The most questionable facet of the new “We All Have AIDS” campaign is not the grade-school semantic error between sympathy and empathy, nor the way that the slogan manages to be as harmlessly controversial as Dove’s “real women” barrage. As a textual bullet, the phrase packs the same disjunctive punch as, say, fuck the police. Yet what makes the AIDS statement inexcusably offensive is its cloying appeal to a common (albeit understandable) need—that, for any tragedy or epidemic or crisis, we as Americans feel the self-serving need to participate in a personal way. Terrible things lose their luster if they’re not directly affecting us and, if they’re not—well then, we simply have to pretend that they are.
In the aftermath of 9/11, We Were All New Yorkers—no matter if we were actually Midwest soybean farmers, Texan cheerleaders or Norwegian airline pilots. Such an umbrella slogan opens the door for a collective embrace of pain that seems to have less to do with the victims and more to do with the individual’s need to wonder, What if I’d been in there? Everyone seemed to have a second cousin whose nephew’s science teacher once almost took a job next to the WTC in 1995.
The orgy continued after Hurricane Katrina, where the physical atrocities suffered by New Orleans residents was made equivalent to the tangential pain journalists felt in observing those atrocities. We see it in Oprah’s unshakable demand to be let into the festering wreckage of the Superdome—to be a witness, sure, but perhaps also to leave with the residual stink of participation, the credibility of a willing victim. Call it a tragedy souvenir. In any case, the moment had less to do with thousands of poor souls packed into a lightless stadium and more to do with the talk-show diva herself wading into the emotional muck.
This is cynical, of course, but we live in cynical times. It’s also dangerous. When misguided ad hacks fry an egg in a pan to signify your brain on drugs and then refuse to make a distinction between smoking marijuana and, say, mainlining Afghan heroin, it sends a simple message—whoever is speaking to you is wholly and undeniably full of shit. By proclaiming the empty platitude of “We All Have AIDS,” we risk the same outcome as a result of a pathological need to baptize ourselves in the rivers of tragedy. As has been remarked elsewhere, this bow to political correctness also leaves aside the truism that HIV/AIDS is discriminatory—it shouldn’t be impolite to assume that a straight male has less of a chance of contracting the virus then, for example, a transgendered street hooker with a penchant for dirty needles.
It’s one thing to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it’s quite another to claim that those shoes are your own. If “we all have” anything, it’s the right to possess our personal pain—without Geraldo Rivera shouldering his way into the frame.
