18 June 2010

Strategic Hamlets: a tool in class warfare

A rather self-righteous friend called me into question because of my government job, saying that I was part of the System and not really against it. In some liberal and progressive minds and nonconformist minds there actually exists a chasm passed which the true at heart have not crossed. The line of this chasm is arbitrary, depending upon where one's leftistism is, but it holds certain occupations up to strict scrutiny and places others on the Right Side.

I schooled my self-righteous friend that while it was important to have personal tastes as to what profession you are suited to, and to be aware of the consequences of one's moral actions, the idea that certain jobs lay outside scrutiny while others are reproachable is not of the real world we live in: and I mean the state capitalist world of wage-slavery - where we are all wage-slaves.

Every enterprise that involves the exchange of the official currency - from drug dealing, online porn, and prostituting to public school teacher, faux counselor at the "community" nonprofit to police officer on the beat to the soldier in the foreign field - is part of the same universe that is our moral conundrum. It is part of the same moral conundrum for the simple reason it involves the exchanging of the official currency.

Don't be misled by the ragings of the left and right on the Congressional floor or your local pulpit that certain things in our universe are beyond the pale. Look closer.

The problem is that many on the left or right look at the official currency only as an economic tool, much like a means of bartering, without any moral weight to it. It might me. The official currency is viewed simply a means to pay rent, buy underwear, pay your utilities.

But the official currency of the state is also a political tool to shape public choices and form a public consciousness. This is the point missing from a lot of analyses and my friend's unexamined moralizing.

The official currency is not only a means to purchase things. Currency is much more than that. An official currency is also a means to construct choices, to narrow those choices, to limit our liberty. It is a system of reward for falling in line as it is a punishment for those who do not.

To illustrate with two examples: how the West created Strategic Hamlets in its imperial conquests.

The British classically took over territory in Africa during what is ominously called in our modern textbooks as "The Age of Exploration" by creating these strategic hamlets to get the natives to work.

Because the native African population wouldn't willingly work for their aspiring conquerors, Britain used its military might and expropriated the best lands. They told the natives they were welcome to stay on expropriated lands if they paid rent. Rent had to be paid in the official currency of Britain. The only way to get this currency would be to earn it by working for Britain. That work was strictly defined not to benefit the local communities but rather for the British Crown: the Empire. We know the history: mines, fields, etc., all commodities for export. Naturally and intentionally, this altered these African societies, the fallout of which we still see today.

The US acted no better in its attempt to stop dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia.

When rural workers in Vietnam tended to support the nationalist, insurgent Viet Cong, the US response was for the Kennedy administration - to the silence of the US population [unimaginable today] - to launch a bombing, napalming, and crop eradicating campaign on the peasantry. This had the desired effect of not only slaughtering many men, women, and children civilians but also driving the survivors into the cities, into strategic hamlets, where they became dependent on the US puppet regime for their every need.

We all live in strategic hamlets where through an employment system and a propaganda model we are strictly tamed into certain behaviors. Better if our views fall in line, but this is not important: sit home and admonish the government all you like as long as you display obedience to the System.

The strategic hamlet of our urban centers are tools of an equally onerous class war, and our choices may seem broad but they are actually very narrow.

Who has access to greater amounts of currency and who has access to none is a political decision. Our urban centers - even the great ones, like New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco - liberal they may seem, are not immune. They are highly designed, highly disciplined machines, and we are no more than factory workers.

In fact, these urban metropolises are more critically disciplined than the rural Wyoming prarie, which might be why one sees a different kind of insurgence from outside the urban centers than from within.

So my self-righteous friend who labors at an urban nonprofit, to put it coarsely, may be doing good work. But he is not working for the Taliban or Weather Underground or the Black Panthers or the Revolutionary Communist Party, and this is not an error. Whether my friend knows it or not, that nonprofit is proscribed from certain behaviors and encouraged in others. It's part of the same moral conundrum.

05 June 2010

AIDS Politics and Why HIV deterrents don't work except to fill jails and fund big pharmaceuticals

In Seattle, WA., Oliver Moreno, a male prostitute, has been arrested for knowingly spreading HIV to tricks who hired him and exposing them to the virus that causes AIDS. Reportedly, the tricks asked Moreno if he was "clean," and Moreno replied he was.

In a country that festishizes making crimes out of any and everything for reasons that need intense discussion, I guess it is not surprising that HIV should become a crime to feed our prison industry. It's perfect. It is a disease believed to haunt gay men, whom the country is kept at constant unease about because we are trying to destroy Marriage and disrupt its combat forces. So, yes: if you can no longer jail them for being queer, HIV works perfectly well.

