Questions for the AIDS campaign

Each year on Alumni Day, the University presents awards to two alumni, one undergraduate, the other graduate, who have given reification to the university's motto of "Princeton in the nation's service and in the service of all nations." This year's winners were Peter Bell, '64, president of CARE, and Bill Frist, '74, United States Senator from Tennessee. It has become customary for the winners to give public addresses, as Bell and Frist did, the Saturday morning before last, in Alexander Hall.

I was there, and I have seldom been prouder to be associated with Princeton. The adjective "inspirational" is feeble and overused, but there are occasions, such as this one, for which it is the mot juste. Anyone who heard Peter Bell talking about world poverty immediately sensed the presence of one of the world's great humanitarians.

Thanks to the advances in technology it is possible for people who were not present in Alexander Hall or in one of the Simulcast rooms to experience the lectures comfortably and conveniently at nearly any computer terminal on campus. I especially recommend this option to one constituency who I know for a fact missed at least one of the talks — the small but cacophonous group of young idealists who braved the elements to hover around the "Oval with Points" during Senator Frist's talk beating a drum and shouting "Bill Frist, go away: sexist, racist, anti-gay!" That may lack the intellectual sophistication of the one about the lady with the alligator purse, but it still makes its schoolyard statement.

This group, of whom I was in happy oblivion until I was walking back from the talk, was later reported in the press to have been composed chiefly of members of the "Queer Radicals" and of the "Student Global AIDS Campaign," alias "SGAC." I hope they will take my advice and actually listen to what Senator Frist had to say, but since life is short, and the work of protestors never done, it may be safest if I summarize his remarks for them.

Frist's talk addressed two principal issues. The first was the international health crisis, with special reference to Africa, where the AIDS pandemic threatens a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. His remarks, though somewhat informally delivered, were mainly substantive; but he did from time to time wax anecdotal. He reported, for example, that he personally travels each year to Africa to practice medicine in the actual context of the African health crisis. I perhaps should mention that Frist is a doctor — and thus one of the few members in Congress from either party who can produce empirical evidence suggesting professional abilities more noble than a capacity for raising enough money to get elected. (In this regard the comparison with another Tennessee senator, formerly much in the news, becomes striking.) He also reported that he advises President Bush on medical issues. I drew the inference that his advice probably had something to do with the remarkable passage concerning AIDS in the President's recent address on the State of the Union.

His other topic was the looming medical crisis in the United States. This crisis is different both in kind and in degree from that in Africa, but still scary enough. I heard him say two things. Immutable demographic realities demand the focused and longterm attention of national statesmen if we are to maintain, let alone expand or enhance the Medicare program. But the United States Congress is composed of short-timers whose election and reelection is most easily effected by pandering to voters themselves not conspicuous for their patriotic postponement of proximate gratifications.

Thus two medical crises, the one global, the other national, both pressing, were the two subjects that a leader of the Senate, who happens also to be a successful medical practitioner, chose to address. The questions that I wish to pose to the protestors, and particularly to those among them with pretensions to the name of the "Student Global AIDS Campaign," are these: which part of Senator Frist's unheard remarks was so offensive to you as to invite you, with peremptory rudeness, to instruct him to "go away"? How would the Global AIDS Campaign have been advanced by his taking your advice?

I shall further make so bold as to suggest that for purposes of answering my questions an opinion essay of about 800 words, published on this page, might be a genre more appropriate than a rope-skipping chant, however "radical." Senator Frist is an accidental leader of the Senate. He owes his job to the accident of Strom Thurmond's indefatigable cardiovascular system and to Trent Lott's failure to engage brain before operating mouth once too often; but anyone who actually listened to him — as opposed to shouting boorish jingles at him — is likely to understand that some accidents are happier than others. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.