection by the workplace or higher education (I’ve experienced both - that’s why I’m a (national scholarship) Fellow who was never a professor).

3. Program to provide a clearinghouse, where we can meet and cooperate against the pervasive public discrimination.

3. A number we can call when we feel we’re being targeted.

4. A pro bono attorney cadre.

5. Surveys of our representation or underrepresentation in government agencies, state universities, managerial positions, professional positions, and technical positions.

6. A statement by the opinion makers of our society of the reciprocity principle: If an opinion, attitude, or practice would be wrong in the case of the protected classes, it is wrong for the clefted. We have exactly the same civil rights as everyone else, although the justice system does not act as if we do.

End of selection.

The religious notion of Original Sin and the cleft palate community.

The doctrine of Original Sin appears in two Abrahamic religions of the First World, the religion of the Israelite tribes, which by the first century of the Common Era had been named Judaism; and the religion based on a first century practitioner of that religion, Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity.

A common expression in these religions is, Through Adam (the symbolic first man) did all men sin; every person is born inheriting this sin. We, until Christian salvation, are all sinners.

Disabled people, particularly so. Consider the passage from the Gospel of John in the Christian scriptures, where Jesus is confronted with a man born disabled. “Master,” the people ask, “who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

Particularly for clefted people, by and large physically able except for the social stigma (implied in the catchphrase “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor), Original Sin can produce a kind of knee-jerk discrimination at the very outset of our social interactions.

In our medical care, the dogma of Original Sin can make a diagnosis of illness an accusation of illness.

A personal example. In middle age, the back pressure from prostate enlargement produced blood changes. I was sent to a specialist who said these changes were a multiple myeloma indicator. Although I asked if the prostate condition could be the cause, he performed a bone marrow biopsy and had me undergo a skeletal X-ray. Although a second opinion said the biopsy did not indicate cancer, and the X-ray didn’t find anything, he wanted to start chemotherapy. I insisted on waiting until we actually knew something.

Not only is the doctrine of Original Sin a harmful premise which frequently produces unfounded accusations, there are counter arguments in the very religions from which it arose; and in secular society it violates it violates a founding liberal principle: the presumption of innocence. I was attending the christening of a grandchild when, to my astonishment, the priest read a passage from the Torah/Tanakh which contradicted a dogma of his faith. Ezekiel 18 is an extended argument against Original Sin: “Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father? … The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, …But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die.” (Emphasis added)

Likewise, for Christians, in the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus is saying that he does not hold with the dogma of Original Sin either. Key passage: “He came to himself.” As in the passage from hundreds of years earlier, the key word is “turn.”

Original Sin makes a society which is inclined to be prejudicial toward the clefted even more so. But there are countervailing arguments in the very religions originating it, and our universal justice assures us that the presumption of innocence is our unalienable right.

/******/

From the first post in this blog nine years ago:

A reciprocity principle: If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for us. We have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if we do.

What someone targeted for being Muslim can teach those targeted for disability: The silence of the witnesses.

Tarunjit Singh Butalia on being harassed in the name of Christianity at a DMV office: “Despite being in a crowded room and others being able to hear this man harass me, no one intervened.”

“I privately spoke with a supervisor at the agency about the harassment I experienced — in what should have been a safe space open to everyone.

People of marginalized identities frequently experience hurtful and harmful situations when we’re merely trying to live our everyday lives.

I’ve learned from experience that teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation does not work.”

“I still worry that my DMV experience happened in public and around dozens of people. No one intervened, no one comforted me, no one confronted the aggressor who was screaming at me. I know these situations can be uncomfortable and, in the moment, sometimes people don’t know how to respond.

But what can you do when you encounter someone being harassed?”

“First, the person under attack needs solidarity. You can stand up and, instead of confronting the bigot, go to the person under duress, face them and block the sight of the bigot spewing hate. You can also offer words of support and ask if there’s anything you can do that would help them in the moment. None of this happened in my case.

