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"    Apparently The National Federation of the Blind are threatening to protest today&amp;#039;s release of the movie adaptation of Jose  Saramago&amp;#039;sBlindness.Dr. Mark Mauer, the federation&amp;#039;s president, says, &amp;quot;Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious and depraved.It portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie.&amp;quot; Dr., you have every right to believe it to be a lie, because gosh darnit, it&amp;#039;s fiction.And not to get all semantical on you, but it&amp;#039;s not really correct to compare real &amp;quot;blind people&amp;quot; to an entire (again, fictional) population that suddenly and mysteriously looses their sight and has to fend for themselves in the inevitable breakdown of civilization. In fact, it&amp;#039;s stupid, and you should be embarrassed. That&amp;#039;s like all of America being pissed at Cormac McCarthy for suggesting that we might resort to cannibalism under Road-like circumstances, or people with the plague getting pissed about how people with the plague are portrayed in...The Plague.And you should be happy with how sight-competent people are portrayed in the book (though you clearly haven&amp;#039;t read it-spoiler alter: blindness is a metaphor!) and movie because if a whole bunch of sighted people lost their vision, people who&amp;#039;d been blind for a while would be at the top of the food chain.I&amp;#039;m sure they&amp;#039;d do a much better job fending for themselves in general, and might even avoid being locked up in an asylum where they are raped and starved. Anyway, I found the book so depressing (and well done, of course) that I cannot summon any desire to the movie.I hope it&amp;#039;s good, and I hope if you go you run into protesters, because it might be really funny.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a32725/blindness-blog/>