No Room for AIDS in Harper's Tidy Mind

Stephen Harper’s curt refusal to attend the international conference on AIDS in Toronto was much more than a major political gaffe, although it certainly was that. And it was not just that Steve would feel uncomfortable in the presence of Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, and Bill Clinton, the charismatic liberal who has more capacity to feel the pain of others in any pore of his body than Harper has in his whole being. As a neo-conservative true believer---Harper is a more principled neo-con than George W. Bush will ever be---Stephen Harper has no room in his tidy mind for most of the ills that roil the world.

Neo conservatives like Harper, and our Canadian export to Washington, David Frum, are offended by most of the human race. They picture themselves as members of an “elect”. They are the chosen ones who understand.

In the mind of the neo-con, personal responsibility is the highest good. You are what you make yourself. It is a sign that you are a member of the elect if you have prospered. Wealth is a badge of honour, of achievement, of self-discipline. The poor man you see outside your door is just as surely the author of his own misfortune as the rich man is of his bountiful success. In this atomistic social universe, the individual cares for himself and his family. If everyone would only behave this way, what a prosperous world we all would have. (For a simple, daily dose of this ideology, read the columns of Margaret Wente.)

In the mental system of the neo-con, AIDS sufferers are seen as having chosen the path that has led them to their misfortune. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, neo-con writers like Washington journalist George F. Will went to great lengths to prove that AIDS was not a general social problem, but only a self-made affliction for gay men. As the pandemic has spread, so that tens of millions are now in its grasp, this uninformed, vicious take on the disease is no longer promulgated in polite company. It still, however, is at the root of the neo-con gospel that sexual abstinence is the key to combating AIDS. It remains all about individual behaviour as far as neo-cons are concerned.

This is not the first time in history that an inhuman, ruling ideology has stood in the way of the alleviation of the suffering of millions of people. In the middle of the 19th century, during the Irish potato famine, in which a million people starved to death, the British upper classes were determined not to feed the hungry on the other side of the Irish Sea. To have done so, and the British Empire was capable of doing so, would have been a violation of the rules of the market. Since the Irish had no means to pay for imported food, nothing could be done. Indeed, Ireland went on exporting agricultural products to other parts of the world at the peak of the famine.

Steve wouldn’t have fitted in at a conference where people accept the idea that there is a social dimension to the human journey, that we are all in this together and that the suffering of a large part of humanity is the suffering of the whole world.

This is one weird guy we’ve got at 24 Sussex. Picture him in a Puritan hat.

God Bless Canada!