WORLD AIDS DAY: A REAL STORY

Why do I care about “gay” men?  It depends on how you define them, which is part of what makes them interesting.  They are a “thought category” rather than a species.  The actual phenomenon of sex with the same sex is present in a low percentage of mammals of several kinds, which includes humans, but that’s only part of the story.  The real story is how cultures deal with such a difference.  Some say “Aauugh! kill!”  Some say, “Come sit by me, dahlin’.”.  Some just shrug.

Our still-recent sexual revolution changed everything for everybody, at least those who had access to birth control in the form of a pill, those who had been part of the extreme physical life of war, those who were seeing a heterosexual pattern of hedonism that stiffed families, those women who had been earning a living doing “man’s work,” and close after that the disappearance of hard physical labor that men used to do when machines took over.

I suppose the first grownup gay man I knew personally, if only slightly, was the uncle of a classmate in elementary school.  He was her mother’s brother, a young man quite cultured in the Portland, OR, early Fifties.  He took the two of us to the ballet and briefly we stopped by his apartment for some reason.  It was the first time I’d been in an apartment building that had carpeted halls.  His place was elegant.  In my mind, therefore, gay men were a civilized and elite group.  I did not see them as evil vampires.

In the great chess game of social competition, any “group” is of interest from a sociological point of view.  But then individuals from that group can be of interest from a psychological point of view.  Even more powerfully from a narrative point of view.  Any characteristic that causes a person — esp. a child — to become isolated, search for answers, struggle through ordeals and confusions, and finally find “the others” is engaging in what Joe Campbell called the Hero’s Journey, which is a big part of our American mythic history.  But we don’t like the versions in which the hero dies, suddenly and for no reason.  

Today is World AIDS Day.  The drugs are good but not curative, the cost of them is sky-high, the distribution of them is complicated by extortion and blackmail on an international level, and STILL people don’t know they have it.  The venues of blood-borne contagion — sex and injected drugs — require secrecy, even secrets from oneself.  I don’t have AIDS.  I have Aging.  It is a behavior-related condition, like AIDS.  You can hasten or delay it by what you do.

Beyond that, I’m interested in the narratives about any individual interacting with social groups, particularly individuals in a diaspora, dispersed from their origins but carrying them inside — the way all of us carry DNA and memes from our ancestors.  That means indigenous people, sexually atypical people, red-heads, and metaphor-gifted people.  That last means the visionaries, the writers, the painters, the musicians who crave expression enough to do the daily practice that makes masters.  

Some cultures, fearing dissension, will try to suppress individuals, but when it comes to the artists, authorities can only compress and politicize the objects of their fears.  Persecution teaches them to cooperate, to care for each other, and to keep on going through the dark in the belief that if dawn doesn’t come for them, it will for someone else.

Because this is World AIDS Day, there will be tweets and posts and formal essays.  The group of young men that I’ve been following for the last decade have posted the public service videos they’ve made by matching their stories with images.  Real Stories Gallery.  Don’t look for them if you’re prissy or scared or coping with the world by denying everything outside your local horizon.

Gay people are like indigenous people in that their identifying traits are so stigmatized and stereotyped that those who haven’t been clued in cannot recognize them.  Indians and gays are scattered among us, unrecognized.  The first Indians I knew, Miss Colbert (Chinook) and Mrs. Eagle (Sioux) were elementary school teachers in Portland, OR.  No one thought about it.  Mrs. Eagle was quiet but taught my brother to read at last.  Miss Colbert was a respected tribal elder who wrote books.

Red-heads.  Oh, you know about “Anne of Green Gables,” esp if you’re a liberal who watches PBS.  Although the real story, which was Lucy Maude Montgomery’s story, ended in her suicide.  Her life was one of struggle.  My mother used to ask me why I couldn’t marry a nice Presbyterian minister.  Lucy Maude did that.  He was bipolar and she spent her life trying to feed their family (2 sons) and fend off curious people so he could keep his congregation.  She even preached in his stead if his emotional paralysis were active.  She wasn’t an orphan.  Her father abandoned the family.  She lived with him and his young wife for a little while as a near-adult.  It was loveless.

Back to boys who come to puberty with the realization that their body is not responding to girls but to other boys.  This difference can make them pull off to the side, marking them as vulnerable because exceptional, and attracting those who will exploit that.  How they respond will be unique to the other factors in their lives and might turn out happily.  But in times as chaotic and treacherous as ours, with as many drug-gripped families as ours, with as much floating violence as our culture supports, a boy needs both luck and help.  

A pretty and bold boy can do well for himself, seemingly, if he engages in sexwork.  Until he gets beat up.  Or worse: the usual STD’s and then HIV.  Often contracted in prison while serving a sentence for drug use, used for numbing to do sexwork.

Why should an old woman care?  I’m in a place, a small town next to a rez on the high prairie, where HIV is rare and yet it’s here.  It hits all levels: the low because they’re dumb and the high because they’re gifted enough to be traveling participants in conferences and panels where they are exposed to temptation among the elite.  Once HIV affects people one cares about, how can you turn away?

Some people will say the very fact that I live here and am not an activist except by writing amounts to “turning away.”  But activists don’t have the time to read and ponder that is my antidote for Aging Syndrome.  I’m leaving a snail trail that is probably already fading, but it’s not nothing.  Most of the time I’m not alone — there is a diaspora of people who care.

BEE DEATH

The theory now -- after years of research -- is that the honeybees are dying because of killer chemicals used to control damage to plants.  The main killer is nicotine, the same as a person killer.  It was not present in natural environments so that honeybees never learned to avoid it or even to detect it.  But the effect on them is invisibly deadly.  And addictive.

Addiction is not conscious.  Addiction might not be detected.  The phenomenon of being addicted is very old and in the most basic functions of the brain as well as embedded in the molecular reactions of the cells and muscles, the autonomic nerve system.

Some human body systems are far more susceptible to addiction.  First the cell level ability to respond at least at the epigenomic level -- the more intense, the more addictive.  Then the inter-person forces of society and relationships.  Availability, intense links to the effects related to trauma, terror, and low-level anxiety barely conscious, if that. The corporate mind-fucking advertising, the commercial substrate dependent on the substance’s production and marketing.  (Tobacco farming is deep into the identity of some places.)  It hardly matters whether the substance is nicotine or heroin.  In fact, honeybees, or whatever it is that pollenates opium poppies, have probably evolved ways to handle opiods.  

Honeybees, which are mostly European like our earthworms, are susceptible to nicotine poisoning in part because they go from one flower to another, accumulating, while American ground bees (like bumblebees) don’t do that.  They are not hive bees.

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on sex.  You already knew that.  (So does smoking -- sooo sexy!)  The virus is not perceptible.  Sometimes sex is not perceptible.  I just watched “Black Narcissus,” the 1947 film -- ironically listed by Amazon as “Christian” though it is about lust, both spiritual and physical.  The idea is that a fabulous retreat in the Himalayas used to be sequestered as a harem.  (Don’t go looking for it -- it’s a scale model with a painted background.)  Its walls are painted with seductive sexy dancing girls, but outside from the incredibly gorgeous and rarified perch, the view is “heavenly.”  At age 8 I only knew I was disturbed and imprinted with these subconscious metaphors.  My girl friend and I danced for hours in her backyard while her mother vigilantly watched the fascinated old man in the house behind, who was watching us.  The mom knew and had sense enough to protect us without forbidding us to dance or alarming us about a social dimension we were not ready for.  

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on IV drugs. Syringes are the enablers.  There are no condoms for syringes. (They'd have to have a hole in the end, wouldn't they?)  But it is conscious -- the addict knows what’s happening and even the thought of the act: the spoon, the candle, the rubber tubing is enough to stop the vehicle so the addict can climb in. 

HIV-AIDS hitchhikes on pain addiction.  Not much research has been done on the addictiveness of pain, I think.  Is there a difference between self-inflicted pain (cutting) and group imposed pain (boot camp)?  What about four-inch heels, so like needles?  As painful as the spiritual and sexy toe-dancing shoes for ballet.  (The directors of “Black Narcissus” also did “The Red Shoes.”)  Why are nuns and priests often into self-torture through restrictions or active flagellation or hair shirts?  Why is secrecy or limited collaboration (the confessional) a part of the addiction?  Can one be as addicted to the secrecy as to the punishable behavior and then flirt with disclosure in order to imagine fear, pain, and sex?   

 Kerr, Kathleen Byron asthe nun who goes mad, and Farrer

Aren’t the entirely bundled-up nuns as sexy as the David Farrer character, about as bare as the Fifties would allow?   And isn’t Gauguin Syndrome in part about “going native” but not “really” being native (Jean Simmons as a Tibetan -- please!  Like Natalie Wood in “The Searchers” ?  What about that famous National Geographic image of the green-eyed Afghani woman) -- flirting with the edge of autochthony, all about the earth/body and the escape from over-structured societies.

The flower, the pollen, the invisible poison, the devastation of missing populations and the loss of profit.  Bees communicate by dancing in a correlating way: using the direction, the distance and the promise as translated into a little compass metaphor on the porch of the hive.  One can get hooked on the bee dance of pornography, online flirting, depictions of all sorts, without even knowing it.  Easier for women to deny arousal than men, sometimes it takes equipment to reveal what the body knows.  And can demonstrate in males unless you’re sitting close enough to the poker table to hide an erection.