Even after I completed my license renewal and walked across the waiting room to the door, not one person stepped up to say “I am sorry for what you went through.” That doesn’t mean folks in the room necessarily agreed with the screaming man. They just didn’t know what to do and how to react.” (Emphasis added)

“Unfortunately, inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others. Next time you see this happen before you, step up and be an ally of the victim. The world runs because goodness exceeds evil.

Silence is complicity and feeds the normalization of hate. As is commonly said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good people do nothing.” So please don’t be a part of the silent majority — instead, stand up, speak up and be an ally for those marginalized in our communities.” (Emphasis added)

/******/

I recently asked an in-law who works in higher education but keeps their law license current via pro bono cases if clefted people are in a protected class. To my surprise, they indicated that we are. “Sometimes people don’t know how to respond” to cleft phobia - or other disability discrimination - because they don’t realize that people having a disability have the same civil rights as women, minorities, and LGBTQ people.

“Inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others.” There are powerful taboos against our speaking up for ourselves (I felt them when starting this blog years ago). We are supposed to be humble and apologetic. Sometimes “teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation” does not work. And sometimes they’re just messing with you because they think you’re afraid to violate the taboo, and it works to come back at them in no uncertain terms. Certainly bigots deserve to be surprised. (Emphasis added)

A reciprocity principle: If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for us. We have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if we do.

A brief note on pervasive social discrimination against people having disabilities.

 Liz Plank: “People with disabilities are one of the most underrepresented populations in local and federal government. You don’t have to look far to understand why, when demeaning and discriminating them based on their disability is the accepted status quo.”

A day in the life: Bullied at the grocery store

 A couple months ago the chain grocer where I shop mispriced the hummus I bought. When I brought it to the attention of the employee who oversees the self-checkout area, he said I’d have to go talk to the deli, which sold it. He suggested I might have looked at the price of a different brand of hummus.

I ate the overcharge.

A couple weeks ago I bought six containers of hummus. It rang up at a total of $9.00 more than the advertised price,“Tell me what I have to do to fix this,” I told him. “What do I have to do?”

He told I’d have to go work it out with the deli.

“Do I leave my (mostly rung up) cart here while I do this?” The employee ok’d that.

So I went to the deli and told them this particular brand was deceptively priced. “Come around out here and look at the label in front of it. It’s not the same as what you have in the machine that rings it up.”

They authorized the guy in the self checkout to correct the price, which he did.

The whole process had taken over half an hour and involved two sections of the chain store’s operation. Presumably the chain is now aware that one of its sections is involved in deceptive pricing, and another section has been stonewalling customers who bring it to the store’s attention. They may even be aware that, in addition to violating state law (RCW 19.94.230) regarding “deceptive pricing,” this unethical employee, in bullying an elderly, disabled customer, could have exposed the chain to a civil rights liability.

Clefted people, according to FHA/HUD, which oversees the over-55 apartments where I live, are impaired in “a major life function” in four ways: Appearance, eating, speaking, or considered as such.

The last covers disability stigma, the public prejudice which can cause even elderly, handicapped citizens to be bullied in the course of daily life.

What you can do when targeted by someone who thinks you aren’t in a protected class

 In June, 2013, this blog posted (Imagine That America Had Its Consciousness Raised), about What We Can Do.

Today, if someone gets on your case: HUD/FHA oversees the 55+ place I live. The application asked if I was disabled. Their sites say that disabled, “impaired in a major life function,” includes:

1. Speech
2. Eating
3. Appearance 
4. And considered to be disabled, which addresses prejudice and stigma.

So, if you don’t want to just let it go - sometimes the politic solution - you can point out that the United States Government considers you disabled, and frowns on targeting disabled people. Such targeting is discriminatory and could be a civil rights violation.

If others are standing by doing nothing, ask if they would let race, gender, or religious discrimination happen without objecting.

Andrew Sullivan’s view of gay stigma often resonates for cleft stigma

 Andrew Sullivan’s Out on a Limb:, Chapter The Politics of Homosexuality:

“There is no common discourse in which he can now speak, …” A beginning: If someone is getting on our case, and pretending that it isn’t because we are different, we can ask, “Are you being cleft-phobic?”

