Snake Oil Taraneh Fazeli, Critical Writing Fellow, Core...

In his review, Snake Oil: Taraneh Fazeli, Critical Writing Fellow, Core Program, Michael Bise trades his heart condition as currency to dismiss any other opinion or perspective on illness, more specifically Tareneh Fazeli’s. The review is a manipulative ploy masquerading as criticism. Bise’s experience with the industrial medical, pharmaceutical and insurance triangle are positioned as an expertise on chronic illness writ large, rather seen as a point of intersection, alliance or confluence with Fazeli, who also has a chronic illness. In combination with his recent review of MPA’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Bise’s perspective belies a deep misogyny and a profound disdain for anything that hints at religion, mysticism, New Age, spiritual, or any alternatives to Western medicine, empirical methods, and so-called â€Å"reason and rationality.† Caught up in his own personal experiences, albeit both his experience of illness an d religion sound deeply traumatic, Bise misinterpreted and misses the point of Fazeli’s essay, in some cases arguing the same points! He makes this review personal by using her name in the title instead of the essay’s name and by glossing over the essay entirely save for five excerpted phrases, decontextualized from a larger network of thoughts, interspersed into a rampage through his own biography. First, Bise calls Fazeli’s statement that â€Å"one thing that unites disabled people with those in fluctuating states of debility is that