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On this day that marks the 85th birthday of the late Larry Kramer, the prophetic, loud and influential AIDS activist and playwright who died last month, his words about AIDS ring true about coronavirus. Kramer often called AIDS a “genocide” against the gay community.
In his 1989 book, “Reports from the holocaust,” Kramer was careful to use a small “h” for holocaust, so as not to equate AIDS entirely with the Nazi extermination of Jews, while using a metaphor. But he was clear in his view that the response to AIDS during the Reagan-Bush years was willfully, criminally negligent, and that it was because it affected people who were detested in society or whom the powers-that-be didn’t care about for political reasons: queer people, poor people and minorities.
How can the same not be said about Donald Trump, the Republican Party and coronavirus?
People of color have been disproportionately affected and that became clear in New York at the outset of the pandemic, where Black and Latino people were twice as likely to die, something that played out in cities and rural areas across America. Add to that the elderly and the infirm affected disproportionate by coronavirus — and thus seen as expendable by some in order to save the economy — and you have a worldview that is quite sinister.
“You’re the elite. You are. You’re smarter, better looking. You have a better future.”
In Phoenix this week Trump spoke to group of 3000 “Students for Trump,” a mostly maskless sea of young, white faces and bright red MAGA hats in a city that is seeing a frightening surge in coronavirus cases. He told the college students, gathered in an evangelical church: “You’re the elite. You are. You’re smarter, better looking. You have a better future.”
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