Aids - an essay"

| topics |

Aids

an essay

Aids (links) (diary) (previous) (next)

Today's morning TV news featured brief scenes of Christmas and pre-Christmas merriment around the world - Santa feeding the crocodiles in someplace tropical and people engaged in a Christmas tree throwing competition in, I think, the Netherlands.

Then it was on to the serious stuff, meaning weapons inspections in Iraq and the growing crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

This made me nostalgic for the tedium of the traditional Christmas period, with nothing in the news but stories of UFO sightings and with nothing special on TV but TV specials. And, one year, on one of Japan's commercial TV stations, a frog race in the studio ... unsurprisingly, instead of racing for the finish line, the frogs jumped in all directions, including right into the laps of the female spectators, who (unsurprisingly) shrieked, which perhaps was the point of the whole exercise. (However, now I think about it, maybe that TV show was in the New Year period rather than over Christmas.)

This morning, in this part of Yokohama, it's cold enough for frost, but the winter here is so dry that there is no frost on the grass. However, there is actual frost on the broad-leafed weeds in a small vacant lot in the neighborhood, which apparently are better dew-gatherers.

(The snow which fell earlier in December has long since melted. In fact, it lasted not much more than twenty-four hours.)

The TV news right now is of the theft of another ATM. Some gang of criminals is operating in Japan, using heavy machinery to rip automatic teller machines (automated teller machines?) ... let me check ... Automated Transfer Mode ... here we are ... Automated Teller Machine ....

Having been uprooted, the ATM is then loaded onto a truck and driven away, never to be seen again.

As the economy in Japan continues to deteriorate, the crime rate unsurprisingly continues to climb, and Japan's jails are now not just full but significantly overcrowded. Although most of the people in Japan's jails are Japanese, there is increasing public concern about crime committed by foreigners ... that is the way these things go.

I remember my first visit to Japan, when I arrived as a tourist in 1989. At that time, surveying the crowded cities, I thought to myself, "Well, it all works magnificently well now, but I wouldn't like to be around if the economy turned sour."

And now, thirteen years down the tracks, the economy is in catastrophe mode. Admittedly, it's a very lethargic slow-motion catastrophe. However, the guts of it (to use a traditional Kiwi colloquialism) is that there are no jobs for the kids, there is no job security for the middle-aged and the old are faced with the possibility of pension cuts.

What other seasonally cheerful things are there to talk about? Well, to wrap up this account of Christmas joy and happiness, two newspaper editorials.

One originally comes from The Washington Post and appeared in yesterday's International Herald Tribune. It makes the point that the global Aids epidemic is only in its early stages, that China and India are set to be hit hard by the epidemic, and that "a midrange estimate" is that seventy million people in China will be HIV-positive before 2025. The number for India? One hundred and ten million.

The editorial says that the Bush administration "needs to be bold" in the face of this crisis, and suggests stumping up five billion dollars annually for Aids, "a small fraction of the estimated $100 billion to $200 billion cost of an Iraq war".

What The Washington Post doesn't say is that to spend $100 billion to $200 billion on an unnecessary war is a criminally irresponsible waste of money. So will I fill the obvious gap and say that myself? No, I don't think I will. I will exercise a little caution for once and will refrain from saying that "to spend $100 billion to $200 billion on an unnecessary war is a criminally irresponsible waste of money."

What I will say, instead, is that I'm struck by the contrast between, on the one hand, the actual handling of the global pandemic and, on the other hand, all the science fiction stories that I've read about global plagues.

In a science fiction story, when a major mass-killing plague hits a planet, the response is urgent. Maybe fearful, maybe heroic, but definitely urgent. And, of course, the standard premise of science fiction is that technology is the key. If possible, let's find the technology and apply it to the problem.

However, in the real world, what happened was that everyone was fearfully worried about Aids for a time, and that the entire planet pretty much went back to sleep. People (including me) changed channels and focused on frog racing and the like.

And when a technical fix of sorts was finally concocted, a package of drugs capable of keeping the disease at bay, the drug companies took the line that, "Well, it's our private property, so if you can't afford to pay the market price, then you're just going to have to die."

And the governments of the world said, "Yes, that's right, private property rights take priority. All you poor people? Sit in that corner. Quietly, please. And die."

There's a classic science fiction story called, I think, The Cold Equations. A young woman stows away on a spaceship, but the pure mathematics of the situation (the math of fuel and oxygen) means that if she stays on board then everyone on the spaceship will die. I think, from memory, that in fact the pilot is the only other person on board.

So, in the end, the sheer mechanical necessities of the situation force the pilot to a cold-blooded but inevitable conclusion, that conclusion being that the young woman has to be killed. (I think, from memory, that she ends up getting fed to the vacuum of outer space.)

But that's fiction. In fiction, a cold-blooded but entirely necessary decision to kill one person can grip the imagination. In real life, a cold-blooded but entirely unnecessary decision to permit the deaths of tens of millions of people really seems to fall into the "boring news" category.

The key point here is that, in terms of their manufacturing costs, drugs are cheap. The pharmaceutical industries of countries such as India are perfectly capable of manufacturing cost-effective drugs if the problem of intellectual property rights could be resolved.

When future ages look back in judgment upon this age, the question is quite possibly going to be asked:-

"How is it that so many decent, honest, law-abiding citizens sat back in complacent silence and acquiesced to a planetary atrocity?"

I think there is one simple answer to this.

The simple answer is that law-abiding citizens have other things to worry about. They (and I include myself in this "they") have lives to live. Getting up in the morning, going to work, running for the train, balancing the budget, trying to schedule a dental appointment, answering e-mail, and so forth.

Our civilizations are hierarchical, and if the people at the top are short-sighted, morally bankrupt or indifferent to the spectacle of wholesale death (countries depopulated, generations left orphaned, nations sliding into anarchic chaos) then it's difficult to know what to do about this.

So we're left with the spectacle of a global plague which has happened, which is happening now, and which will continue to happen for the rest of my lifetime.

I promised comment on two editorials. The first editorial, mentioned above, makes the point that the global Aids epidemic is only in its early stages. The second editorial is from The New York Times and appeared in the (English-language) Japanese edition of the International Herald Tribune for Saturday-Sunday December 21-22 under the heading An anti-life crusade.

The editorial is about attempts by George Bush's administration "to block an endorsement of condom use to prevent AIDS." This news comes from a United Nations population conference in Bangkok.

The editorial analysis from The New York Times is that the Bush administration is prepared to win points with the American right wing at the expense of the health of people in foreign countries. The editorial makes the point that abstinence is not the answer to Aids in Asia. Why? The answer is simple. "Teenage girls get AIDS largely because they are pressured into sex by older men."

And I'm sitting at my computer keyboard on a sunny Christmas morning, trying to come up with my own comment on this, and I find myself having difficulty conjuring up the words that would be necessary to respond to this situation.

(And I'm conscious of the fact that the clock is running. I'm not going to be alone in the house all day, and I still have last-minute shopping to do before cooking Christmas dinner.)

What do say?

It's stylistically difficult to come up with some measured response, with something that would not seem ... well ... "emotional" is the word often used to condemn intense responses to extraordinary situations.

I am tempted to say this:-

"By making itself the champion of ideological purity at the expense of practical survival, the Bush administration is becoming a cheerleader for the apocalypse."

However, couldn't that easily be denounced as "strident"?

Right at the moment, I have this image of myself as a very small and intensely active ant standing amidst the jumbled rocks at the very foot of the lofty mountain known as Hierarchy, threatening the mountain with a rhetorical attack ....

Let me content myself by saying this:-

Although indifference is understandable, actively encouraging a catastrophe is criminal.

Yes, that's what I want to say.

| Aids (links) |

top