The Age of AIDS Revisionism [or, Frontline does David Lean one better]

Frontline's production, The Age of AIDS, was only interesting in how it revisted a chronology many of us have forgotten. It offered visuals to events I was too young to witness so added a dimension to history, maybe like being able to see Queen Elizabeth I recite her Tilbury speech to troops fighting Spain. But it glossed over shamelessly the historical record. Not mine, theirs. Like, those early patients, whom the doctors were quoted as saying were healthy one day and sick the next with PCP pnuemonias. Really? Their own literature documents these gay men had had multiple std infections, were drug users, including poppers [amyl nitrates, implicated in Kaposi Sarcoma], and had had regular treatments of antibiotics. These are not immune builders but toxins. So keep in mind this is what "their" doctors describe as healthy. They truly white washed the AZT controversy: yes it was developed in the 50's as a cancer treatment, but they failed to tell us why it was not on the market from the 1950's to the 1980's: its toxicity. Apparently it was bad for the general population but just fine for gay men. At any rate, their own studies report that AZT disproportionately ill-effected BLACK men. This was also not said. There were no doctors like the ones I have come across who use terms like "kill" and "murder" when they express remorse about administering AZT to any patient. There were none of the other scientists at all actually. Injection drug use was casually referenced but never linked from the LA beginning to Thailand to the former Soviet bloc where AIDS is allegedly rising. Needles. Could it be what's IN the needles and not the needles themselves? The April 1984 news conference with Secy of Health Margaret Heckler is the stuff of legend. It was unprecedented since at that juncture, no consensus had been formed as to the cause of AIDS, more scientists than the Gallo and Montaigner were trying to solve this riddle, yet there she was literally choking on her words with the controversial Dr Gallo at her side. I had often referred to and read about that news conference, and last night got to see it for the first time. Then there was the overshadowing character, much like the expansive and overwhelming desert was in "Lawrence of Arabia," of AFRICA. AFRICA The Sinister. The Dark Continent. From beginning to end, the lone hunter/gatherer in the bush and his strange ways with the green monkeys. Those monkeys. Savages!! I realized the empire is a weak sickly thing that can only rely on pushing old buttons to weave its ridiculous tales. One wonders at this point if the germ theory - barely a hundred years old - has any credibility. I am close to declaring it not. No where in this movie did I see what THEY call long-term nonprogressors. These are people who have been told they have HIV and after 5, 10, 20 years have had no unusual illnesses. They uniquely do not take those medicines, which are said to save but also explode your liver, collapse youe kidney, destroy bone marrow, wear awar at your joints, cause blindness, nausea, vomiting, rashes. Remember: healthy one day, sick the next? They call them long-term nonprogressors: some of us are just made to question whatever HIV might be, it does not cause AIDS.

Church-Think vs University-Think [Bring Back the Lions II]

When I was in my first year at college, living in Liggett dorm [Washington University], our dorm advisor took us Black men and women aside one night for a chat. We were few back then, maybe 7 or 8, and while this Black male dorm advisor pretended to give us advice, I think he was actually wrestling in the middle of things himself. His subject was dating and marriage, and he suggested that we would have to be open to dating outside our "race" as we got further in our educations. If that campus was any indication he was correct. But St. Louis had a large Black population: couldn't we date or marry among them? His argument, further, was that what we'd encounter was something that wouldn't jive with the mindsets being shaped as undergraduates and graduate students: that, professionally we would be set apart and intellectually would have different set of tools with which to view the world than a partner who'd only gone as far as high school. Fast forward 20 years, and I think more and more about that fireside chat. My mind has grown more curious, more disciplined, more thirsty for what goes on in the world and how it operates. I have posed questions about a range of topics. What I have experienced - in a generality - is that there is truth to a Black resistance to exploring ideas, asking questions, interrogating "facts" versus an openness among Whites to all that. This is the trend, not an absolute. But it is strictly Black gay men who ban me from online discussion groups, Black gay men who will not date me for my politics. I have not met a white gay man to date who has reacted that strongly. White men, tending to have had educations beyond high school, may not agree with me but they respect the idea of Interrogation. It is not seen as disrespectful. It is not dangerous. Black men, tethered to a Church whose ideas are somewhat medieval, a hierarchy, keep their head down and the loudmouth in the group is a threat to survival. I would be the loudmouth. Unlike Bill Cosby, I do see the socio-economic basis for this - half of Black students dropping out of high school in LA; those who do graduate, many cannot read, etc., etc. Stupidity has been imposed on us somewhat. But this is not enough: something must spark the poor to awaken, to see that education is a duty to oneself. It is also a duty to the Democracy, and this is what uttermost is in peril. The Democracy. Regardless who I come to date, we cannot have a democracy with part of the population unable and unwilling to weigh Issues. Question motives. Interrogate the status quo. Strive for Competence.

