"BORROWED TIME: AN AIDS MEMOIR." (PAUL MONETTE).   Term Paper ID:28842 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: 1988 book on author's lover who was stricken with AIDS. Presents political & ethical arguments. Role of denial.... More...

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Paper Abstract: 1988 book on author's lover who was stricken with AIDS. Presents political & ethical arguments. Role of denial. Paper Introduction: In Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir, Paul Monette grounds his political and ethical arguments in a profoundly personal and painful story about the last year and a half of the life of his lover Roger Horwitz, after Roger is stricken with AIDS. The love of the two men for one another, and the suffering they endure together and separately, are the cornerstones of the author's efforts to expose the political and ethical realities of the wider, social, and global struggle against AIDS. Monette clearly knows that human beings as individuals and in groups are moved to political action not by a recitation of ethical theory or statistical analysis but rather by emotional involvement, by compassion and empathy. He knows, and demonstrates in this book, that the injustices involved with the AIDS crisis can be expressed best through personalizing the Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The test mentioned above,if administered more widely and inexpensively, could have decreased therate of the spread of the disease: Just fifteen months between Roger's beginning suranim treatment and me on ribavirin. . Monette's political messages are not always clearly labeled as such,but are often subtly tucked away in an approach and style which are morepersonal. If a man is heterosexual, he might not relate to two men loving eachother or to AIDS and may not want to read about the disease because hebelieves he will never acquire it because he is not gay. The book focuses on the lifeand death of Monette's lover, but the beginning and end refer to theauthor's own plight: "I don't know if I will live to finish this" (1-2).Thus the journey of Paul and Roger's love begins, in Paul's words, and inPaul's recollection. Certainly a central part of the argument for a political andethical change in the fight against AIDS is that if the disease did notaffect gay men disproportionately, many more millions of dollars and muchgreater effort on the part of the government would have been poured intothat fight. Both emotions are stirred in the reader byMonette's focus on the injustices involved in the medical treatment of AIDSvictims. He does so by writing not onlyabout others' suffering from AIDS but also his own. The end ofthe book appears to be anything but political, if we equate the politicalwith calls to march on Washington. Many of those in society and government who failed toact to fight the disease justified their immoral inactivity by believingAIDS is a "gay disease" brought on by almost suicidal sexual practices. . Like Paul and Roger, everybody thinks thatit is the other person who has done something that will bring death on. Of course, many non-gayssuffer from AIDS, but, again, if gays were not the major victims of AIDS,the political support for the fought against the disease would undoubtedlybe much greater. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.----------------------- 8 Borrowed Time. Monette writes much about his and other AIDS victims' denial aboutAIDS and its transmission and deadliness, but he also writes about the evencostlier denial of public and private agencies. Monette clearly knows that human beings as individuals and in groupsare moved to political action not by a recitation of ethical theory orstatistical analysis but rather by emotional involvement, by compassion andempathy. Such an increased personalexperience on the part of the reader leads to greater compassion for AIDSsufferers, greater anger at the injustices carried out by politicians andcapitalists, and, hopefully, political action which would lead to morefunding, research and support for AIDS victims and their loved ones. In the case of Paul and Roger, denial focuses on the factthat the two lovers did not live the fast-lane lifestyle that AIDS victims'all seemed to live. Monette writes about an essential early AIDS testand the lackadaisical attitude of the medical/insurance community towardthat test: When I took this test myself in July of '86, the viral culture still had a vampire edge. In other words, the book begins after Roger has died,after Paul has himself acquired the virus, and after the prevailing factorin Paul's own life has become another imminent death--his own. However, everyhuman being, gay or straight, male or female, seeks love, or has love andfears losing that love. Now we know that stride could have been made in '82 or '83 if the government hadn't been playing ostrich (119). The government gave minimal funding, the drug companies saw AIDS asa means for revenue, and even friends, frightened, turned their backs onthe AIDS victims. From the beginning, the treatment of AIDS by the political/medicalcommunity (for money and power are behind both politics and medicine) wasclearly hindered by the view that it was not a significant illness,whatever it was, in part because it affected, apparently, only a part of ashunned social minority. Therefore, Monette's humanization of the victims of AIDS(including himself) is a direct