John Travolta and Dyslexia

So, last night was the Oscars, in which I was unusually interested, having seen many of the films which were nominated for various things. Gravity was one of those films, and it was a bit weird that it ran the tables, basically, at the various behind-the-scenes type awards, film editing and such, but didn't win Best Picture. But hey, 12 Years a Slave might be really good, I haven't seen it so I can't really object. I was, however, very pleased that Frozen, which I just saw a week or so ago, won both of its categories, Best Animated (Feature-Length) Film and Best Original Song for "Let It Go." Since "Let It Go" was nominated in that category, it, like each of the nominees, was performed live during the ceremony, by the person who sings it in the movie, which in its case is Idina Menzel. Now, y'know, it wasn't the world's best performance or anything, though I still found it cool, but that's not the point.

No, the point is that John Travolta had the job of introducing Idina to sing it, and he, well, botched that job. At the end of his introductory speech, which was about how musical-movies are really cool and in particular their big main-event songs (like "Let It Go"), he was supposed to, y'know, say her name. Except instead of saying "Idina Menzel," he said "Adele Dazeem," or something. It was weird. Of course, well before she had finished singing the song there were Twitter handles for that non-existent person; I particularly like the third entry from @AdeleDazim, "Travolta never bothered me anyway." I'd call that a sick burn except, well, ice and all... You get the idea, the whole internet has been mocking Travolta non-stop for the past twenty or so hours.

The more recent development is that it is claimed that Travolta is dyslexic, and that therefore we're all being terribly mean in laughing at him. Right up front I want to state very clearly that I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse the proposition that one should not laugh at people on account of their learning disabilities. (There might be a kind of forfeiture doctrine involved, where you don't get to make this objection to being mocked if you become President, but even then I kind of felt bad about it, and it's not like we didn't have any other things to criticize and mock.) But I think there are a number of reasons why the dyslexia defense doesn't really work very well here.



First of all, the timing is suspicious. The word "dyslexia" does not occur in his Wikipedia article; this suggests to me that stories in the past day or so are literally the first time the general public has become aware of this fact. Now, certainly there's no general obligation to tell everyone about all your learning disabilities, so this problem doesn't utterly defeat the claim, or anything close to it. It's just suspicious. Particularly if there were other reasons to think the claim invalid anyway, it might make you think that he was cynically exploiting his dyslexia to try and excuse a pretty jerky move on his part.

Second of all, and I should state upfront that I base this on an incredibly cursory perusal of the internet, Travolta is apparently a Scientologist, and has apparently claimed that Scientology in fact cured him of his dyslexia. Another thing I saw suggested that scientologists don't "believe" in dyslexia. This raises two problems for the claim on his behalf. First of all, if his dyslexia has been cured, it no longer bloody well excuses his difficulties reading off a word. Second of all, and a bit more tenuously, belonging to a group that has what I will uncharitably describe as "nut-job" beliefs about a condition, and in particular which deny its existence, would seem to make you lose your standing to claim the protections from mockery which that condition might afford someone else.

Finally, it is by no means obvious to me that "he is dyslexic, he got her name wrong, therefore he got her name wrong because he's dyslexic and therefore we shouldn't laugh at him" is a correct chain of inferences. This kind of involves synthesizing points from the first two objections. He's a sixty-year-old man with a lengthy and successful film career, which appears to have been so very unimpeded by his condition that the world did not know about said condition until today. That suggests that, dyslexic or not, he's gotten reasonably competent at reading words. Moreover, it's not like he was taken by surprise. He was given the job of presenting her at the Academy Awards. He knew he had that job. He could have spent an hour or so practicing how to say her name, getting instruction from someone who knew how to pronounce it, whatever. Indeed, people who have the job of introducing someone whose name they are unsure how to pronounce routinely devote some time to practicing it. Had he been pulled out of the crowd at random, with no notice, and asked to read off an introductory speech for Idina, and he had never seen her name before, well then we would most definitely be sympathetic if he mispronounced the name due to dyslexia.

But... that's not what happened. He had every opportunity to get it right, and instead he got it wrong. And, though I wasn't entirely focusing on him at the time, being more excited for the performance itself, my impression of his demeanor was that he knew he was getting it wrong, and was doing so intentionally. That is to say, he made fun of her for having a weird name. In other contexts we call that bullying. Having yourself a condition for which other people are sometimes bullied is not an excuse for that, especially if you yourself appear to hold crackpot denialist beliefs about that condition and/or claim that it's been cured.



I will state for the record that this post contains a lot of factual speculation on my part with essentially no research whatsoever. I'm kind of taking as a given what random people on the internet seem to be saying, and adding in some conjecture of my own. And if I am wrong as to any of the major factual predicates, e.g. that Travolta claims Scientology cured him, that Scientologists don't believe in dyslexia, or that a dyslexic person would not actually have had trouble managing to pronounce Idina's name correctly under the circumstances, then my conclusion that Travolta ought not skate on the charge of being a jerk through a dyslexia defense might well be wrong. In which case I'd feel bad about having laughed at him. I just wanted to point out that, at least based on what I do know right now, invoking the dyslexia defense on his behalf seems way too simplistic, and is in fact kind of a sick distortion of the issues involved with that condition.