The mainstream, despite the civil rights revolution, still “pursues the logic of repression.”

Like homosexuality, cleft palate “does in fact exist as an identifiable and involuntary characteristic of some people, and that these people do not as a matter of course suffer from moral or psychological dysfunction,” nor are we guilty because of our difference.

One reason a “common discourse” is lacking is because of  “a politics of denial or repression. Faced with a sizable and inextinguishable part of society, it can only pretend that it does not exist, or needn’t be addressed, or can somehow be dismissed.” Ok, just 1 in 700. But name a program anywhere in the United States for adults with cleft palate.

Sullivan describes a gay politics of “theater and rhetoric”; we clefted sit abashed, humble and apologetic, and don’t do anything. “Acquiescence in repression,” Sullivan notes. “A psychological dynamic of supplication that too often only perpetuates cycles of inadequacy and self-doubt. … the notion that [our] equality is dependent on the goodwill of [our] betters. … A clear and overwhelming history of accumulated discrimination and a social ghetto that seemed impossible to breach.” (I don’t care if it h-words the Governor.)

“Facing their families and colleagues with integrity.” Yes. We should. Cleft Pride. “Full civic equality.” Shout out our “existence, equality, integrity.”

“America’s inherent hostility to gay people.” And to us, still: half a century after the civil rights revolution.

“Liberalism properly restricts itself to law—not culture—in addressing social problems.” And since the Equal Protection clause has been implemented as protected class, we must be in a protected class, even if the public doesn’t think so. Make that clear whenever someone insults or bullies you.

We don’t have a community: “A young heterosexual black or Latino girl invariably has an existing network of people like her to interpret, support, and explain the emotions she feels when confronting racial prejudice for the first time. But a gay child generally has no one. The very people she would most naturally turn to—the family—may be the very people she is most ashamed in front of.” Our small numbers - 1 in 700 - make us very alone. One of the first things the so far nonexistent program for adult clefted people should be a clearinghouse to put us in contact with each other.

“The country [should be] forced to debate a subject honestly—even calmly—in a way it never has before.”

Does the performative era exacerbate the pervasive public discrimination against the stigmatized disabled?

Black Columbia Professor John McWhorter’s Woke Racism’s explanation of Critical Race Theory describes it as an academic fad which is not constrained by evidence and reason: “It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” The lack of cognitive constraints facilitates the targeting of anyone who can be accused of politically incorrect thinking or speaking. Why this matters for the civil rights of the stigmatized disabled is that it has ushered in an era of heightened self-righteous moralism. Not only can any difference from the conventional wisdom be characterized as utmost sinful heresy, McWhorter gives example after example of extreme punishment of anyone singled out for wrongthink. If such wrath can be visited on virtually any Ivy League student or professor who exercises freedom of speech, it creates a fear society which increases the pariahdom of a disabled minority which is already marginalized.

McWhorter gives many examples of extreme punishment which performative virtue signaling exacts for anything that can be construed as adverse to a race, gender, or sexual orientation:

“Thus, an obscure legal theory now feeds directly into a modus operandi that leads to indefensible suspensions, firings, and shamings nationwide.” Examples: “Is it necessary that the president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation be forced to resign because the group’s statement in allegiance with Black Lives Matter after the Floyd murder was not long enough?” “Is it necessary that when, in 2018, a woman attended a party thrown by a Washington Post employee and wore blackface in ridicule of a recent comment by Megyn Kelly, she was not just called aside but cast into unemployment as a revolting heretic unworthy of civilized engagement? The blackface was unwise, to be sure—by the late 2010s it was no longer within the bounds of most educated people’s sense of humor to wear blackface even in irony. But still, the offender clearly intended it as signaling allegiance to the barrage of criticism against Kelly. Only in the late 2010s could this clumsy goof-up qualify as grounds for unemployment, with her callers-out claiming that she had made the party’s space “unsafe,” as if she had simply walked in corked up and saying she was Oprah. A few people at the party not only hounded her out but dedicated themselves to getting her fired from the newspaper for her transgression of etiquette. They succeeded, after even going as far as strong-arming the host of the party into revealing her name to them so that they could pursue her persecution.”

