I Get To Nitpick Gary Wills

Gary Wills writes on "Two Speeches", comparing Lincoln's address at Cooper Union with Barack's Philadelphia speech on race.  And here are two from the "Small Historical World" file - I poked through Lincoln's Cooper Union speech a few years back in response to a Bush comment about Dred Scott during a debate with Kerry.

OK, here is my mini-smite of Wills, who wrote this:

The charge that AIDS was a white plot against blacks is obviously unjustified, but to some blacks it did not seem crazy, since their accurate oral history remembers a time when syphilis went untreated among blacks so as to study its effects. One of the least sensible charges against Wright was the claim of Michael Gerson, President Bush's former speechwriter, that his statement would expose more blacks to AIDS.

Well, the notion that these AIDS conspiracy theories contribute to AIDS by discouraging condom use was announced in a RAND / OSU study from 2005.  The WaPo:    

More than 20 years after the AIDS epidemic arrived in the United States, a significant proportion of African Americans embrace the theory that government scientists created the disease to control or wipe out their communities, according to a study released today by Rand Corp. and Oregon State University.    

That belief markedly hurts efforts to prevent the spread of the disease among black Americans, the study's authors and activists said. African Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to Census Bureau figures, yet they account for 50 percent of new HIV infections in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And the lead to the RAND press release:       

STUDY BY RAND AND OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY FINDS CONSPIRACY BELIEFS AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS DETER CONDOM USE

Significant numbers of African Americans believe in conspiracy theories about AIDS, and black men with such beliefs are less likely to use condoms as a precaution against spreading the HIV virus, according to a study issued today by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and appears in the Feb. 1 edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. It is the most thorough examination of the types of AIDS conspiracy theories held by African Americans, and is the first to also examine the relationship of those beliefs to the use of condoms. More men than women believe in the conspiracy theories, the study found.

Pick Gerson over Wills this time.  This is essentially irrelevant to the Wills article, but it gives me an excuse to post on it.

 

Comments

[Anon]

I'm glad you posted this. To be honest, that was the thing about Wright that upset me most. If he peddled these theories, he actually hurt the very community he meant to be helping (and to be fair, did help). And what a vulnerable community! It's just sad.

[MarkJ]

Gary Wills? I heard he was dead.

(ref: "Escape from New York").

[spectre765]

Excuse me for picking nits, but shouldn't that header read "I get to pick nits with Gary Wills" ?

[edh]

God damn the Rand Corporation, and God damn the Trojan Corporation!

[SteveMG]

Pretty big "nit" - mitigating the spread of a deadly disease through greater education - to grab even if it is ancillary to Wills' piece.

It does seem counterintuitive (didn't read the full RAND report). I.e., thinking that the government is out to get me would certainly lead to me behaving less recklessly. Condoms? Give me five of 'em.

Unless, perhaps, one thinks the government run health clinic dispensing the condoms is giving out tainted prophylactics?

What's the thinking?

[M. Simon]

Tom are you a pick a nity?

[Danube of Thought]

Forget Wills. He'll rationalize anything this Leftist fraud and his cuckoo minister have to say, but he's preaching to a very small choir.

[David]

The origin of the "US Government invented AIDS" was KGB mis-information from the '80's Gorbachev era (see "The Sword and The Shield-The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB").
This lie is so sad in that it has caused so much misery in the U.S. and especially in Africa, where it was a great barrier to the same sort of preventive measures documented in the Rand study that could have limited the spread of AIDS/HIV.
Interesting that Wright still promoted this lie so many years after it has been discredited.

[Dan Collins]

Excellent post, Tom, but I think that the year of the study needs an extra zero.

[Ty Knoy]

I'm dense, obviously, but whether the U. S. invented AIDS or didn't, what does it have to do with condom use? Can someone please explain the thinking?

[harkin]

Nice, fact-based and to the point.

[TSOL]

Didn't HIV jump from chimpanzees to humans due to a certain ethnic group's partaking of "bushmeat"? Talk about projecting...

[narciso]

If you have to explain, you've lost the point. Just like most of the JFK
assasination conspiracies after the KGB put their disinformation into Paesa Sra and other sympathetic papers, and Garrison ,et
al ran with it. Max Holland, uncovered this detail yet he gets no end of grief from the
left, for this apostasy in favor of the Warren Commission. Wills, one, recalls in the Kennedy Imprisonment, said he was glad
the Bay of Pigs had succeeded, because had it succeeded it would have tied the US to another puppet regime, (like in Baghdad, he would say if the book was ever republished.

[Cecil Turner]

Can someone please explain the thinking?

