The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane ...instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.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 »
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 »
The slow-witted approach to the HIV epidemic was the result of a thousand years of Christian malpractice and the childlike approac...h of the church to sexuality. If any single man was responsible, it was Augustine of Hippo who murdered his way to sainthood spouting on about the sins located in his genitals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as i...f nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is not a true adventure. It is a mere ersatz. Where ties are established, where problems are set, where creation is stimulated...--there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The diagnosis of drunkenness was that it was a disease for which the patient was in no way responsible, that it was created by exi...sting saloons, and non-existing bright hearths, smiling wives, pretty caps and aprons. The cure was the patent nostrum of pledge-signing, a lying-made-easy invention, which like calomel, seldom had any permanent effect on the disease for which it was given, and never failed to produce another and a worse. Here the care created an epidemic of forgery, falsehood and perjury.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »