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    Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism
    Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism
    Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism
    Ebook232 pages4 hours

    Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism

    By Kamran Nazeer

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In 1982, when he was four years old, Kamran Nazeer was enrolled in a special school alongside a dozen other children diagnosed with autism. Calling themselves the Idiots, these kids received care that was at the cutting edge of developmental psychology. Now a policy adviser in England, Kamran decides to visit four of his old classmates to find out the kind of lives that they are living now, how much they've been able to overcome-and what remains missing.

    Bringing to life the texture of autistic lives and the limitations that the condition presents, Nazeer also relates the ways in which those can be eased over time, and with the right treatment.Using his own experiences to examine such topics as the difficulties of language, conversation as performance, and the politics of civility, Send in the Idiots is also a rare and provocative exploration of the way that people-all people-learn to think and feel. Written with unmatched insight and striking personal testimony, Kamran Nazeer's account is a stunning, invaluable, and utterly unique contribution to the literature of what makes us human.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateDec 10, 2008
    ISBN9781596919914
    Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism
    Author

    Kamran Nazeer

    Kamran Nazeer was born of itinerant Pakistani parents and has lived in New York, Jeddah, Islamabad and Glasgow. He studied law but decided not to become a lawyer. By the time he completed his Ph.D. thesis, he had decided not to become an academic. On leaving Cambridge, he was recruited into Her Majesty's Service and now works as a policy adviser in Whitehall. He has published work in newspapers and magazines.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      For about 18 months in the 1980s, a New York City school ran a special education class for autistic students. Some didn’t speak; another periodically interrupted every lesson or conversation to say “Send in the Idiots”. Another would only sit on a particular white stripe in the classroom carpet. That one, Kamran Nazeer, is the author of Send in the Idiots. Around twenty-five years later, Nazeer attempted to contact his former classmates and teachers; two teachers, three classmates, and the parents of a third (who had committed suicide) agreed to talk with him, with this book as a result.
      All (well, not the suicidal one) were reasonably successful. André is a computer programmer who communicates with the aid of carefully crafted puppets (technically marionettes, since they are worked by strings). He can hold a normal conversation for a while, but the puppets come out periodically when things get difficult. (This is actually a major improvement on André’s previous coping mechanism, which was unfolding a paperclip and driving the wire under a fingernail until he completed a sentence). Although multiple puppets, each named, are involved, Nazeer doesn’t say if particular puppets are associated with particular situations. He does note that while interrupting André is perfectly acceptable, interrupting a puppet invokes an outburst – André threw a glass at him in one case and locked him in the bathroom in another. André had bad luck on the dating scene; he was thrown out of a singles group after bringing a puppet, but Nazeer also comments, on meeting some of André’s programmer coworkers, that André seemed the most normal one there.
      Craig (the “Send in the Idiots” repeater) is a successful Democratic speechwriter (No jokes, please). Other than being a little nervous in social situations, he doesn’t display any particular autistic “quirks”. Nazeer spends rather more time with Craig than his other interviewees, and they both display considerable disappointment at the 2004 election results – which he and Nazeer (who is now a UK government employee) attribute to the “politics of affinity” rather than the “politics of argument”. Samples from Craig’s speeches show he really is excellent a presenting an argument: combing the literature for references; emphasizing points with just the right amount of repetition; and breaking the speeches into perfectly timed introduction, body, and conclusion. Unfortunately political speechwriting isn’t really about cogent arguments, and Craig is having trouble getting a job when Nazeer leaves him.
      Randall is a bicycle messenger. He leaves the house when second hand of the clock is on the 3, 6, 9 or 12, rides the first couple of blocks with his eyes closed, and won’t ride at all unless his bike feels “just right”. He sometimes has trouble with delivery deadlines because he won’t go up to a reception desk if there is anybody else waiting. A good part of Nazeer’s interview with Randall is based on Randall’s relationship with his boyfriend, and on Randall’s delivery of a handgun. Both are a little strange; Randall’s boyfriend is cheating on him, but apparently doesn’t realize that somebody who is obsessive about details will not notice stray hairs of the wrong color on a pillow or the fact that shoes are in the exact same position they were in the morning belies the claim that he was out of the house when Randall called to check on him. The handgun thing is also strange; Randall made a delivery to a gun store, then the owner asked him to take a package to another store, after showing Randall the package contained a gun. Randall follows procedures exactly; it’s OK as long as it’s called in to the dispatcher. The delivery gets made, then strange things start to happen – apparently people leave unusual phone messages and guys come to the door and make cryptic comments. Mike (the boyfriend), Randall and Nazeer can’t figure out what’s going on – neither can I, and it doesn’t get resolved.
      Elizabeth is the suicide, so the interview is with her parents. Elizabeth seems to be the most severely affected of Nazeer’s classmates; although she is a talented pianist she can’t manage riding the bus; she can’t ride for a certain number of stops because she can’t distinguish between stops to pick up passengers and stops because of traffic. She can’t count streets because she can’t distinguish between a street and a driveway. She eventually ODs on drugs and drowns herself in the backyard pool.
      Interspersed through this is Nazeer’s own story; he works for the UK government in some sort of an advisory postion. Since he’s lived in Islamabad, Jeddah, New York, Glasgow, and London he presumably has considerable practical international experience and language ability. Nazeer’s coping mechanism was – and still is at the time of writing – carrying an alligator clip and squeezing various body parts with it during conversation. Nazeer calls his alligator clip (he actually calls it a “crocodile clip”, presumably because there are no alligators in Pakistan) and André’s puppets “achieving local coherence”. Unfortunately, he never really explains what he means by that but two examples may illustrate it: one is on noticing a sign in a bar that says “No Dogs Allowed”, Nazeer speculates that this is to avoid animals that might create a nuisance for bar patrons – although he allows himself to wonder what would happen if a patron brought in a pet bear, he agrees that the bar has achieved local coherence through a rule. He then discusses another classmate – not interviewed for this book – who negotiated the complicated problem of swapping items from her lunch box by only trading for items that began with a particular letter of the alphabet – for example, the letter “B”. Thus she was able to trade an apple for a banana while Nazeer ended up hopelessly flustered. The classmate also achieved local coherence by rule. A similar – although fictional – example occurs in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the autistic hero plans his day based on the color of the first car he sees. He explains that he knows perfectly well that the car color doesn’t affect anything, but it gives him rules that avoid the need to puzzle over the world’s behavior. A further coping mechanism for Nazeer is always washing his body in the same order when he takes a shower; after his comment, I realized that [b]I[/b] always wash [b]my[/b] body in the same order in the shower. With some trepidation and unease, I changed my washing order today, with no apparent ill effects. It did feel strange and unsettling, though.
      Nazeer is also unsettled by the fact that everybody seems to expect autistics to be latent geniuses, possibly influenced by Born on a Blue Day and Rain Man. Nazeer notes that he and André and Craig didn’t achieve success through genius – although they are obviously smart, they studied their chosen fields extensively – almost obsessively, suggesting that much of the “genius” of autistic savants is just the ability to focus really hard.
      Interesting; I wish Nazeer would have asked more from his subjects and compatriots – discussion “local coherence” with André, for example, to see if the puppets really served the same purpose as the alligator clip. There are lots of insights on philosophy and autism interspersed with the interviews; well worth my time.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting book by an author diagnosed with autism as a child, combining tales of his personal experience, the experiences of classmates, their parents and families, and scientific and philosophical thoughts on autism.
    • 5/5
      This was one of the most engrossing, thought provoking, and intriguing perspective of living with autism I have read to date. A unique book that describes the transition from childhood to adulthood for high functioning autistic individuals.

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    Send in the Idiots - Kamran Nazeer

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