CUTTING THE RIBBON.
No red carpet for the ultimate AIDS symbol?
Red ribbon, red ribbon, where art thou?

By Celia Farber

We were watching the Golden Globe Awards, and I suddenly noticed something
strange. The stars had no red ribbons on their lapels. None of them–not
even Meryl Streep, not even while she was accepting her award for Angels
in America.

Interesting.

The iconic red ribbon was created in 1991 by a group of artists who formed
an organization called Visual AIDS. The ribbon was meant to symbolize
"solidarity and tolerance with those often discriminated by the public–the
people living with HIV and AIDS."

Here are the four stated meanings of the color red, which you can find on
hundreds of AIDS websites around the world:

Red like love, as a symbol of passion and tolerance towards those
affected.

Red like blood, representing the pain caused by the many people that died
of AIDS.

Red like the anger about the helplessness by which we are facing a disease
for which there is still no chance for a cure.

Red as a warning not to carelessly ignore one of the biggest problems of
our time.

A noose, you might say, that strangles any emotional response other than
those dictated in this covenant. Should you stray beyond these boundaries
of prescripted emotion, you’ll be shamed, punished, vilified and driven
out of polite society on a rail. Just look at the language–it’s all there.
What begins unconvincingly with "love" and "tolerance" soon becomes
"blood," "pain," "anger" and finally "a warning."

I respect the millions of people who have used the ribbon simply to
express empathy with suffering. But the ribbon, like the slogan
"Silence=Death," has fascist implications. It has long reigned as the
official, global symbol not of AIDS itself, but of the dominant, immutable
ideology within AIDS. The core mandate of this ideology has been to
enforce and brand AIDS as the disease of all time, the disease without
scope, the disease that must rule over every mind whether awake or asleep,
from here to Cape Town to Bombay, and for the rest of time. It would be
the disease that no leader, no politician, really no living person, could
ever "care" about as much as the ribbon demands, because the ribbon is
insatiable.

Since 1980, American taxpayers have spent a total of $132.4 billion on a
blitzkreig of virtually fruitless research into the very ordinary nine
kilobase retrovirus, HIV, widely believed to cause the vast range of
symptoms gathered together as AIDS. (Widely believed, that is, by those in
its employment. Hundreds of virologists, biochemists and other scientists
believe nothing of the kind, and have stated their opposition vocally into
the small black hole reserved for people like them, that sits about 180
miles off the outer periphery of "responsible journalism.") That is more
than six times the amount NASA has spent putting every man it has thus far
put on the moon, and yet we haven’t saved one AIDS patient. Ask amFAR.

The first thing you will be asked to obliterate when you contemplate AIDS
is your sense of proportion. It is a religion, not a disease. But let’s
leave aside profoundly disturbing questions about whether the scientific
approach to AIDS has been linear and rational, if unproductive, as many
believe, or ill-conceived, myopic and disastrous, as others believe. Let’s
just look at the Red Ribbon and its curious sweep of the planet’s
consciousness.

Ideological and religious symbols seek to replicate themselves as far and
wide as possible. Every place where the symbol crops up, it is a sign that
its belief system has triumphed. The symbol amalgamates ideas and
responses, and short-circuits individual expression. It is a simplifier
and a unifier. In the dictatorship of the AIDS proletariat, the red ribbon
was the Lenin bust. It was mass-produced and distributed around the
world–pinned on every lapel, stamped on every available surface,
emblazoned on walls and windows and erected into giant statues. Nobody
holds the copyright; it is a symbol of compassion, remember, so the magic
of it is that everybody who wanted to show they "cared about AIDS" did
their part–made and folded their own ribbons in their own countries, and
distributed them with evangelical zeal. The ribbon, like red flags on May
Day, was in profligate bloom whenever an AIDS movie premiered or an actor
received an award for a stirring portrait of an AIDS victim. The flag of
contemporary rightness. Purity. Tolerance.

The website of Red Ribbon Deutschland tells us that "Red Ribbons are
folded manually by various volunteers throughout Germany. We have so many
supporters on our list that we don’t need any additional help at this
time" (emphasis theirs).

The website goes on to say that in addition to distributing the ribbons at
AIDS events, they are besieged by requests for red ribbons by German
citizens who want to "hand them out at their weddings and birthday
celebrations"–by shop owners who want them available at the counter and
companies who want them distributed to employees.

Like I said, it’s a symbol of purification, a means of purging guilt.

But guilt about what?

I watch the ups and downs of AIDS mania, searching, usually in vain, for
signs that it is sobering up, coming to its senses, maybe even developing
an interest in the objective reality outside the ever-protective
propaganda bubble.

The ribbon made its debut into mass consciousness at the 1991 Tony Awards,
for which Visual AIDS volunteers had sent letters and red ribbons to all
attendees. "Unfortunately," as several of the ribbon sites phrase it,
"Jeremy Irons was one of the very few celebrities wearing the Red Ribbon
that night."

The campaign continued, and soon stars were sent letters by volunteers,
imploring them to wear the ribbon at awards ceremonies. The rest is
history. I vaguely recall one actor refusing to wear one a few years back.
Was it Jack Nicholson?

Whoever it was, of course, was branded a callous homophobe. But the act of
defiance signaled something important: The wish to preserve our
inalienable human right to feel, respond, react as we ourselves decide
to–not as cogs in a vast machinery that has codified the feelings for us
and festooned us with its idealized emotions.

Why are they so maniacally controlling of our feelings about AIDS? And how
have these ribbons in all their redness and rightness served to drain us
of the very humanity they purport to impart?

Do we really need amFAR or Bono or Sharon Stone to tell us what sad means?
What loss means? What death means?

I’ll tune in to the Oscars, if nothing else, to check for ribbons. And if
they’re absent, it will mean that new borders are opening up through which
vital discourse can at last take place on a disease long trapped in a
hagiography that has made real science, i.e., real caring, impossible.