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Notes -
Book review thread!
My problem with the comparisons is that the strongest ones are also the most obvious. In particular,
is like…a stock villain. The kind of character young-adult authors add when they want to make readers feel a little more mature. The profit motive has been a bogeyman since at least the Gilded Age. And there was still enough post-2008 class warfare in the atmosphere to get people riled up. Was this a lesson learned from the Reagan era, or was the age of Gordon Gekko just less willing to intervene in capitalism?
The other standout is transfer of information. Does the book address how institutions shared their data? Because I’m imagining heated phone calls and corkboards with string. The kind of medium which makes for good TV but not necessarily the right decisions.
In 2020, we got to watch the COVID counters go up in real time. We didn’t get to see it, but the scientific consensus was congealing at roughly the same speed. The Internet makes stuff happen faster, but there’s still no way to speed up the real-world information. Every notion has to be preconceived.
I dunno, if you have people making profit on running a blood bank or a sex-oriented bathhouse, I'd image they would actually go and fight over their right to do just that if banning or regulating those things would cut into the said profits, especially if they can also just argue that it's not time to be hasty since there's no full certainty on how the virus transmits or how likely the blood is to be contaminated.
Conferences and mail, mostly, as far as I've understood. Certainly the book couldn't make a comparison to the current, more rapid spread of information, since they didn't have a time machine.
I think Shilts puts his thumb on the scales a bit for that evaluation, especially for bathhouses.
He makes a big deal out of them as a "100-million dollar industry" and charging 5/10 dollars a
headperson, and that is an investment: the Club Baths would have definitely gone (and did eventually go under!) when closed. Totally fair point! But the other side of that's the extent the Club Baths founder had been a gay activist over a decade before opening his first bathhouse, and went into that field knowing it'd blacklist him from most normal ventures. When it comes to revenue and ideals, there's really little in And the Band Played On that really excludes the option 'both'; just what Shilts wants to portray.More significantly, while Shilts mentions the long incubation time for HIV, the work as a whole kinda glosses over the extent that drove so many other problems. There was no blood test until 1985; understandings of the high real transmission rate and true number of cases were projections and guess-work, and often wrong (as you mention Fauci and the spit-take). He mentions as an aside different times where the expected incubation period increased -- ten months, a year, two years, five years -- but he only really talks about minimizing estimates of incidence to show obviously misguided activists. But they were only obviously wrong in retrospect: in many cases, they were doing the math and statistical analysis correctly, just with garbage numbers coming in.
I think there's a stronger argument for blood banks (though the strongest arguments come well after the 1980-85 block that Shilts focuses on), but even that has to trade off against the often-serious risks low available blood would involve.
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