The New "Ironside": Good or Bad for Crips?

When NBC announced a reboot of “Ironside” was coming this fall, you might have dismissed it as just the latest Hollywood rehash.  But for wheelchair-users like me, it’s either cause for celebration or an omen of despair.

The old Raymond Burr series about a tough-as-nails paraplegic ex-police chief was never exactly enlightened.  But as a disabled kid in the 1960s and 70s, I clung to it with near religious fervor.  For me, Chief Ironside was a model for refusing to be defined by others’ limited expectations.  I came to rely on him as a kind of lifeline.

I never could walk or even stand, but like the hardboiled cop I didn’t want to be underestimated.  I felt determined to live a full, active life--to strut my stuff.

So I welcome the return of “Ironside,” but with a note of caution.  Will the producers screw it up?

To be sure, the original program had flaws.  It never talked much about the Chief’s disability.  Yet that was partly what made the portrayal so appealing.  It was simply an aspect of his character.  It didn’t define him, just as mine wouldn’t define me.  I knew his fictional physical limitations were different from my real ones.  But for me, just seeing a guy in a chair who was fearless and in charge was revelatory and redemptive.

The old show had other shortcomings, too.  Ironside rarely had to explain himself to others, as I was always having to do.  “I can’t walk,” I would answer nosy strangers.  “I was born this way. … It’s a neuromuscular weakness called spinal muscular atrophy.”  On “Ironside,” no one asked because everyone knew.  He’d been shot in the line of duty. His reputation preceded him.  

He also had a knack for materializing on the upper floors of buildings with no elevator, and apparently never had a problem finding an accessible bathroom.  Late in the series, he even drove his own van without adaptive hand controls! 

Nevertheless, the show introduced me, and much of the world, to a wheelchair-accessible van, complete with automatic lift.  Ironside's office had a built-in ramp and speakerphone, too.  I didn't have any of that, and you'd better believe I wanted it all.  The empowering paraphernalia had the effect of magic, especially compared to the other prominent image of disability on TV in those days--the pitiful kids on telethons.

Granted, my memories are hopelessly tinged with nostalgia, as will be my appraisal of the new version.  I’m bound to tsk-tsk every little difference—such as moving the series from San Francisco, a source of endless plot lines in the days of Haight-Ashbury hippiedom, to New York.  And switching the composition of Ironside’s hand-picked team, if not eliminating it altogether, seems a no-no.  In the original, his crew included one of TV’s first female police officers (two of the first, actually, considering a cast change in year 4) and a smart young African-American man who frequently faced down racism as he rose from the Chief’s assistant to a full-fledged attorney.

Not to mention the casting of the lead role.  Instead of a heavyset, gruff-yet-avuncular old white guy, we now have his opposite in buff, middle-aged Blair Underwood (who, like Burr, became famous playing a TV lawyer). 

But none of that matters.  The new show could still win me over.  Yes, some will complain about a nondisabled actor once again portraying a paraplegic.  Even that doesn’t faze me, though, if he plays it well.  And by well, I mean realistically.

Indeed, a touch more disability realism than the original managed would be most welcome.  No, it shouldn’t overwhelm the story.  We don’t need to see Ironside’s bladder and bowel procedures.  This isn’t a documentary.  But every now and then, couldn’t the new Chief wrestle with equipment failure, pressure sores, strangers’ stupid questions, or architectural barriers?

Let’s face it: Simply presenting a tough guy on wheels isn’t enough to impress anyone anymore.  Not in the age of Stephen Hawking, “Push Girls,” or “The Sessions.”  Audiences are smarter than they used to be.  To get the willing suspension of disbelief, you've got to infuse some convincing details.

Better still, the new show could have a social conscience.  It could address the economic and political inequities people like me face. 

But let’s not get carried away.  If it doesn’t do any harm, that might have to be good enough.  Of course, I could be pleasantly surprised.  I never imagined we’d see so many people in wheelchairs riding city buses as we do today, or that Michael J. Fox would return to prime time with Parkinson’s (as is happening this fall).  Disability inclusion has come a long way. 

Perhaps the original “Ironside” helped make this progress possible.  Its new incarnation could play a similar role, as long as it recognizes its potential to open people’s eyes to life’s possibilities.

The Origins of the Modern Disability Movement: Part 21 of "Miracle Boy”

A friend has written a blog article about famous people with dyslexia. Now, I know, having dyslexia is not the stigma it used to be. That's partly because so many people have it, or are related to people who do.

It's practically as common in our language nowadays as OCD and ADD -- and, for that matter, LOL. But I mean some people even go around humorously self diagnosing. "Sorry if I'm not focusing, it's just my ADD," you might hear someone say.

I've even heard people say "OCD is the new anal." In terms of describing behavior that's repetitive or fussy. Just to be clear.

Still, dyslexia is a real disability, even if some people make jokes about it and similar "invisible" conditions. I even once heard the Washington disability-rights leader Evan Kemp say that his dyslexia made his life more difficult than his spinal muscular atrophy. It made people think he was stupid just because he had trouble reading and writing the way they did.

I certainly have always felt pleased that my disability is so visible, so obvious. People may disrespect or underrate me because of it, but they never accuse me of faking it or taking advantage of it (even when I do!).

Anyway, here's the link to my friend's piece about dyslexics. “50 Famously Successful People Who Are Dyslexic”
Just one thing. Don't come back to me with jokes about Tom Cruise. I've probably heard them all already anyway.

The Birth of the Independent Living Movement

The whole idea of dependent autonomy, of being self-directed by relying on others, is a new concept that activists in Berkeley, California, are promulgating. I don't know about that at the time, yet on some level I know learning to manage my own assistants will ultimately enable me to grow up.

And marginalizing Dad from my daily life—distancing myself from his inability to accept the permanence of my disability, his hunger to uncover a cure—becomes liberating, too. I express and mask my mixed feelings towards him with a little song I make up. "Oh, my daddy, so sweet and so plump [which he never was], he looks like a camel without a hump!" It always makes Alec laugh, and Dad tolerates it. No one ever realizing the hostility behind it.

In the end, I decide my parents' divorce isn't a tragic turn but a fortuitous one, because it sets me free. Yet the ghosts of their breakup—the encroaching sense of familial bonds as stifling, strangling—will haunt me in adulthood.

***

That same year—1972—the nation's first curb ramp for wheelchairs is cut at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley—the result of lobbying from a recently established group called the Center for Independent Living, whose headquarters I visit seven years later. The CIL is launched by a small cadre of physically disabled activists, mostly graduates of the University of California at Berkeley, with a mission to give people with disabilities the means to control their own lives, have full and equal access to everything society has to offer, and live outside of institutions, in their own homes, with the assistance of personal aides they hire and control themselves.

This is very different from any sense of what it means to be handicapped that I've ever known. It's antipodal to Dad's view of it as a mark of failure, a problem to be solved, or Mom's semi-stoic proclivity to just cope and get on with the business at hand, fighting misery with industry. It's different from my own formulation, at ten, that disability can be ignored if you've got enough character, intelligence and humor to rise above it. The independent-living "model" is nothing short of revolutionary.

Spearheading this revolution is a visionary named Edward V. Roberts, who will become known as the father of the modern disability-rights movement.

***