assault on the prejudice which underliesthe relative lack of governmental support for the AIDS fight. We lose ourprejudice against gay men when we come to know them as individual humanbeings in great suffering, and when we lose our prejudice against a group,as a society we are far more likely to do everything we can to help thatgroup when it falls into great suffering. The love of the two men for one another, and thesuffering they endure together and separately, are the cornerstones of theauthor's efforts to expose the political and ethical realities of thewider, social, and global struggle against AIDS. Everyone knows he and the people he loves are going to die, but allare in denial about it, just as Paul and Roger are in denial about the roleAIDS is playing in their lives. Because the medicine which treats AIDS is either unavailable inthe United States, or is offered at such a high price that patients must goout of the country to purchase it, the reader must see that this is aninjustice which must be corrected. The emotions which lead a person to become politically aware andactive are empathy and rage. In other words,Monette, as a man who is fairly well off, who lives in a nation alleged tobe the greatest in the world, the most technologically advanced, a societyclaiming to be the most just in the world, must go out of that country to arelatively poor and scientifically backward nation to purchase medicine sothat he might stave off death from AIDS for a while longer. Just as the political andethical landscape was changed in the 196 s through the personalizationprocess of the civil rights movement, so is the fight against AIDS beingchanged through such humanizing accounts as Monette's. The reader with anyhuman feelings will see not only the destructiveness of the disease to thevictim and those who love him, but also will understand the evilness of theprejudice against gay men which has hindered the struggle against thedisease. Nobody wants to think about it, and nobody wants to think about whatit would be like to go through it, either the dying person or the survivor.One way to exercise that denial about one's own mortality is to deny thatof others. There is simply no way for Monette to describe hisexperiences without indicting the prejudices and inhumanity of a systemwhich treats its citizens as the United States has treated AIDS victims,the victims of "gay cancer" (3). When friends and the government and thedrug companies treat Monette and Roger and other AIDS victims as less thanhuman, for reasons of fear or greed or politics, then those individuals andinstitutions are behaving unethically. Clearly, Monette is simultaneouslyassaulting political, ethical and personal immorality with his book. The empathic reader identifies with thesuffering of Monette and experiences rage at a system which hasinstitutionalized bigotry against homosexuals. Onealways searches for the factor in the dead person's death which distanceshim from one. In Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir, Paul Monette grounds his politicaland ethical arguments in a profoundly personal and painful story about thelast year and a half of the life of his lover Roger Horwitz, after Roger isstricken with AIDS. The reader who can finish this book by Monette and not be terriblymoved, who, if he or she has some homophobic tendencies, cannot feel thatat least there is something very ignoble and even inhumane about suchtendencies, is a hard-hearted person indeed, whether he or she is moved topolitical involvement or not. The final way of losing love, of course, is throughdeath. . Instead, the author faces his grief forhis dead lover and his knowledge that an early death awaits him as well:"Putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone--thiscalamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do (342). The test costs six hundred dollars, and since the insurance company doesn't consider it reasonable or necessary, I'm still trying to get reimbursed for it (119). He knows, and demonstrates in this book, that the injusticesinvolved with the AIDS crisis can be expressed best through personalizingthe disease, through putting a human face on it. The personal is a reflection of both the political and the ethical.The ethical is essentially based on treating others humanely, especiallythose in need, those suffering. Monette's book effectively breaks down all these barriers, all thesedenials, all these immoral rationalizations. Monette is an honest and effective writer who blends the political,ethical and personal in a way that humanizes those who suffer from AIDS. In other words, the political is first and foremost the personal, andthe fact that the author himself is carrying the disease adds to both hispersonal account and his political message. Work CitedMonette, Paul. Monette connects the personal and the political again and again, aswhen he links the shunning of AIDS victims by friends and government alike.He refers to "Bruce's anger--his black, black humor as he excoriated thegovernment, the drug companies, his friends who were turning away from him"(145). The sensitive readersees the death of his lover through his eyes. He begins the book making clear that he is dying from AIDS, andadds: "I take mt drug from Tijuana twice a day" (1). Hehas created a passionate love story which should also inspire others tofight this killer disease. 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