Jean Simmons -- an unlikely Tibetan

“Send me a picture -- a RECENT picture.”  “Put your picture by your post.”  “Try to look attractive. “Like” people -- give us their names.   And kids have to be told to NOT sext, because they think it’s innocent.  It’s so possible to double-speak in the sleepy dark of an adolescent bedroom with walls full of sexy posters.  Or in the addiction parlor of the Oval Office of the President, as full of power as one of those carefully fenced and warning transformer sites we see so often that they become invisible.

Bottom line: addiction is not always perceptible and often is detected only through consequences.  Attempts to break addictions often become addictions in themselves: “group”, intimacy, self-affliction and denial.  

This is because so much of the addiction is in the animal substrate of humanness; unconscious, automatic, and meant to expand in the face of danger, discouragement or paralysis.  Craving cannot be cured by intelligence.  Nevertheless, to some extent both are in some exquisitely subtle way calibrated to be triggered by thinking.  As our technology becomes ever more delicate, we begin to think of addressing the penetrations of sex and drugs with changes to our very cells.  Now there’s a scary enough idea to give you a squirt of adrenaline!

Joe LeDoux is on the edge of this research.  His books are like the early Kinsey investigations of sex -- so scholarly, so dependent on footnotes and sources to be mastered that I have to read them at a table with a high-lighter and legal pad, now and then traveling to the computer for definitions.  The words aren’t in my medical dictionary which is a little dated.

I do better than most stuffy people with obscene materials because there is so much overlap with literature.  Well-written descriptions of every kind of transgression (sex or abuse or sickness and death or raw violence or HIV-AIDS) are as addictive as their subject matter, without the earth/body consequences.  I do not know whether censoring these real forces is helpful or whether their vivid depiction is damaging.  I’m pretty far over on the open depiction side.

As an eight-year-old, “Black Narcissus” -- which is masterfully done -- hooked me right there in the plush theatre seat, surrounded by family and society.  The title comes from a mythical perfume, which is a drug, right?  The East Slope of the Rockies can as spiritually exalting as the Himalyas, Blackfeet can serve pretty well as Tibetans, and if you don’t think Bob Scriver is as sexy as David Farrer, it’s because you didn’t know Bob.  He didn’t own any shorts because he never wore them.  If it seemed safe, he took everything off.  If it wasn’t safe, he only removed his shirt.  

I do not demonize drug use because “drugs” are a part of the operational system of the earth/body -- for better or for worse.  Maybe we would do better to address the human interactions that produce deceptive information in our bee-dances and lace our flowers with poison.  

Lilas et Narcissus Soivohle for women and men

Here’s something for Facebook users to consider.  I dumped Facebook quickly, partly because most of my family is clearly hooked.  It’s part of their reassurance that they are normal, safe, and attractive, though it is anything but.  https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-facebook  It’s what I got my education in order to escape.  My relatives think it is all about family.  It’s not.  It’s “hive mind.”  All about swarms and queens, so terribly sweet.

WHY BOTHER ABOUT AIDS?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124001493

Recently rapes on campuses have become a big deal.  Not just fooling around in the showers, and not just a few obnoxious meatheads or criminal invaders, but sexual abuse rates of one-fifth, one-third, one-half, one in eight, one in six, both sexes, very often related to alcohol and/or drugs.  The kids shrug.  “What’s the big deal?  These days, if you’re on the pill, what’s to worry about?  Anyway, just use the back door.”  (They evidently don’t know there are hazards besides pregnancy.  Not even counting emotional chaos.  Do I smell denial?)

A raped co-ed gathered up her courage and went before the board the university provided to deal with such matters.  It took months and lining up a couple of other women attacked by the same guy.  She had had consensual sex with the guy twice.  This time they came home from a party, he was drunk, suddenly flipped her into position and entered her anally though she was fighting and objecting.  The board did not believe the woman because one woman board member stubbornly insisted it was not possible to enter anally without lubrication.  (I got this out of the ordinary newspaper, not some secret source.)  No news about HIV status.

Normally, one accepts the authority of people because they know more, are ethically more grounded, protect everyone involved, and, of course, have power over one.  How this stubborn female authority came to her convictions about anuses is a question less important than how she was thought to be capable of judging cases like this.

Jack

Our hero Jack snarled,  “You can’t handle the truth!”  In fact, a lot of people have so little experience with the truth that they can’t recognize it.  Esp. if it has to do with stigma, censorship, prudery and so on.  Even here in cow country where people put their arms up cow butts and see the whole process of creating a new calf, can tell a lot of sheep jokes, and feel like Saturday night and enough beer is a license to . . .  well.  Most people have a lot to learn.  Much of it is about misery, but they have no incentive to go out there looking for it in order to alleviate it.  Until it happens to them.

