Confusion about Camelot
I swore to myself that I would resist. Previous experience had taught me that it would end badly. "No good will come of this," a phrase that friends and I employ often was bandied about in my head. I knew I should not watch television. When I logged on to check e-mail today I was hit broadside with the news. "Washington begins state funeral." "Reagan lies in state in Capital Rotunda." S immediately called and urged me to turn on the funeral procession for comic value. There were several moments that were good for a chuckle, the down to the minute timing (7:22 pm, First lady removes glasses, single tear falls as she touches head of coffin.) The coffin supposedly weighed near 700 pounds. Reagans body could not possibly weigh more than 150 so WHAT WAS IN THERE? My guess is the evidence of his war crimes, but of course I could be wrong. The coffin was so heavy that the guard carrying it had to be changed halfway up the 183 steps of the capital building. Former first lady Nancy Reagan had to approve this 30 second delay in time. When they finally reached the rotunda I should have turned it off immediately. I was doing laundry and not paying much attention until I noticed Ted Kennedy speaking. What? What was Ted Kennedy doing there, extoling the virtues of Ronald Reagan? I turned it off and went for a walk (okay I went to the store to buy cigarettes and razor blades in case I couldn't take any more.)
Why is so much compassion being shown to a person who showed so little to so many people. This man created new levels of class division, slashed the budgets of every social program while spending billions on defense contracts. Trickle down economics made the rich richer and created levels of poverty not seen since the depression. AIDS killed Americans and he stood by silently arm in arm with Cardinal John O'Conner and the rest of the religious right. The AIDS epidemic is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He did NOT put an end to communism, he did NOT rescue the hostages from Iran.
There are a few good articles out there not being carried by the regular press. Information Clearing House has a great article with links to a few others.
Larry Kramer is publishing an article in the Advocate in a few weeks entitled "Adolf Reagan". I can't wait to read that.
posted by YankeeNexile @ 12:24 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Andrew Sullivan's reply to Larry Kramer's maniacal jeremiad was much, much more sensible:
Memo to Larry Kramer:
Ronald Reagan did not give me HIV. Another gay man did, in a consensual sexual act, for which I ultimately bear responsibility. The notion, as Larry absurdly writes, that Reagan “murdered” every gay man with HIV is patently ludicrous. Comparing his negligence to Adolf Hitler’s holocaust is an insult to the dead of the Shoah, an obscene analogy that Kramer has used before, trivializing one of the most horrifying acts of mass murder in world history. To say that there is no difference between negligence in the face of a natural disaster and calculated mass murder is sophomoric.
Larry isn’t interested in nuance, of course. He writes: “Ronald Reagan did not even say the word ‘AIDS’ out loud for the first seven years of his reign.” Untrue. Reagan spoke of AIDS in a press conference in September 1985—4 1/2 years after he became president, and two years after HIV was even identified as the cause of AIDS.
Larry writes: “There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies.” Another untruth. Under Reagan some $5.7 billion was spent on AIDS and HIV, with large amounts going to the National Institutes of Health. Given the very sketchy science in the early years, it is doubtful whether vast mounts of more spending would have made much of a difference. As it happens, the breakthrough came in the early 1990s, as an entirely new class of drugs was innovated to tackle HIV. It remains an astonishing scientific achievement. Too late, of course, for millions who died. But, tragically, we are not superhuman. An instant cure for HIV was never going to be possible.
Science takes time. Grown-ups recognize this. Children scream.
Larry is absolutely right about one thing: Reagan should indeed be faulted for not doing more to warn people of the dangers of infection early enough (Margaret Thatcher was far better.) His refusal to address it for two years is utterly inexcusable—underlining the idea that gay lives were worth less than straight ones. But it was a different time, and Reagan wasn’t alone in being negligent. Scan Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign for passion about HIV and you won’t find much.
Would such a message have saved lives? I doubt it. It was blindingly obvious very early on that something dangerous was afoot as AIDS first surfaced. Just read Larry Kramer at the time. Many people most at risk were aware—mostly too late, alas—that unprotected sex had become fatal in the late 1970s and still was. You can read Randy Shilts’s bracing And The Band Played On to see how some of the resistance to those warnings came from within the gay movement itself.
In the polarized atmospheres of the beleaguered gay ghettos in the 1980s, one also wonders what an instruction from Ronald Reagan to wear condoms would have accomplished. Did Larry want Nancy to launch a “Just Say No” campaign to unsafe sex? Can you imagine the response?
As for research, the resources increased by 450% in 1983, 134% in 1984, 99% the next year, and 148% the year after. Yes, the Congress was critical in this—doubling, in many cases, Reagan’s request. But by 1986 Reagan had endorsed a large prevention and research effort and declared in his budget message that AIDS “remains the highest public-health priority of the Department of Health and Human Services.”
In September 1985, Reagan said: “[I]ncluding what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS, in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be $126 million next year. So this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.”
Should Reagan have done more? Yes. Were people like Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer responsible for delaying a real prevention response because only gays were dying? You bet. But was Reagan ultimately responsible for so many tragic, early deaths? No. HIV was. Viruses happen. No president can magic them away. Reagan’s indifference to the early epidemic is indeed a scar on his record. No one can or should pretty that up. But it only undermines the real case against Reagan to lard it up with Larry’s copyrighted hysteria, drama, and untruth.
Post a Comment
<< Home