Bring Back the Lions? [Why Christianity Spread]

Christian nobles boast of the religion's spread around the globe as testament to its divine message and how it inspires faith, hope, love and everlasting Life. But a look at Christian beginnings offers a clue to what is really behind Christian popularity. Constantine, known as the first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity, did not do so until on his deathbed. Before that, he conspired with Church hierarchy for the prestige he was losing with his own Roman nobles. What did he do? Tolerant of all religions de jure, pagans and Jesus cultists all, he lavished honors and commissions on Christians and showed some disfavor to pagans in higher taxes. In education, we might call this giving a cue, provoking a desired response. With the result that Christianity grew in popularity. Hellenism [pagans] grew to the fringes. Recall that 19th century British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was born into a Jewish family but his father had him baptised in the Church of England [Anglicans], so he could have access to better schools and social mobility. Christianity has spread the globe in large part because the Masters of the Earth have wielded the Bible and Cross in their conquests and lavished prizes on the converts, and the conquered have followed the lead. Peculiarly, in much the same way poor Third World countries have found AIDS scares to be enormously lucrative, even inflating HIV rates to get western money they would not get otherwise, Christianity has covered the world. But what of Religion? What has been lost in the abandon of ancient, earth religions and their gods for a bribe?

Illegal Immigration [or, How the International Workers Movement Lost its Balls and went to High Tea]

A recent article in the Socialist Labor Party 's The Militant tries to accuse those against illegal immigration as being racist and/or without conscience. They are just one in a long list of left organizations who have successfully framed immigration as a race/humanitarian issue. The Militant article sites some early Socialist Party officials who spread fears of Yellow and Black perils across the US and counters them with selected quotes by Mr Lenin. As a Socialist myself, I am a bit baffled by the continued framing of immigration as one of race or even humanitarianism. I am baffled too with how foreign government's, like Mexico's, is allowed to prattle about rights of migrants when they have none at home. This is liberalism witha RED COAT. A few generations ago, the workers movement was international. It was Socialist. It was Communist. And it was without borders. It was also bloody. But the Imperial powers struck a deal with labor, in exchange for recognition of their unions, some of its demands, the unions would stop wildcat strikes and weed out socialists and communists from their ranks. Just prior to the FDR administration, wildcats spread across the country because union bosses had lost touch with their base. Socialism, even in the US, was threateningly on the horizon. Bu to stop the bloody class war, a peace treaty was made. Irony of ironies, even the British Labour Party threw out communists! What they gained in legitimacy and invitations to Buckingham Palace, they lost in being a voice for workers, who exist beyond political borders. Consequence? Workers in Mexico, the largest source of our illegals, are framed not as abandoned, landless workers but as pathetic cogs who must be cared for in the slave labor they only qualify for in the US. Overwhelmingly - but not exclusively, Mexican illegals arrive with 3rd grade OR BELOW educations. They are unskilled, uneducated. Professional contractors - their likely employers - lament their incapacity to command basic [to us] math concepts necessary for landscaping. So, these poor workers can mow and pick, pick and mow. A traditional socialist approach to these workers would have been to organize them AT HOME to change their governments, secure labor and land rights [which they have none in Mexico, not since Mexican President Salinas signed away their land rights in 1985]. I suggest our US, Canadian, and First World Labor Unions provide seed money to the Third World to enable their activists to organize, petition, and to the extent that voting changes anything, have voting drives. Immigrants usually want to stay home and march for their rights, wave their flags, demand recognition: why must they come to the US to do that?