Much of the trouble begins and continues in the home, until the kid gets thrown out, the woman gets killed by violence, or both just leave, which can be a disaster for them.  But the forces that push people towards abuse are in the larger society.  Not just being poor or alcoholic, but the constant sneering, the lack of credibility, the scorn, the arrogance.  Stigma.

Heads on pikes

I watch the dynamics portrayed in series on the cable channels and sometimes wonder whether we aren’t promoting the culture of maybe 1400 or 1700.  There must be rooms of severed heads in the prop department.  I don’t mind naked people but in the name of equity, I think that for every show with naked women being rolled around, a photo of the director’s genitals should be posted at the beginning.  No need to show his head.  ("His," right?)

The thing is, I’ve given up the idea of pornography.  It’s just too hard to figure out what is and what isn’t and what gives entitlement to watch it outside of being on the censorship board.  Age, money, success in marriage, a clinical test for maturity?  A science degree?  Ordained?  Personally, I think the criterion should be whether the work is smart, well-done, tells us something we didn’t know before but ought to.  Playboy-style pretty-girl bare-bottomed Barbies are not pornography -- they're candy.

Linda Lovelace

When I was an animal control officer, I felt a certain entitlement and immunity, considering that I was entering whore houses and so on.  (Where we go, our dogs go.)  So I went to see “Deep Throat,” which was playing in my beat.  (I didn’t go in uniform with my badge.  As the only woman there besides the ticket taker, I was scary enough to all the guys with raincoats over their laps.)  The movie had played for so many years that the court ruled it was the bright line between what was pornography and what was not, since it had not been closed by the law and therefore was not.  But it WAS porn.  A poorly made movie with only one joke, a dumb and childish one.  What was worse was finding out over time that Linda Lovelace hated being in it, was oppressed and used, and took years to recover.

Stigmas are stupid.  They also make money because not-knowing or believing that there’s some magical thing to find out what only certain privileged people can know will cause people to pay.  Money is the ultimate porn.

Orphaned by AIDS

That doesn’t mean that what’s free is okay.  Esp. with sex, the price may not be in money right there at the moment, but in terms of emotion, family, and medical bills for the rest of one’s life, the cost can be beyond measurement.

I ask myself why I’ve gotten so interested in HIV/AIDS without actually interacting in real life with people who are suffering from it, at least not knowingly and in person.  Here are some reasons:

1.  I get tired of everything being dominated by big cities on the coasts.  Maybe out here on the prairie we have a few observations.

2.  It’s entwined with the issue of “gay” which is embedded in the cultural binary that stuffs people into either male or female.  Even GLBTQX is only six choices, each with salesmen standing by to give you marketing advice.  Where’s eclectic?  Where’s mix-and-match?  Where’s a blend?  Where is “I-stand-alone”?  It’s about DESIRE, not fertility.  (That’s why I like to add the X -- for the situational, the exceptional, the unexpected.  Desire is like the Holy Ghost -- it goes where it wants to.)

3.  I’m interested in freedom and the San Francisco sexual revolution accompanied a lot of other freedoms, released a lot of energy.  If at the same time the jungle in Africa had not been pushed back enough to release HIV from the chimps (and who knows what the melting glaciers will release?) the story of Gay Liberation would have been quite different.  As it is, we’ve been forced to rethink ALL physical and sexual practices.  Not just gays -- straights, vanillas, babies, oldsters.  

4.  HIV is a way into our medicalized world in which we are learning an incredibly overwhelming amount of technical information about bodies.  I’m fascinated but I need a focus that isn’t just about getting old.

Sometimes you need a guardian.

5.  It’s a vulnerability disease and vulnerability interests me as much as freedom because they’re so related.  HIV makes you a banquet for microbes, which may end up ruling the world if they don’t already.  Know your adversary.  And then the vulnerability of behavior -- how to be open to intimacy and disclosure without being destroyed by them.

6.  The consequences of any plague-level disease are so devastating that whole generations, and therefore nations, and therefore civilization itself can be brought down crashing into war, famine, population displacement on a massive scale, and therefore the whole planet could be spun back into chaos.  At least until the humans are gone.

7.  The ongoing struggle to understand what it means to be human starts with a boy thrown out of his home because he is considered gay, therefore undeserving, and converted by need to make money into a vector for diseases carried back to families by ruthless men.  I find these boys an opening through their misery to an understanding of ruthless and clueless men -- and women.  I need to know where they come from.  It’s a bioreligious question.