Doubt it . . . it's inexplicable. Just as the "accurate oral history" that implies the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a plot by a bunch of rednecks to spread syphilis amongst black men ignores the do-gooder basis for the study:

1931 Rosenwald Fund cuts support to development projects. Clark and Vondelehr decide to follow men left untreated due to lack of funds in order to show need for treatment program. [emphasis added]

The bottom line is that the participants weren't going to be treated anyway, they were just being studied in an effort to coax money out of Washington. And, of course, the men in the study didn't need to know what was really happening, because their intellectual betters were looking after them. (Sound familiar?)

Somehow, the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) has managed to shed all responsibility for its part in the study, and effectively framed the narrative as a need for a new research center and museum in a bid:

to develop a strategy to redress the damages caused by the Study and to transform its damaging legacy.

Seems to me that effort's been a miserable failure . . . except perhaps as a means to keep race-baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Jeremiah Wright in pocket change.

[Candy]

It's simple and stupid.

They don't wear condoms because it feels better without them. The normal person would say, 'Yeah, but they could die down the road', exactly... but most don't care.

[Cecil Turner]

And it feels especially better to those who believe in conspiracy theories?

[boris]

The conspiracy believers probably don't accept that it is spread by sexual contact. After all if someone is going to believe in a conspiracy might as well pick on that fits their personal agenda.

[boris]

IIRC in Africa there is a widespread folk remedy for AIDS that involves having unprotected sex with a young virgin.

[Tom Maguire]

Excellent post, Tom, but I think that the year of the study needs an extra zero.

No, it was a very forward looking study... the year 200 it is. AD, of course.

Actually, the 5 is resistant on this keyboard, leading to odd typos.

[bgates]

Actually, the 5 is resistant on this keyboard, leading to odd typos.
Like a missing zero? What do you do, type '5' twice when you need a '1' or a '0'?

AD, of course.
Christianist.

[nodak boy]

the logic is simple: if the government is spreading AIDS to kill blacks, you can't trust what gov'mint scientists say about AIDS or rubbers. So bareback, baby.
Plus, they say it feels better.
For the wearer.
JFK never wore condoms.
Look what happened.
More seriously. Maybe condoms reduce the overall transmission of HIV; but not by much. Some say the permeability of condoms doesn't even catch the tiny little HIVs very good. Plus, the mechanics of using condoms when drugs or alcohol are part of the foreplay and when the backdoor is used, makes it pretty dicey, right? Remember?
Plus, do you think any of these scientists telling the hoi polloi to wear rubbers would ever screw someone with AIDs even using a condom?
A better federal sexual health policy, truly, would be "Whap their pee-pees with a ruler."
Sister Mary Elizabeth Montessori
No, they, wouldn't. So why do they talk as if wearing a condom makes it "safe" or even "safer" to screw someone with HIV.

[Mona]

His name is Garry Wills. He started out a conservative w/ Buckley at NR. Left during the Viet Nam era when he could not hack what that mag was spewing.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Maybe condoms reduce the overall transmission of HIV; but not by much.

Oh, bullshit. See, eg, this CDC publication, which says:

Epidemiologic studies that are conducted in real-life settings, where one partner is infected with HIV and the other partner is not, demonstrate conclusively that the consistent use of latex condoms provides a high degree of protection.

I guess this proves that it's not just African-Americans who believe politically convenient myths.

[MW]

Can someone please explain the thinking?

Maybe it is a correlation, rather than causation thing -- people who believe in AIDS conspiracies are disproportionately stupid.

Stupid people are less likely to use condoms.

[Daddy]

Boris,

Had a depressing conversation with a Medical Missionary in the Philippines a year ago. He had just returned from a long stint in Sub-Saharan Africa. He was vehement in stating that the sort of folklore/superstitious belief prevalent among many people there, was that the way to cure or prevent yourself from having AIDS, was to engage in sex with young virgin women, as somehow the virgins blood was supposed to cure you. He said this unfortunately had become a standard sort of "morning after whoring therapy", thus the worst possible behavior and mindset for preventing the further spread of HIV. I personally have no way of knowing if this was true, but he was well respected among the folks I knew, and most certainly he had nothing to gain by relating this to me, as I was simply a guy asking questions about the medical situation in Africa.

[Cecil Turner]

I personally have no way of knowing if this was true . . .

Yep. Google "virgin cure" for plenty of stories (like this one). Saw somewhere the buy-in was about 25% of the population in South Africa, so it's hardly universal, but significant.

[Daddy]

Ughh. Sorry to find out its true.

[Vibrata]

The UN says circumcision will stop aids. Females won't talk enough. If they abstained that might be the answer; but these poor, uneducated people actually think they're blessing the world with the existence of their breeding result.

[battery]

The UN says circumcision will stop aids. Females won't talk enough. If they abstained that might be the answer; but these poor, uneducated people actually think they're blessing the world with the existence of their breeding result.

[sophy]

I do not know how to use the Hellgate gold ; my friend tells me how to use.