Sunday 2 October 2016

Tom Hanks Accredits the Memes - Philadelphia (1994)



Philadelphia is the (vaguely True) story of a gay man who got wrongfully dismissed and fired from his law firm (he says) because he had AIDS - who didn't have AIDS when they fired him.

He had Karposi Sarcoma. Which is not AIDS. It's a skin cancer 



For America's most trusted leading man Tom Hanks' seminal first Oscar-winning performance as a corporate lawyer, struggling to win back his peer group respect and dignity and triumph in a wrongful dismissal suit brought against his old firm's senior partners before succumbing to terminal AIDS, Hanks' iconic and breakthrough performance still to this day stands as a significant waymarker in the forging of the landscape of our present-day popular culture.

It was a true watershed moment that firmly redefined, or obliterated numerous long-standing dramatic conventions, gathered up existing clichés and stereotypes by the armful to flush them all straight down the toilet and challenged nearly everything the audience thought they knew about various strange, marginal groups we had (most of us) only been dimly aware of in society, and certain concepts which we had all been culturally conditioned to recoil from in visceral fear and panic, whilst imparting reassuringly definitive public health information, without ever talking down to audience, condescending to them, or making an appeal to basest reactions of the lowest common denominators within the society.






“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. 

What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? 

If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. 

Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.” 

― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

Joe Miller: 
Have you ever felt discriminated against at Wyatt Wheeler?

Anthea Burton: 
Well, yes.

Joe Miller: 
In what way?

Anthea Burton: Well, Mr. Wheeler's secretary, Lydia, said that Mr. Wheeler had a problem with my earrings.


Joe Miller: 
Really?

Anthea Burton: 
Apparently Mr. Wheeler felt that they were too..."Ethnic" is the word she used. And she told me that he said that he would like it if I wore something a little less garish, a little smaller, and more "American."

Joe Miller: 
What'd you say?

Anthea Burton: 
I said my earrings are American. They're African-American.



“More than a medical scientific problem, AIDS is a sociopolitical imposition.”

Dr. Jonathan Mann, 
Former World Health Organisation AIDS Czar

Being gay, even during the Moral Panic on the early AIDS Crisis (which was entirely created by gay men in the gay press, desperate to scare The Straights in Congress into getting some funding for treatment and/or a cure) is not like being discriminated against, up to and including the point of being lynched because you are Black in America -

Furthermore AIDS is not a gay problem - despite the gay community having been totally and completely duped into accepting a disease as an aspect of their personal and individual identity.

A disease - with Civil Rights. 
Including the implicit Right to Privacy.

It is  a sociopolitical imposition.”

Liberal Hollywood elites want to tell you that being Black in America is the same as having a disease :-

IT IS NOT.

PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY IS NOT "DISCRIMINATION"

If HIV-AIDS is a communicable disease (which everyone, including me, at the time assumed that it was, and I no longer believe it is), it has to be reportable, so you know the scale of the problem if you want to control it.

So you know if you have an epidemic, a pandemic or none of the above on your hands - so you can allocate enough funding and resources to stop it spreading, contain it, adequately treat and and cure it.

This is ESSENTIAL.

Gonnorra is reportable.

Vineral Disease is reportable.

Genital Warts are reportable.

Dysantry is reportable.

Hepatitis-A, B and C are all reportable.

Legionaires Disease is reportable

Ebola is damn well reportable.

Zika Virus virus is reportable.


HIV-AIDS was made explicitly non-reportable in California (where most of the cases in the US and indeed the Western World were at that time) for reasons of privacy - because it might imply that someone reporting HIV positvity was a practicing homosexual.

Making Gonnorra, VD or Warts reportable does not risk implying that anyone contracting such a disease may be a sailor or a habitual and incautious patron of street prostitutes by their Doctor reporting their case to the Centre for Disease Control.

The Centre for Disease Control HAS to know these things - for the purposes of controlling communicable diseases, and correctly identifying  the existence and epidemiology of any new infection.

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