MEDICAL MOLECULAR CGI FOR CELLS

In Saskatoon I had an ongoing discussion with a geologist about what it meant to live in a new place where the element isotopes were different.  Since a person changes cells constantly and must draw the materials from the environment where they are, or at least where their food originated, would the difference in isotopes gradually change the cells and ultimately the person’s body?  He said no, I said yes.  Eventually he came to my side.  But would a person know they were changing?  Would they feel the difference?

Animal bodies of different kinds accumulate different isotopes of carbon.

To follow this question, you need to know that the body is made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are assembled out of elements.  An element is the most basic atom but it has three parts: neutrons and protons locked together, and then the circling bits called electrons.

"Isotopes are variants of a particular chemical element such that, while all isotopes of a given element have the same number of protons in each atom, they differ in neutron number. Nuclides that have the same neutron number but a different proton number are called isotones. This word was formed by replacing the p in isotope with n for neutron.   Chemical properties are primarily determined by proton number, which determines which chemical element the nuclide is a member of; neutron number has only a slight influence.”  Got that?  Science on this level is tough.

An animation of a cell process.

www.xvivo.net/animation  This website is one I often visit because it's FUN.

It always surprises me a little that matters at this literally elemental level are so mechanical: molecules “fold,” have structure, go hand-over-hand along filaments.  But maybe that’s just because we think of them this way, model them this way with tinker toys or ping-pong balls.  We have to envision them SOME way in order to think about them.  The genome is composed of links arranged in a double helix, right?  A cell has a skin and a nucleus, right?  But they move -- they writhe, they dance, they transform.  They take in the atoms of the location, the isotopes formed by forces aeons ago.  And then, yes, we are subtly different.

David Astrachan, MD

Michael Astrachan, animator

www.xvivo.net is a company that produces medical animations of the most teeny and technical structures and their interaction -- not for fun, but for learning and understanding.   (Disclaimer: there are two men on the board who are named Astrachan but they are not related to my birth family “Strachan.”  They don’t look Scottish.  Similarities can be deceiving.)  When you watch these animations, you must remember that they are CGI, as much as sci-fi movie simulations and, in fact, the best Hollywood CGI people (who might not live in Hollywood -- some live in Montana) watch these animations to get ideas.  Even the plot-developing writers who create scripts would be smart to watch these patterns as they unfold.

I have no idea what this is, but it's a bit scary.

If you watch the demo clip at the website, which I just did, you’ll recognize organs, skin, blood, and organic "submarines" called mitochondria which are ancient creatures captured long ago by mammal cells, living batteries that supply energy and come only from your mother.  You’ll see the structure of bone, which changes slowly but DOES change.  But you’ll also see a lot of zany stuff that’s meaningless without technical interpretation. 

http://www.xvivo.net/animation/zirus-antivirotics-condensed/

This clip is about viruses.  They say that there are plenty of people on this planet who can’t understand things like HIV-AIDS because they don’t understand that there ARE such infectious agents as viruses.  Never heard of 'em.  The piece I was reading referred to tribes where the people know there is reading but have never learned to read.  (Ten per cent of the people in every industrial society don’t read.)  Talking to them about viruses is ineffective if they don’t know the words and the words are not in ordinary use where they are.  Most of us learn fancy medical words by reading.  But anyone can look at these clips and see, conceptually, what a virus does in the body.  All they need is the link I just gave you to call up the clip and watch it if they have a cell phone.

At first the floaty, prettily colored blobs and filaments, accompanied by bouncy sounds, might not mean much.  Even a scientist might need some orientation -- that’s what the Harvard students are getting when they watch these animations.  They are building into their brains some ideas that will serve them for many years.  The main idea is that the tiny world of the cells in bodies are very busy and complex.  You have to keep thinking about them.

The CGI folks who do these animations are not likely to run out of work for a long time, because they will need to revise and revise in response to new discoveries and theories -- which may have arisen out of watching these clips in the first place.  This thinking is hand-over-hand.  Once a person has a firm grasp of the genome double helix, then it’s possible to think about the impact of the epigenome, which can turn individual pairs on or off, or the complex little dance that the pair-partners do during conception that determines which one is dominant or if there should be a compromise.  This is the kind of thinking used to figure out how to transfer the mutated genes that confer immunity to HIV-AIDS from one person to another.

Pretty enough to be jewelry.

Such work is enormously expensive.  Even if the scientists figured out how to do it reliably (without damaging the genes next door to the ones being extracted or added), even if they figured out how to deliver it, let’s say, across Africa to every tribesman and his children, it wouldn’t be possible to get it done for a long time.  Not for scientific or even financial reasons, but for social and educational reasons.  

In the United States a high proportion of people can read, DO understand bacteria and viruses, DO understand routes of infection, and still stubbornly refuse to vaccinate their children or use other personally protective measures like condoms.  In fact, they try to evade laws that require vaccination and they criminalize condoms by assuming that carrying them means prostitution, grounds for arrest.  When it comes to defeating themselves, human beings are very resourceful.

One of the elements of being a smart alec who knows better than everyone else is to contradict whatever official wisdom is going around -- not that officials are always wise.  Emotion gets into the mix -- emotion is the “epigenomic” addition that shuts rationality on and off.  I’m watching “The Outcasts,” not the Western version of the American frontier, but the BBC sci-fi that was too thoughtful and too short on explosions to “live” so got canceled in the first year.  

The idea is based on these CGI-illustrated concepts:  that some people (being forced to emigrate from the planet Earth) had been genetically “enhanced” to make them better suited to harsh planets, but that when the ordinary folks arrived, their babies all died of some virus.  The newcomers thought it was a virus carried by the Frankenfolks and the order was given to kill them all.  But the person who was supposed to do it could not.  So now there are two opposed societies on the new planet and the planet’s indigenous lifeforms are not liking it.

Scottish Madonna (Amy Manson)

Much as we try not be entirely gripped by anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, we want OUR babies to survive.  But many people today, like the illiterates of the world, don’t understand that this is not just a technical problem that can be solved by running the baby over to the emergency room.  The romances and adventures in the media can be like evil CGI that distorts the realities of forming families and protecting infants.  

Where are the cautions against leaving little kids to be babysat by gormless young men with bad tempers so the woman can do some low-pay grinding job?  Where are the endorsing stories about how boys become nurturers, caring for each other as well as the defenseless?  Must they be animations?  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt.  

 Flawed Leader (Liam Cunningham)

Asshole Hero (Daniel Mays)

It’s a step in the right direction that on this BBC show the mighty leader has some serious moral flaws and the “asshole” everyone mocks is the guy who comes through, but simple reversals are not enough.  We need new systems.   And I don't mean solar systems.  But animation would be good.

"SPILLOVER"

Reading David Quammen’s “Spillover” is both a challenge and a reward, because it is so rich with concepts and vocabulary we need in order to think about the part of culture we call “disease” as in dis-ease, that which makes us miserable.  His vivid but never judgmental writing calls up memories.  Since Quammen lives in Bozeman, he's always been "just over the hill" from me, maybe in a hazmat suit.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, the second woman hired was a pre-veterinary student waiting for an opportunity to get into vet school.  Her husband became infected by a rickettsia, which is a particular kind of microbe not well understood at the time.  She was extremely wary about some of the places and contacts we made, often unsanitary to say the least.  (Four-inch crusts of animal feces in homes.)  The resident one-celled animals were likely as predatory as some of the belligerent dogs we encountered.  They told us fresh killed animals in the street were more problematic than cold maggoty corpses, because the critters on the newly dead corpses were looking for new hosts.  Also, we became intensely aware of infections in the general animal population, some of which might be zoonoses that could jump to humans.  Portland is a port city, which means ships which means rats.  We were advised not to donate blood because of the bits of beasties we might be carrying.  We were given rabies shots.

In 1981 I was doing my ministerial internship in Hartford, Connecticut, when Lyme disease was first being identified.  One of my parishioners had a knee the size of a cantalope before massive doses of penicillin brought it under control, but it came back later.  Another man in Hartford was my first awareness of PTSD, not because he had just come from a new war but because he had commanded a ship during WWII and sent his soldiers onto a beach into disastrous battle.  Standing on his bridge, he had watched them through binoculars as they died.  That had been decades earlier, but through some trick of aging his memories now came back in the night to torture him with guilt and grief.

When I was circuit-riding in Montana (’82-’85), a nurse told us that now and then mystery diseases would show up that caused the patient to be “wrapped in aluminum foil like a baked potato” and removed to some unknown quarantined place, never to be heard from again.  One of those diseases may have been HIV-AIDS, which was not quite defined yet, but others were probably among the infections Quammen discusses.  Or like them.  One of the strong themes is that infectious disease is a planetary ecology that only includes human beings under conditions of intersection when the vector carriers transport mutated bacteria or viruses to active infection of humans, which is technically called “spillover.”   Then the bugs are zoonoses.  Spillover is not necessarily a continuous stream, but happens when conditions are right, as when a stream spills over its banks due to upstream rain, late melt, erosion from timber cutting or fires, and so on.

When I was a ward clerk just a few years ago in Shelby, a nurse told me about a little circle of sex-sharers and IV needle drug users who had Hep C which somehow mutated into “fulminating hepatitis.”  One after another, they developed bad colds and then died, without passing that mutation to anyone else.  It was a deadend epidemic.

