Caucus Eve: And the Band Played On...

First proviso: I don't care who wins the Iowa caucus. The candidates seem comparable to me on pretty much every policy issue, at least within an acceptable range when they differ. They are all better than the Republican alternative, in any case. Much better.

So, I was getting a little sick of the primary-related DU insanity last week, and I decided to do something different. I wanted to remind myself what it was really all about when we dropped of the fanboy/fangirl bit and started thinking about policy. I wanted to read about a policy issue. I went through my books, looking to revisit something worth reading. I didn't want it to be recent, because I wanted a sort of untainted experience. As I was scanning the bookshelf, my eyes fell on Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On. It fit all the criteria I was after: it is the history of the early AIDS epidemic, so it spans 1981-1985 (with some stuff from the mid-1970's); it wasn't dense theoretical reading (I read enough of that for work), but more like a very long magazine article; and it focuses on people and policy. Real policy stuff. People interacting through policy and bureaucracy. People making policy. People affected by policy. Lives affected by policy. A society profoundly affected by policy decisions, and the barriers to effective action.

I read And the Band Played On maybe 15 years ago, when I was in college. The creases in the spine were deep, the pages discolored. I read it last weekend, and it is, of course, remarkable. The blunders, the indifference, the failure of imagination, the outright refusal to fund research, or cover stories, or assist in any way. The complexity of the political situation: how do you tell a group that has just achieved something close to liberation that it must rein in what freedom it had won through struggle? This is no simple question. In the administration, in the Congress, in the agencies, in the newsrooms, in the populace and the activist groups. It's about policy. Each page is more maddening than the last. At each step, good and smart people were doing diligent work, trying to save lives, and at each step they faced the barriers of a complex system that was much more the cause of the epidemic than was a nasty little virus.

As we go into this caucus eve, I'd like to recommend it. Go out and read And the Band Played On. Forget about candidates as personalities, and start thinking about candidates as capacities to produce and shape policies, and capacities to respond to problems in thoughtful and canny ways. The candidates as attractors in the complex system of bureaucracy.

And when I think "Who among these candidates on the Democratic side would have the fortitude and insight to handle the priblem more appropriately should something like AIDS spring up again?," my answer is simple: ALL OF THEM.

All of them would do a better job. That's what's important.