As in the case of the witch hunt that ensued when it was discovered that Virginia Governor Northam had appeared in blackface in a youthful peccadillo, responsible liberal voices might ask, “Where’s the path to redemption?”

“She had made the party’s space ‘unsafe’” (by appearing in blackface). There are people whose bigotry against disability makes them “offended” when, for instance, they encounter someone with a cleft. Could this justify their complaining to management that they should not have to labor in a “contaminated, offensive” workplace?

McWhorter describes: “Kangaroo court inquisitions, … psychological torture sessions seeking to purge people of improper thoughts, … obsessive policing of language.” That’s not an environment that bodes well for people considered “misfits” because of a birth condition.

McWhorter’s opening chapter: “As I write this in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color. Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told. Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently. What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?”

It is a short path from hair-trigger, self-righteous woke antiracism to a heightened readiness for ableist attacks on America’s largest minority. Social performativeness increases the “social tyranny” John Stuart Mill warned against in his classic study of liberty. It is bad for democracy, it is bad for the pursuit of happiness, it turns the land of the free and the home of the brave into a fear society.

A day in the life

 Experiences I’ve had that maybe you have too.

One gets hired for a position, and does well in it. Sooner or later there’s an office shuffle, and there’s a new supervisor. They’re cleft phobic, and make life hell - but nobody seems to notice.(1)

A simple ride on the city bus system goes south. I once took a seat near the front of the bus opposite a scrawny woman in a wheelchair. As the bus got rolling, she got out one of those little dollar bottles of gin and commenced trying to open it. She asked passengers to help. When she asked me, I smiled and demurred. No drinking on Metro Transit. “You are weak!” she said, and started repeating it in a loud voice, verbal abuse that surely the driver could hear. (I wondered if I should suggest to the driver that the civil rights of a disabled person were being violated on government property - but decided not to bother.)

You go to a party, and someone asks you what seems to be a friendly question. This turns into derogatory rhetorical questions, and instead of a happy occasion, you find yourself on the hot seat - people backing away. Presumably this doesn’t happen with minorities, women, or LGBTQ people - people in a protected class.

A stranger remarks, “I knew a guy like you” - another person who was “different” - clefted.

Even government offices aren’t safe. I was meeting with an employment counselor when their co-worker nearby loudly joked about a moustached employee’s “hair lip.” A State Driver’s License photographer said, “Cheese, whiskey, harelip.”

You are admitted to the graduate school of a public university, and as soon as they see you there’s a chill. I experienced this in both a Midwestern and a West Coast university. (A city university just starting its graduate program acted the way higher education ought to act, and I had no difficulty getting a graduate degree there.) Are universities in the performative era afraid that having certain kinds of disabled people bearing their credentials out into the world would harm their reputations? 

These things add up. They constitute stigma, and result in what Sociologist Erving Goffman called “reduced life chances.”

/******/

(1) When I was working for the City Comptroller’s Office, I once came back from a week’s vacation to find co-workers acting a little strange. Finally, someone took me aside and said one of our people from across the hall had gone to my supervisor’s supervisor (a CPA, one of the ethical occupations) and complained about the way I was constantly being dressed down in front of everybody. The CPA said, “That’s a serious charge. It would need to be documented,” - and she pulled out a list of times and what was said.

Example of cleftphobia: “What’s a misfit doing at a party?”

“Public prejudicial discrimination—harassment—is an appeal to those present to share the harasser's opinion that there is something wrong with the person who is being singled out which renders them outside of society. That is why it is not the responsibility of the target of prejudice to defend themself socially—social negation is assumed. That is why it is the responsibility of any group, as soon as they realize it is possible that discrimination is taking place, to make it clear in no uncertain terms that discrimination is not accepted there.” - Personal note, 2008

Cleftphobia is often apparent at parties. One suddenly finds oneself on the hot seat. Interrogation pretending to be normal social curiosity—but the subtext is, ‘What’s a misfit doing at a party?’