And, there are always prisons and jails to be filled somewhere in this decadent country.

Additionally, the continued spread of HIV almost 30 years after it emerged as a gay cancer is baffling. It is only equally baffling to the scientific community's paltry offerings in response. (This is not meant to indict the many doctors, nurses, health clinic workers, sex workers, and researchers who want to see an end to this epidemic, but the initial direction HIV research was driven unilaterally is also up for intense discussion).

An online contact, a fellow gay man equally concerned about the continued spread overall and among gay men asks: "Why do you think HIV prevention efforts failed so miserably?"

The answers are multi-tiered and refute some common assumptions and myths about HIV/AIDS prevention. It is worth summarizing.

For one, "HIV prevention efforts"assumes it has been the intent to stave off the spread of HIV. I am old enough to remember that US President Ronald Reagan never spoke of it, and given the proportion infected given our supposed 7% of the population, there was very, very little hue and cry, even from liberal circles. People were simply allowed to die.

My alma mater, Washington Univ [St Louis] was the second university in the country to install condom machines in the bathrooms throughout the campus. This was 1986 or so. It caused an uproar from predictable circles, and quietly the machines were removed. Again: 1986, almost 10 years before the miraculous "retrovirals" when many gay men went from infection to death in a matter of months. 1986, when death came quickly. And who cared?

Second, it was controversially the main aim of the HIV/AIDS activists - AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) - to bring more and more medicines in the pipeline. This demand was not unreasonable, but it did not go without criticism from the ranks of activists (and many in the scientific community).

I joined Queer Nation/San Francisco in 1990. ACT UP/SF was already huge, and our QN meetings got up to 500 lgbtq's. A vocal minority of us questioned the reasonableness of asking for a Marshall Plan of MEDICATIONS for HIV rather than look at sociological factors, like poverty and employment, as some pointed to how and where this plague seemed to be fast spreading. We were frightened this was some social purification scheme, given Reagan's silence. Given the values of our establishment, how could we be wrong? And we were ignored. Meds make money. Poverty costs. There are many, global examples of this paradigm, including in Central Africa, were old diseases aren't profitable. AIDS, Inc., is.

Third, the sex message has continuously been nuanced from one dimensional to flat, but it is still a message to a marginalized community. Marginalized communities are historically removed from humanity even by liberal circles and expected to make water into wine, rouse themselves from deep poverty and get on their bicycles to find jobs [as one Thatcher crony dictated] as if we function in some Twilight Zone awaiting white papers and health department edicts to inspire us.

In the real world, look at anti-drug, anti-early pregnancy, anti-std campaigns and see where they have succeeded and failed and emerges a pattern a high school student could discern. Our establishment will not.

Where there is affluence, where there is a perceivable pathway "up" behaviors can be [self-]modified. This is usually, but not always, among whites with obvious exceptions. Anti-early pregnancy campaigns, for example, have worked best when women were given access to higher education, equal employment, Title IX, and breaking the glass ceilings: they themselves will hold off having children [and marrying or not] later (and I am not at all saying marriage/single motherhood is a good or bad thing, just stating what I understand to be the facts).

Nevertheless, the early "Safe Sex" message to gay men was on par with JUST SAY NO, a harsh command you'd give to a farm animal. Not to accept in full this message drew any respectable gay man into question. The harshness of the message was observed by HIV activists. We protested the framing of this message and were accused of making excuses for "reckless behavior", etc. We stated this message would never - and has never - been directed at straight men.

At some point in the mid-90's the medical community got less myopic, and "safer" sex was born. It was a far cry from the Safe Sex message from my doctor telling me to use a plastic sandwich bag on my partner and to keep my tongue in my mouth when kissing [1989].

"Safer" sex still ignores the human impulse and social conditions we urged be attended. So, predictably, HIV is reportedly fast growing among women of color, and gay men of color: marginalized communities within a marginalized community. Should this really be a surprise? What other indices do we know about these - our! - communities? And why are these indices ignored from my beginnings with Queer Nation to this hour?

I "know" exactly who Oliver Moreno is. He is an un-/under-employed queer of color whose had little or very poor schooling and is only meant to be a source of cheap labor for or capitalist economy. He can rent his body picking grapes, stocking a shelf at Wal-Mart, or turning a trick.

The men who believed he was "clean" are the same men who believe he is a loyal Wal-Mart associate.

AIDS Wiki & Celia Farber * Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science * HIV treatment response and prognosis ... * Peter Duesberg