AIDS, STIGMA & OMAR

Yesterday was World AIDS Day but I didn’t write about it for several reasons. By now there are so many causes and so many official World Days that the ribbon colors are re-cycling: now red ribbon is supposed to mean you’re against violence. But what IS new is that the Great Falls Tribune ran the story on page one and the continuation inside on page three showed members of the Metropolitan Community Church of Montana in a formal church setting. WITH personal photos and WITH names. Two AIDS activists, Steven Barrios in Browning and Trisha Gardner from Great Falls were interviewed because the governor gave both of them awards for their work. I had never heard of either of them until now.

There is no color of ribbon loop for stigma, but this time around both the Governor and the recipients defied stigma by being public. Stigma is what gives permission for the persecution and punishment that is no color, no day, but every color, every day. Human nature wants things labeled, put on the calendar, separated out so as to keep up with the causes. Let’s be frank: so as to know whom it is safe to ignore or attack as opposed to those whose feet had better be kissed. Stigma is often transparent, hardly noticed.

I’m on a number of environmental listservs for academics, usually mainly students and therefore young and often at least half of the commentors are female. Because of that there is stigma attached to two demographic groups more than others: the wealthy and white males. A recent discussion hit both on grounds that the wealthy are powerful people who control and abuse other people’s lives. I got the impression that they thought all the most powerful people were white males and that they were all wealthy and surely they didn’t have any diseases. Someone suggested they were never subject to domestic violence or police brutality or any other troubles or worries. They are describing unicorns and centaurs, nonexistent creatures.

What I see is that -- worldwide -- people of color are also despots, mega-million income CEO’s, controllers of armies, master minds of the underworld. Some of them might even be female. One of the things Bob Scriver and I learned when Bob’s work began to sell into the higher income groups was that the main thing money buys you is the ability to be cloaked -- NOT to find yourself on the front page of the newspaper.

This is totally irrelevant, but “Scriver” is derived from the word “shriver” which means a maker of cloaks. “To shrive someone, in old-fashioned English . . . is to hear his acknowledgement of his sins, to assure him of God's forgiveness, and to give him appropriate spiritual advice. The term survives today in ordinary usage in the expression "short shrift". To give someone short shrift is to pay very little attention to his excuses or problems.”

The subject on the listserv was not AIDS (they never mention AIDS) but rape and whether rape were too serious a crime to use it as a metaphor for the destruction of land, though they consider “destruction” of land to be the major crime of our times and though they consider “destruction” to be anything that they don’t want to happen. Some of them still believe that making the air unbreathable, running out of human food, cutting all the tropical forests and so on “destroys” the planet when in truth it destroys humans and the earth they must have in order to keep living. (The planet shrugs. It likes volcanoes and earthquakes.) Others have gone so far as to stigmatize all humans and consider only animals to be “innocent.” (Yes, yes, we’re all animals but not grad students, surely; what could be less animal-like? It’s the undergrads who rape, walk on the grass, get drunk, attend football games.) Any group can be stigmatized.

In the hunter/gatherer millenia stigma meant marking enemies or contagious people or people who were troublemakers, Excluding them, even by killing them, was practical in terms of protecting the group. Much of the business of the hunting band was making worthy children, so the stigmatized should be excluded from reproduction. Of course, they got frustrated and took what they weren’t supposed to have.

These deep assumptions are hard to challenge. In fact, I don’t think reasoning or parsing words or arguing history does much to change them. What DOES work is story and particularly filmed story, artfully presented. I’ve been enjoying the whole sixty-episode span of the series called “The Wire” and have just completed the first story span, three years long. It’s complex but the subject is society as illustrated by the city of Baltimore. The writers and producers call it “long form television” which has several meanings. First, it’s five years worth of hourly episodes; second, now on DVD one can sit down and watch all sixty episodes at home just as one might read, say, “War and Peace.” Third, those interested can rewatch many of the episodes with voice-over commentary from those involved, hearing what decisions were made and why, what real life sources were used, and a certain amount of philosophy which boils down to “I love Baltimore, warts and all.” I’m sure they have had a profound influence on the argument about legalizing marijuana. (They’re for it and you see why.)

It’s not a bitter show and resists the stigmatization of any group. It’s like the yin-yang sign that has a little black in the white and a little white in the black. It shrives most characters but cloaks no one in the sense of invisibility. In fact, what begins to develop -- though only in my eyes, so I may be projecting it -- is my bottom-line which is that situations are what make villains. If you don’t have starving people, if you don’t have a forest full of game “owned” by lords, if you don’t have an oppressive sheriff, you don’t have Robin Hood.

As it turns out, the Robin Hood in this series is Omar: black, gay, a killer but not violent. (The other version is Brother Mouzone, an equally potent gunslinger from a similarly mysterious source. Brother would defend academics.) Omar is outrageous. Finding himself out of “honey nut” breakfast cereal he puts on silk satin pajama bottoms with a flowing matched robe and walks out down the street to the corner store, picking up a drug stash on the way back. But he takes his grandmother in her splendid “crown” (designer hat) to church once a month, he does not kill on Sunday, and he and Brother Mouzone are the only ones who never use the “f” word. And Omar doesn’t worry about AIDS, though his heart is broken when his lover is killed by torture in order to punish him. Omar is a challenge to the concept of stigma. He don’t need to wear no ribbon. Should he be shriven?