Editorials/Zoo Sex/Mysterious Reticence
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS ZOO SEX The present pother over AIDS is comparable to no other problem in American history. It is a health problem as tuberculosis was once a health problem, but now it has been...
...Is this owing to a massive loss of imagination, or has it to do with their source in the Oval Office...
...The Roosevelt election of 1936 was a stupendous landslide, and on the campaign trail the great Roosevelt said little that was daring or memorable...
...Electoral squeakers are not the only elections that fetch the imagination and quicken the pulse...
...As many as one million Americans are AIDS carriers, and researchers believe that 10 percent of these unfortunates will come down with the disease and die...
...Hygiene was improved...
...Nothing was done then, and when AIDS made its appearance in the homosexual community shortly thereafter, homosexual groups thwarted attempts to question potential blood donors about their "sexual orientation...
...AIDS victims...
...Similarly, when officials in such cities as New York and San Francisco tried to shut down homosexual bathhouses, which are veritable breeding swamps for AIDS and other homosexual-related diseases, homosexual-rights moralizers brought these efforts to ruin...
...The AIDS agent is by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Some Washington observers argue that the dullness of these books and the paucity of other Reagan books is owing to the size of the 1984 landslide and to the fact that in his campaign Ron said very little about his policies and his Weltanschauung...
...Some homosexuals have seen the light and demand that AIDS be treated as the public-health menace that it is, but others frustrate proper policy and turn the matter into soap opera...
...In America, I doubt there are that many different presidential postcards available, though the Reagan Administration is markedly more historic than the Thatcher government, its break with the past being bolder...
...That was when researchers discovered a high incidence among homosexuals of hepatitis-B, theretofore a virus uncommon in America...
...After overcoming such fantastic figures as Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, and George McGovern, the Hon...
...Diets were changed...
...Still, books, articles, and even television commentaries on these amazing events are scarce...
...Various ideologues say no...
...The election evoked, however, vast commentary...
...Thatcher appears almost monotonous when placed next to Ronald Reagan, an ex-actor, judged a political has-been in 1977, and now our oldest President...
...Nonetheless, authorities addressed the matter boldly and intelligently without fear of political harassment...
...Over a decade ago health authorities recognized that such zoo sex posed a serious health problem...
...Today any discussion of AIDS is sheathed in euphemisms, as one must constantly duck the recriminations of homosexual-rights moralizers whose strictures are like nothing so much as those of their archenemies, the Bible-pounders...
...In the past four years annual government appropriations have climbed from $5.5 million to over $120 million...
...In Washington they fret over jobs and live with the melancholy knowledge that few of their colleagues read, so why write about Ronald Reagan...
...New York's Mayor Koch proffers a qualified yes...
...Gordon Muir, a medical researcher, published an essay in these pages listing nearly a half dozen dangerous health problems, such as "Gay Bowel Syndrome" and hepatitis non-A non-B, spreading from the homosexual community to the general public...
...America is now in the absurd position of treating exhaled smoke from cigarette smokers as more dangerous than viruses and parasites of proven deadliness...
...Radicals could bring together all their fears of impending doom: starvation in the streets, upheaval amongst the masses, suddenly comes America's Marxist Dawn...
...But radicals have contemplated the Reagan regime for five years and are too fearful now to write of such calamity and rebirth...
...The explanation will not wash...
...Perhaps Ronald Reagan does not want books and articles written about him...
...And Mrs...
...MYSTERIOUS RETICENCE As Ronald Reagan, who has vanquished so many liberals, comes out yet again to battle their paladins on Capitol Hill and in the bureaucratic foxholes, one of the mysteries of the Republic must be the scarcity of commentaries and books admiring or even noting his accomplishments...
...For instance, overcrowded living conditions were ameliorated...
...As time passes the disease spreads...
...Conservatives, too, could turn out a tolerable legend: a septuagenarian Prince Charming, a pretty and stylish First Lady, liberty renewed, the American eagle soars anew—a Camelot for clock-stoppers...
...The Roosevelt campaign hummed along flawlessly, but few campaigns have attracted more literary attention, and to this day many of us recognize James A. Farley's jest: "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont...
...AIDS is but one of an unedifying congeries of serious diseases prevalent among promiscuous homosexuals...
...Upon close inspection, there always has been a mysterious reticence around Ronald Reagan, and it intensifies the closer one gets to him...
...Actually, vast amounts have now been allotted for AIDS research...
...In the United Kingdom there are, at this very hour, over half a dozen books out assaying Prime Minister Thatcher's accomplishments or blunders...
...Utterly lost from view is the grim acknowledgement that these children will soon be dead and that while many of America's 13,000 AIDS sufferers contracted the disease by disregarding proper hygiene, these children suffer because adults have frequently absconded from their responsibilities for maintaining public health...
...They balk at attempts to quarantine the disease...
...These problems ought to be addressed intelligently...
...They reproach the government for not spending money for cures...
...Vaccines are more plausible, but the AIDS virus is prone to constant mutation...
...Recommendations from health authorities must pass the solemn judgments of sexual pontificators, ideologues, and quacks...
...Any vaccine developed today would in all probability be ineffectual tomorrow owing to changes in the viral strain...
...We have, admittedly, the obbligato campaign books, but all are tedious and insipid...
...AIDS is not a civil rights problem...
...A year ago, Patrick Buchanan, then a syndicated columnist, now head of White House communications, and Dr...
...Yet conservatives seem speechless...
...No such jests mark the 1984 landslide, nor will you find as many books written about RR's first five years as were written about FDR's, though the Reagan Administration represents a similar disjunction with the past...
...Instead they write sleep-inducing tomes such as Jack Germond and Jules Witcover's aptly titled Wake Us When It's Over...
...At that point public health authorities should have refused to allow homosexuals to donate blood, for their blood raised the risk of hepatitis-B's spreading to the general public...
...The real question is why the consensus commentators in the middle do not write interesting books about the last five years of Reaganism...
...Yet any notion of a cure being within our grasp is utterly fanciful...
...It is a public health problem associated with promiscuous sex, specifically promiscuous homosexual sex...
...Rarely is it discussed candidly or intelligently...
...What makes this a mystery is that the Reagan Administration could make such a gripping legend...
...Walter Mondale headed possibly the most liberal ticket of the century, only to blow up in a poof on election day when the voters opted for one of the century's most conservative tickets, Reagan-Bush— not the equal of the fabulous Coolidge-Dawes ticket of 1924, but admirably conservative nonetheless...
...It marked the end of the old Republican order and the rise of a new perspective on American constitutional politics...
...Consequently, measures were implemented to reduce the disease even before suitable drugs had been developed...
...It is a health problem as tuberculosis was once a health problem, but now it has been transmogrified into a civil rights matter with quasi-religious overtones...
...In addressing tuberculosis a century ago, one was addressing an illness particularly prevalent among tenement dwellers...
...What is more, the Reagan Administration's policies have been bold departures from the social engineering that had reached an apogee with affirmative action, from spiraling taxation, and from the passivity of the Carter foreign policy...
...Apparently, an individual's right to remain silent regarding questions of sexual hygiene takes precedence over a blood recipient's right to sound medical care...
...a virus and, as with most common viral diseases, cures remain elusive...
...This fall the question facing the public is whether schools should bar young Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