A vector is something that carries the “bug,” a virus or bacillus.  The source accumulation of infectious agents is called the “reservoir.”  The reservoir can be carried by a vector that transmits it to an “amplifier” or a “superspreader.”  This vector can be entirely innocent and not clearly involved in the final transmission of the bug.  As Quammen relates again and again, finding the infectious agent is the first problem and often made possible only by identifying the vector, but backtracking until finding the reservoir has to be the single most effective insight into prevention.

It’s clear that HIV-AIDS originated with African simians and was spread to humans (probably has been doing so for a very long time) through the consumption of bush-meat.   The two most obvious human vectors of HIV-AIDS are IV drug users and sex-workers, because these are two primary ways (outside medical situations) that body fluids are carried across from one person to another.  Other vectors could be birth, nursing, transfusions, organ transplants, and bloody wounds, as from violence.  Almost all HIV-AIDS vectors are humans. Deliberately infected lab animals are caged and destroyed.  

Public health workers know that infected people should be prevented from exchanging body fluids and encourage “barrier prevention,” that is, condoms, clean needles, and so on.  These are often denied to captive HIV carriers, like prison inmates or deportees, on grounds that they are an “extra,” expensive, and make bad behavior safe when it should be punished -- even fatal.  The big hole in this argument is that convicts are released and deportees re-immigrate, still infected, still vectors.

Making barrier prevention work means keeping people alert and consistent, which they won’t be if they are drunk, confused, stressed, or past giving a damn about anything including themselves.  Despair is a superspreader.   Public health workers obsess all the time about how to reach those people.  Because most public health strategies are based on data collection, labeling, stigmatizing, capture, incarceration, forced treatment, deportation, cattle-call clinics -- in short, punishment -- their efforts just don’t work.  Escape IS being a vector.  Secrecy and hiding are amplifiers.

Other parts of our present cultural ecology amplify vectors.  One is our constant obsession with sex and the use of it to promote everything consumable, reducing every good thing to sexual access, even Heaven.  Related is our valuing of the “high,” the extreme/blissful/
orgasmic, often through either transgressive sex or IV drugs.  These are amplifiers but so are stigmatizing, incarcerating, criminalizing -- INCREASING the spread of HIV-AIDS.  What seems blameless and what seems evil are working on each other synergistically to create ecological opportunities for body fluid crossovers.

But what is the real reservoir of HIV-AIDS?  If sexworkers and drug addicts are vectors, what is the cultural reservoir that creates the inevitable re-infection of these carriers?  I do not think it is a virus -- I think it is cultural.  The real reservoir for HIV-AIDS and many other diseases is the unhappy family that produces abused children.

At the heart of the old-fashioned mom-and-dad model of families was a successful dad who provided for and protected his wife and family.  In the past he did this by being reliable, hard-working, successful at competing with other men, skillful, and physically strong.  His reward was that he owned that family.  This was suited for rural agrarian places but has become increasingly impossible since WWII when the industrial revolution finally produced suburbs, automobiles, national highways, and a stoically traumatized former soldier population.  Men were trapped in families they didn’t want without any way to earn enough money for them. Others were emotionally trapped in jobs they hated because it made them able to buy houses, cars, and relief in the form of socially approved alcohol.  Maybe they took off, maybe they resorted to paid sex, maybe they were angry enough to enjoy the forcing of it on whoever was weak and handy, maybe they became abusers of their own children.

Abusive families, male members or not, sexual or not, are the reservoir for pandemic level HIV.  They send out vectors into society (their rejected and damaged children) and they themselves act as vectors buying sex, bringing back the same bugs (now amplified) to their own families -- what’s left of them.  Is this true?  I’m going to work on that question for a while.  At the very least it is a “spillover” of misery into society at all levels.  Misery and despair can be autoimmune diseases that cause people to damage themselves irreparably.

THE SHORES OF SURVIVAL

Many people are focused tightly on the disease caused by human immunodeficiency syndrome or HIV.  This is because research is traditionally done in this way and because people are driven to stop the specific suffering and death of human beings due to HIV.  But many other issues and patterns are connected to HIV.  My interest is in the big picture of the entangled bits of the surface of the planet and sometimes in the forces inside the planet that produce geological events.  As well as these physical links and ruptures, I try to think about social cultural patterns that derive from them and contribute to them.  Therefore, I’m interested in the primate origin of HIV, the changing human patterns that transformed SIV into HIV, the resulting reactions of societies around the world as the virus reached them, all the previous pandemics we know about, and the social forces that prevent scientific knowledge and ordinary compassion from saving people.

