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>> Jonathan Mooney’s The Short Bus journeys into the heart of disability and normality

by JULIET WATERS

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that made me hate reading as much as Jonathan Mooney’s The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal. It’s a hard thing to witness the various ways that society uses the activity I most love to evaluate, regulate, shame, exclude and torture children.

Though you wouldn’t suspect this from Mooney’s engaging book, he didn’t learn to read until he was 12. Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and forced into special education, Mooney was designated to ride the “short bus.” That squat school bus meant to accommodate, and ultimately segregate, children with any form of disability. As a kid, he suffered the usual amount of condescension, impatience and bullying.

But because of superior athletic skills, he managed to achieve some degree of popularity and self-esteem, even as he struggled with depression and suicide. And finally, he managed to meet at least one teacher who nurtured the creativity that eventually got him accepted to Brown.

After a stint as a public speaker, Mooney set up a meeting to pitch his success story as an Afterschool Special. His instincts, however, forced him into an abrupt u-turn one afternoon. He found he could no longer adapt to the traditional American formula of the individual overcoming his “problems” and inspiring others to do the same. He’d met too many people along the way who, for whatever reason, would or could not overcome their disabilities. And he’d encountered too much discrimination to supply the world with one more story to justify the pernicious myth that, with determination and encouragement, people with disabilities could become “normal” too.

He decided instead to renovate that short bus and set out on a digressive, complicated road trip. The end result is a work that probably won’t reach as many people or make him as much money, but may touch those it does reach at a deeper level. Part memoir, part social document, The Short Bus includes Mooney’s reflections on his own pursuit of normality, while embracing a broad spectrum of stories from people whose brains and behaviour are a very bad fit for that concept.

There are the brilliant, like Kent, a comedian, Onion contributor and fellow Brown student. Despite his significant learning disabilities, Kent managed perfect SAT scores, but is having a much harder time mastering maturity. There are the wondrous, like Butch, a fascinating master of outsider art; Ashley, a deaf and blind eight-year-old with unnerving rebelliousness; and Katie, a 20 something with Down Syndrome who is equally doomed and graced with perpetual naïveté. There are the strange, like Cookie, a free-spirited cross-dresser in a conservative fishing town. And there are the helpless, like Jeff, whose Asperger’s syndrome has made it virtually impossible for anything close to what most people would consider a productive life.

Along the way, Mooney ruminates over the various issues raised by contemporary struggles with disabilities: advances in technology, like cochlear implants, that will further marginalize those who can’t benefit from them, like Ashley; the neurological research that so dominates the medical dialogue on learning disability; and the lack of neurological research devoted to overcoming our routine inhumanity towards people we marginalize and condemn to miserable lives.

What emerges from this journey is increasing evidence to support the theory that the predominant learning disability in our society is our anxious obsession with normalcy. It’s a cognitive concept that satisfies the small, but dominant part of our frontal lobe that likes order, routine, consistency and stability. But it’s an abstract concept that may in fact de-activate huge chunks of our temporal lobe, the part of our brain that intuits meaning, connections and value in the world around us, the part that heightens our sense of community and tenderness towards people’s vulnerability. The Short Bus is a small but hopeful step towards envisioning a society that devotes a little less energy towards fixing individual disabilities and puts a little more energy towards improving our collective ability to accept neurological and physical diversity.

The Short Bus by Jonathan Mooney,
Henry Holt, pb, 288 pp, $24