IN THESE TIMES...

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall

In these times, eerily feeling of past horrors... I am 65... I miss Susan Sontag and other thinkers who had the language, the ability to hold-up, to pull shadowy examples of human nature: the desire for “quick and dirty” solutions; “Back to Normal soon”… Revealing to Us the most fundamental of mistakes being perpetrated then (AIDS pandemic) and repeated again.

The language surrounding the “outbreak”, “epidemic”, “pandemic”, “scourge”… chose one… of any disease like “Corona Virus” or COVID-19:  the militaristic language associated with it (AIDS being Sontag’s focus in the late 70’s-80's: “AIDS and it’s Metaphors”)—from descriptions of the biological process (an invasion through the body's weak defenses) to treatment (“a war”) need to be examined as the cowardly “Us Against Them” constructions that they were and now are. Such language burdens patients struggling with isolation, “Quarantine”: not only do they seem to have to shoulder some responsibility (being aged or infirm… “weak”… Queer), they also have to shoulder arms against “it”… This horrible affliction that strikes, as we are learning now, almost at random.

Destructive to Our cultural sense of harmony and humanity, the Metaphors adopted from “Us Against Them” constructs fly: “Evil”… “Infirm”… “Older People” (Read Weak and not to be trusted)… “The Enemy to be Avoided”… “Quarantine”… “War”… without bounds.. It is ironic that cases in New York City now appear to be most serious among the young (virulent?) male population: 20-50yrs old: Across the United States, about 38% of corona virus patients sick enough to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54, the CDC reported last week.

 The use of such Metaphors in a time where individualized compassion and understanding is most wanted, in Sontag’s view, combine(s) to create the effect that “much of the very reputation of the illness is added to the suffering of those who had it”—a situation not helped by the use of words like “cancer” in slang to mean the epitome of evil: “There is a Cancer on the Presidency” or “AIDS”… the “GAY DISEASE”, and now Corona. “the disease of the “Weak”… 

Healthcare is not WAR..and the faces of those working in the field are not those of "soldiers" and, NO, they are not HEROS, to be thrown into the breach. If there is a breach it is our collective fault and we should be ashamed.