The Decameron of Boccaccio is a collection (decameron) of stories presumably told by a small group self-quarantined during the great plague that swept Europe, reducing the population by one-third.  My mother survived the Spanish Flu (though her doctor did not) but I don’t know of an anthology that resulted.  It killed 2 to 3% of the population of the planet, reaching even into the Arctic.  Ten percent of the American prairie population died.  The demographic was the same as soldiers: the best and the strongest, because it was not the LACK of immunity, but a sudden burst of SUPER immunity that killed people.  The homeostasis of immunity, which is a stream between the two banks of too-much and too-little, is deadly when over either limit.

The origin of the Black Plague was microbes carried on fleas riding on black rats which may have followed the Silk Trade into Europe.  Most flu epidemics come from the mixing of birds with pigs, which have a physiology much like humans.  The birds are air travel.  (When pigs fly.)  In both cases, plague (which persists in rodent fleas of Asia but is now curable with drugs) and flu (which is a virus and therefore not susceptible to most drugs) were closely linked with human travel patterns for trade or war.

This is also true of smallpox. The history of smallpox extends into pre-history; the disease likely emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC [when livestock was domesticated].  The earliest credible evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3000 years ago. During the 18th century the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease.  When Europeans brought the disease to America, it had the same consequences, but worse.

The following information is from a paper written in 2005, which means it’s out-of-date, but it still gets the idea across that African primates and monkeys of many kinds have SIV and that the origins are very ancient.  Gorillas have passed SIV, as HIV, to humans in a small area.  Monkey-originated HIV has affected more people, and the main origin of the Euro-American HIV is from chimps.  Given a chance, all primates eat other primates, but maybe gorillas less so than the others.  It’s a puzzle to me that if SIV and HIV are transmittable by sex, why do bonobos seem to escape?  They are the most human-like and the most constantly sexual.  Is it because all the bonobos who were susceptible died a long time ago -- so now being a bonobo means inheriting immunity?  People who eat a lot of bush meat carry blood markers of many versions of SIV.  One tribe of human pygmies carries almost all of them but seems immune to not only SIV but also HIV.   

Simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) are primate lentiviruses [lente = slow] that infect no fewer than 36 different nonhuman primate species in sub-Saharan Africa. Two of these viruses, SIVcpz from chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and SIVsmm from sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys), have crossed species barriers on multiple occasions and have generated human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) types 1 and 2. . . 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph6_Z6NIx98#t=15   “We Were Here.”  

This link is to a University of California Television Osher Center for Integrative Medicine hour and a half movie about the origin and history of AIDS, reaching back centuries until it goes crazy in San Francisco about 1981 and begins wiping out a community of men who came to join a movement expressing freedom, esp. in terms of MSM sex.  Survivors tell their stories in a kind of national “decameron.”  

Because of the kinds of communities, these men -- and the women who were also there --have a particular kind of story to tell.  Many linked sex with love (this is probably as much physiological (in-born) as psychological (cultural).  They took care of each other before anyone even knew what was going on.  These were guys who broke barriers, who challenged the status quo, who had come from all over the planet to participate in a revolution.  It wasn’t just about free love -- it was about freedom from assumptions.  When I look at all the faces, it often strikes me how similar they are demographically to the WWII photos of soldiers.  When the plague hit, the veterans -- now doctors, professors, and researchers -- at once set to work on the problem of AIDS. 

When AIDS jumped from the West Coast to the East Coast and hit the artistic and bohemian population, a highly political bunch who knew a holocaust when they saw one, the reaction was much sharper and more violent.  Gay liberation broadened and intensified at the same time.  It is the combination of both modes of response (love and fighting back) that has brought us -- at least most of us -- to a new understanding of human relationships.  Now we are up against a similar revolution that is about whether economic patterns can be kept from killing people just as AIDS has -- is.  We see that poverty, hunger, unjust law, stupid priorities, and so on are fanning the flames of an AIDS pandemic into a holocaust of the world as we know it.

Nothing is more contagious than ideas, but some populations around the world have not “caught” ideas that would protect them from fear.  They are still infected with what one writer calls “the culture of persecution,” which he figures arose in Europe about 1100 AD, probably as a reaction to the plague.  It is a meme pattern that promotes fear by pointing to culprits and trying to eliminate them as sources of contagion.  But we see many of the Inquisitors secretly indulging their obsession: J. Edgar Hoover cross-dressing, super-conservative politicians unzipping, teenagers persecuting other teens.  The mysterious draw of wickedness.

The homeostasis of culture is not different from any other limits of survival.  Too much persecution and the culture will kill itself, a kind of auto-immunity.  Failure to identify dangers and resolve them before they kill the vulnerable is also to lose the culture.  These are the shores of survival.