AIDS and It's METAPHORS

Kinglake’s influential book Eothen (1844)—suggestively subtitled “Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East”—illustrates many of the enduring Eurocentric presumptions about others, starting from the fantasy that peoples with little reason to expect exemption from misfortune have a lessened capacity to feel misfortune. Thus it is believed that Asians (or the poor, or blacks, or Africans, or Muslims,) don’t suffer or don’t grieve as Europeans (or whites) do. The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place.

The U.S. Department of Defense has announced that military personnel discovered to be HIV-positive are being removed “from sensitive, stressful jobs,” because of evidence indicating that mere infection with the virus, in the absence of any other symptoms, produces subtle changes in mental abilities in a significant minority of virus carriers. (The evidence cited: lower scores on certain neurological tests given to some who had tested positive, which could reflect mental impairment caused by exposure to the virus, though most doctors think this extremely improbable, or could be caused—as officially acknowledged under questioning—by “the anger, depression, fear, and panic” of people who have just learned that they are HIV-positive.) And, of course, testing positive now makes one ineligible to immigrate everywhere.