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 »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the... middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »