Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some ...sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[If a woman athlete who had contracted the AIDS virus admitted that she] had been with one hundred or two hundred men, they'd call... her a slut, and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all th...e catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local,... limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at o...nce, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human beings are distinguished by a capacity for experience as well as by their behavior, and homosexuality is as much a matter of... emotion as of genital manipulation.... As we each examine our own sense of identity we realize how much more complex is the question of homosexuality than a mere Kinsey-like computation of orgasms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such simple things, And we make of them something so complex it defeats us,... Almost. Why can't everything be simple again?...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »