Can AIDS Deaths be an Entertaining Distraction?

Who doesn’t love a good diversion? I mean, isn’t that what life is all about? At any rate, I think so. After all, everyone seems to have his or her own preferred brand of escape from the stresses, the inequities and the absurdities of the lives we lead. And whether we choose marijuana, Jesus Christ, stamp collecting or The Grateful Dead, you can bet your left buttock and your right pinky toe that we’ve all got some kind of “way out” from the grind and the humdrum of the everyday.
Yet who can be blamed? We live in a world that seems to make very little sense, if any sense at all. Scientists have become used to the idea that the principles of physics, as we understand them, can change at any moment, leaving little hope for any certainty about even less defined topics like politics, philosophy, ethics and art. So, guess what? Athletics are that back door for many of us, out into our personal backyards and away from our existential confusion. We may choose to be a spectator and enjoy the simple fun of watching a moving picture of a football on an idiot box, for short periods of time vicariously living the lives of our sports icons through the cathode ray tube. Or we may choose to be the actual athletes and have our mundane worries temporarily diverted in the exhilaration and transcendence of being “in the zone.” Either way, sports can often provide us with exactly the sort of entertaining diversion from reality that we seek.
And consequently, as such an important aspect of our lives, athletic distractions seem to occupy a stature and importance in our society nearly equal, for example, to the fight against deadly diseases. This is easily exemplified by the fact that during this past year, United States tax-payers spent a staggering $1.3 billion to help prepare for and fund the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. And, of course, I will grant that the Olympics are an entertaining, sometimes astounding and even inspirational event, however, despite a few incidents of terrorist attacks, they are hardly intended to be a life-and-death affair. On the other hand, the American government is allocating a mere $2 billion to funding for global AIDS relief, which is an amount barely greater than that which we spent on the 2002 Olympics, a single large sporting event. It is also an amount much less than the $10 billion requested by the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
Yet the statistics certainly prove that AIDS is indeed a life-and-death affair in the way that the Olympic games could never be, the disease having decimated a total of 25 million human beings since its discovery in the 1980s. Knowing this, it is not so difficult to imagine that there might potentially be many thousands, perhaps millions, of lives saved by this eight billion-dollar differential between what we as a country are willing to give and what is actually needed. Even the extra $1.3 billion spent on the Olympic games would help the effort tremendously. And though the many zeroes and dollar signs may seem difficult to keep track of, these billions amount to a mere fraction of the more than $300 billion spent last year, for example, on military defense. And that defense money, I might add with irony, proved to be terribly ineffective in defending the United States during the tragic events of Sept. 2001.

But we need our distractions, our Super Bowls, our games of war. And many of us would balk at the thought of sacrificing these distractions for the lives of strangers in faraway countries. Yet this attitude is somewhat understandable in light of the history of Western sports, as again, we can cite the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome. There we would have found lavishly expensive events, which, like the Olympics, would have been basically athletic and diversionary in nature, but whose costs would have been paid not merely in coins but in the wanton bloodshed of humans and other animals. The emperor Trajan once held a 123-day festival, during which 11,000 non-human animals were killed and 10,000 gladiators dueled to their deaths.
The only difference in these modern times is that the exotic, conquered “gladiators” who die in immolation to our sporting events do not die in stadiums right before our very eyes as once they did, but they die completely out of sight, often many thousands of miles away. Yet they die just as mercilessly, cut off from our aid and our compassion, raising their necks to the American blade in the way that too many people around the world seem to, in their adoration and worship of our Coca-Cola and our MTV. They relinquish their cultures so that they can be more like us, and we let them die because Americans need to take care of Americans, and because despite the notion that all races and colors and creeds can be American, some of us are always more American than others.
So perhaps after the 40 million people presently infected with HIV have died from lack of access to treatment, the great, unseen transformation will be complete. Those lost will have become the martyrs who gave their lives for our amusement and our self-aggrandizement. We might cheer to ourselves aloud in Roman fashion, “Those poor, backward fools! They were strange and ignorant, after all. It is better that AIDS has put them out of their misery. It is better that they have died so that America might live, live as the best, the most superior, the ruler of all the Earth!” And when we have said this and truly believed it, our world will finally have become one huge, gory gladiatorial circus. And what an entertaining distraction it will be.