I'm in a real "talking out of turn" mood today.
Yesterday I made my usual turn into the door of what all the people I know know as
The Greatest Café in the World. The people there are really cool, they play great music, the vibe is really down to earth and mellow, like Long Beach in general. Not like San Francisco, a city I've called home, where a lot of people have this big chip on their shoulder, too cool or too righteous or just too ...
whatever .. for school. I’m exaggerating of course, but the generalization is pretty apt, that the San Francisco Bay Area is the Place of Righteous Indignation.
Well, I brought a bit of the old SF Bay ‘tude to the LBC today.
When I sat down at a table, a woman approached me and said I’d have to sign a release form or move to one of the two rear quadrants (and me in a front quadrant mood). She told me that they had reserved the place to shoot images for an ad campaign.
“What’s the ad campaign for,” I asked.
“It’s for a pharmaceutical company,” came the polite, hurried reply from the woman.
“What’s the drug?”
“It helps people live healthier, fuller lives.”
Right. Look, you can hang out The Greatest Café in the World like any normal person! By being hooked on our drug, you can be hooked on another drug just like the rest of Starbucks Nation! We make money, the café makes money, you get to feel like you, you know, fit in -- everybody’s happy! Just check out this video!
“Seriously, what’s the drug?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s an HIV AIDS drug ...”
I can’t tell you what else she said. Well, actually, I can’t say that, because as I was writing this, she came back to where I ended up retreating (any quadrant at The Greatest Café in the World is pretty good) and very nicely apologized for hurrying me out of the front area. Seriously, she was very nice, and she told me how she herself had been moved, earlier in the day, by the story of a young woman who had gotten HIV when she was a teenager, and how the other AIDS drugs had made her sick.
But see, that’s what I’m talking about! And so I told her again (in a way that was more shall I say relaxed than our first encounter) that the main priority of pharmaceutical companies is not to help people, but to make money, and that therefore it’s in their best interest that people stay sick, and believe that the products the companies offer are the only way to get (sort of) well. Well, the reality just might be that Pharm drugs harm more than they do good. The reality just might be that people can be healthy by
healing with whole foods and alternative medicine, like centuries old Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The reality just might be that HIV does not cause AIDS in the first place.
I remember first reading about that decidedly alternative reality, back in the 90’s, in
Spin Magazine of all places. “Oh, some music rag? Well, if the information doesn’t come from corporate owned Time Magazine, or that newspaper where they print
All The News That’s Fit For Our Advertisers, then I don’t believe it ...”
The column in Spin -- which had not yet been sold to big corporate media -- was called “Words From the Front.” That’s where I first read about how there were cases where people without a trace of HIV nevertheless were diagnosed with this “AIDS” (not a disease itself, but a Syndrome by which people’s immune system supposedly breaks down and they get chronically sick from any number of previously identified diseases). That, in any case, HIV is in a class of viruses called “retroviruses," which are considered harmless. And that reputable doctors and scientists had been blacklisted for promoting the view that therefore
HIV doesn’t cause AIDS at all.Then early in this decade I came into contact with the San Francisco chapter of
ACT UP. Back when people still posted fliers, they were putting some up in my neighborhood with the slogan
“Don’t buy the HIV lie.” When I went by their table at some event, they politely offered me lots of literature, including
this book by Christine Maggiore.
The rest of the HIV ≠ AIDS theory is that in the early 80’s, gay men became sick because of recreational drug use, a form of self-medication brought on by the persecution of homosexuals. The medical establishment repurposed some inconclusive research to find a viral cause of cancer, the Pharm Industry came up with some really toxic drugs, and voila! More people got sick from those licit drugs, while all manner of people who continued to live an unhealthy life (such as so many people in Africa are forced to do) continued to get sick, and so got prescribed more toxic drugs. HIV Negative Cycle.
Most people to whom I have repeated this theory have said, essentially, that I am crazy. To these people I respond by saying:
-- In the course of my own activism, I have seen firsthand how the government agencies that regulate private industries are in a very incestuous relationship with those industries they are meant to regulate. People migrate from government to private industry and vice versa all the time. Our own (vice) president is a perfect example.
-- Science is a faith-based religion. Oh, people love this assertion too. They tell me, “We know that HIV causes AIDS, we can prove it.” Who is this “we”? These people, taking comfort in belonging to a group and embracing the reigning ideology of that group, do no more than take on faith what the priests in white coats say. Which is no different to how things functioned in the so-called Dark Ages -- priests and clerics were thought to be more knowledgeable than the average, normal person, and they had the verifiable, demonstrative proof of how disease was caused by demonic possession, or whatever. Once upon a time, people had verifiable proof that the earth was flat. Then people proved that it is round. What truth will become false tomorrow?
Every society has its knowledge/power base; every society has truths it holds to be self-evident. Reason and logic and
SCIENCE! are just cultural constructs, like movies or faux nature art or youtube videos. And I have to pull out
Foucault here (he’s not Time Magazine, but still pretty respectable). Per Michel, “truth” (the non-belief in which causes people to be expelled from the group with some label like “crazy”) is what makes us subject to power -- “subject” in the sense of (i) something over which something else has mastery, and (ii) an individuated agent, a formed identity. It’s a word that “coincidentally” means both things.
I am (the) subject of/to this sentence. I am subject to the truth that the “HIV virus” causes AIDS because if it’s not true, then so much comforting “reality” comes tumbling down, and I become “crazy” to boot. I am subject to that truth because I have some investment, monetary or otherwise, in the Medical/Pharmaceutical Establishment. I am subject to that truth because I am subject to the truth that sex is sinful, or dirty, or “bad.” I am subject to that truth because considering an alternative feels tantamount to saying that friends and lovers and people I identify with have died in vain or, worse, caused their own demise.
In other words, I don’t think of the HIV ≠ AIDS theory as a conspiracy theory, like the conspiracy theory that bad brown people are out to get us, or that microscopic creatures are out to get us. I think, to dispense with the Foucauldian rhetoric, that people believe what they need to believe. The people in the Pharm Industry believe they are helping people. They just “coincidentally” make tons of money doing so. Kind of like how Halliburton has made tons of money out of a war one of its “former” chief officers pushed for. After all, “we” are bringing “democracy” to “them.”
So is it my belief (that perhaps I need, chip on my shoulder, to harbor) that HIV does not cause AIDS?
Well, let me put it this way -- what if it is true?
