Chicago police, delegates to the American Medical Association annual meeting and guest speaker Dan Quayle confronted spray-painting AIDS activists Monday.
They`re not alone if they believed that the protest, in part against proposals for mandatory AIDS testing of doctors (which inspire a July 1 Newsweek cover story), was shrilly counterproductive, even given evidence of overreaching and anti-gay slurs by the cops. A nifty monthly on academic life says the activists are victimized by their movement`s own intellectual roots. In June Lingua Franca, Donald Harris, a columnist for a literary publication called The Quarterly, argues that various academic theories have inspired, and hobbled, the group that demonstrated in Chicago Monday: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).
The group, fond of the slogan ”Silence
Death,” has made headlines by disrupting public meetings, throwing condoms at opponents, and interrupting broadcasts of CBS` ”Evening News” and PBS`
”MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” Harris contends that such tactics are derived from university-inspired movements tagged ”critical theory” and have backfired.
”The flamboyant and controversial tactics of ACT-UP may be the first examples in history of the direct influence of academic theory on the actual strategies of grass-roots activists, whose intellectual obsessions have not only set the tenor of the organization`s propaganda but have helped select both the specific sites and the occasions of its often ingenious coups de theatre.”
For example, Harris finds that the activists have used elements of
”deconstructionism”-a belief that an author`s idea of what a text means is the tip of the iceberg and that there are many equally valid, even conflicting interpretations-in an obsessive quest to manipulate media. Indeed, he discerns ”fascism” in their seeming equation of truth with power over how an issue is represented in the media.
The result, he argues, is that ACT-UP does little more than grandstand and manipulate the media, trivializing its cause rather than effecting desired reform of alleged homophobia, misogyny and racism. ($3.95, 175 5th Ave., Suite 2245, New York, N.Y. 10010.)
July-August Bass Player has Brenda Herrmann`s good profile of four Chicago-based blues bass masters…. July Details has Jon Savage`s nice effort on the evolution and demise of punk rock, starting with its mid-1970s origin in ”white, suburban, adolescent nihilism.”
The July JUF News, from the Jewish United Fund, proves that the media missed one angle on the Chicago Bulls NBA championship: ”Jewish Bulls” is a look at team executives Jerry Reinsdorf, Jerry Krause, Steve Schanwald and Irwin Mandel, as well as the promotion director, the official scorer and a media services intern.
July Business Tokyo discerns growing American resentment of huge and unabated Japanese investment in U.S. golf courses, especially in Hawaii. The purchases totaled $1 billion for three courses along the Monterey Peninsula, and tentative plans are to sell memberships at one, Pebble Beach, for $750,000. Meanwhile, July Golf Digest starts a series on golf bargains that notes that if you don`t want to spend $200 for a round at Pebble Beach, you can spend $16 at the nearby Pacific Grove municipal course and ”get to see the same ocean.”
In June 27 New York Review of Books, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe, physicist Kurt Gottfried and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara argue that Soviet instability is precisely the reason to reduce American and Soviet nuclear forces, from a current total of 50,000 warheads to ”something on the order of two thousand.”
Heart-tugger of the week: ”Dan,” 32, a divorced attorney, complains in July Cosmopolitan about romance during these fear-filled days. ”First I read that women have fantasies of wanting to be `swept away.` So you try to sweep one away and she calls you a pervert.”
Well, if Dan is having trouble surviving the social scene, he could split to the seas or the great outdoors. July Yachting has safety tips (like buying a $2,000 radio), while July Sports Afield does likewise for the serious traveler.
Of course, Dan may prefer getting tanked. If so, head overseas. July 1 Business Week reports that sales of American bourbon are booming with an annual 25 percent growth despite sharp slippage in the U.S. Maybe he can be swept away by a bottle of Jack Daniels.
