And The Band Plays On...
Parallels Between The Excellent Book, PurpleAmerica, and Current Progressivism.
In the recap last week, I recommended reading the book or watching the movie “And the Band Played On.” It’s a re-telling of the AIDS epidemic, from its beginnings through to about 1987, from the perspective of the health officials, doctors and activists trying to do something about it. It really is one of the best books I’ve read, and the movie (while condensed) does a very good job of reflecting many of the events. Since I dropped the idea last Friday, I had an urge to rewatch the HBO movie again over the weekend and took the time to revisit it. It still holds up.
At its core, its a story about the Centers for Disease Control and local San Francisco Health Officials who recognize the growing problem. They go about finding creative ways to prove the spread of the disease, how it was spread, how to test for the disease and steps to prevent it. All of this was extremely novel at the time because they genuinely had no idea what they were dealing with, and couldn’t even identify the virus causing it. However, they were stymied by bigger factors working against them:
An unsympathetic political environment that looked down on the impacted population.
A lack of resources, both medical and financial, to treat and study the growing viral threat.
An impacted population, wary and skeptical that the best suggestions to curb the spread were actually veiled attempts to push them back into the closet.
Hospital administrators and health care companies worried more about a bottom line and shareholders, and how the negative stigma of this very ugly disease would impact their businesses.
Egotistical doctors who wanted credit and financial windfall, and manipulated the back room politics to attain it.
What is great about this book/movie is that there are actually many heroes in it, some of them who just do small things and relate personably to people at minor levels that have huge impacts down the road. From public health officials doing Herculean works for little pay and out of pocket expense, to a brother of an AIDS victim who volunteers information, to a wealthy dance artist with the disease who donates all of his money to combat it, to many local activists working to help aide and comfort the growing population of people afflicted with the disease. These are all represented by various composite characters in the film. However, I want to focus on two specifically.
The Idealist (The Bleeding Heart Doctor)
Most people would identify with Don Francis (played by Matthew Modine), the CDC doctor who is on the team working against AIDS. He’s the focused hero of the film, although as I mentioned, there are a lot of heroes contributing. It’s very easy to hold him up as a hero; he’s idealistic, uncompromising, he works hard, his heart is in exactly the right place and he goes up against anybody who gets in his way, often talking harshly about how they are preventing progress.
But he is not without flaws. Outside of the medical context, he has no knowledge of the practical aspects of working within government, how to get resources he needs, how to appeal to the people he needs to, nor the potential landmines that exist between individual stakeholders and their interests. He’s always asking his boss to “find the money in the budget” for this or that. At one point, he ignorantly complains “All we need is an electron microscope” without a sense to the cost or the fact working for a government agency requires substantial time and effort to increase financial resouces through the bureaucracy to get it. When confronted with bureaucratic panels stonewalling funding, he goes off on a tirade, “How many are enough? 1 million? 2 million? Please let us know so we won’t BOTHER you until enough people have died!” He speaks for everyone frustrated when confronting the issue.
At one point, he makes a critical error in providing samples out of goodwill to French doctors in competition with one of the CDC’s biggest contributor on AIDS research, Dr. Robert Gallo, resulting in alienating Gallo and cutting of any assistance. To Francis, this is a one-dimensional issue; AIDS is the enemy and we need to kill it. He lacks the knowledge and the pragmatism to implement a plan toward that goal within the structure where he exists. As a result, although his good intentions, he’s largely ineffectual and counterproductive in the broader context.
The Pragmatist (The Rational Mind)
Another character in the film is Dr. Jim Curran (played by Saul Rubinek), part of the Centers for Disease Control and head of the Prevention Task Force in charge of the group for whom Don Francis works. He’s a mid-level bureaucrat, who in the context of the movie, serves as a limiting factor to Francis. Don Francis needs something to stop AIDS, Curran is the bureaucratic red tape/brick wall saying “We don’t have the resources.” He understands government and working in the public sector is a constant political fight for funding and influence.
In actuality, Dr. Curran has a much broader focus than Francis; he’s not just worried about AIDS, but is in charge of preventing any outbreak, whether it be the flu, measles, hepatitis, or gonnorhea. He understands the politicking required to run an agency, and that butting heads and screaming idealistic broadsides at bosses are not as productive as casual assent, calm persuasion and redirection. He also recognizes that he has been dealt a shitty hand; Reagan’s conservative interests are gutting funding for the CDC tying his hands. There’s a limited amount he can ask for, and even less that he is going to get. When the doctors under him fly across the country to follow a lead, he is only relieved after they tell him that the CDC doesn’t have to pay for it, they’ll cover the airfare. To him, jumping in with both feet is akin to a game of whack-a-mole; you push down on one problem over here, you anger stakeholders and two other problems pop up on the other side of the board. If you complain too harshly pharmaceutical companies aren’t helping on AIDS medicines, you may lose discounted cancer drugs or see the price go up. He knows the stakeholders he has supporting him, knows how to get things done, and recognizes that keeping all the decision-makers happy is the best way to get what you need. Steady, calm, collected and incrementally is the best way to proceed without backlash.
All of this leads to confrontations with Francis. His ability to secure everything he needs to fight the virus is contingent on the credibility and integrity of the CDC and his role in managing it. In that sense, Francis’s tirades undermines Curran’s job considerably, making his already impossible task that much more difficult. He finally goes off on Francis after his “How many will it take…” rant and tells him flat out, that Francis has damaged the credibility of the agency and it will prevent him from getting the funding and resources required for what he needs to help; that after reading everyone the riot act these other interested parties no longer have any incentive to help the CDC at all. Curran almost looks gleeful when he tells Francis that he has pissed off Gallo into no longer cooperating with the CDC, laying a big giant turd on Francis’s doorstep, demonstrating how counterproductive Francis’s approach was.
How This All Relates to Progressives and PurpleAmerica Today
Neither Dr. Francis nor Dr. Curran were 100% heroes nor villains. They both had good intentions, they both wanted to solve a problem and they both went about very different ways to accomplish that goal. Both served as limiting factors to one another, but their general interests as it relates to AIDS were completely aligned. They just disagreed how to accomplish that goal; one narrowly fixed on a singularly focused direct approach (resulting in counterproductive results) while the other taking a broader scope, a more incremental approach that tried to appeal to as many as possible (and in the long run would prove more successful).
There are parallels about the coming election and ensuring the Democrats (and specifically Joe Biden) wins over the growing MAGA cancer in this country.
Idealistic progressives are quite fairly analogous to Dr. Francis in the movie. They have a clear goal, a real objective and a very narrow view on how to attack it. “We need to beat Orange Jim Jones! Let’s go after it, at all costs, 100%! Let’s contstantly scream and throw everything at the wall ALL THE TIME! Anyone or anything that gets in our way or are not solidly in line fighting with us to the extent we are are on the side of the Big Orange virus!” This approach works great to the already agreeable, but persuades nobody outside of that, and even alienates them.
Moderates look at Dr. Curran as a guide. They see the bigger picture. Just as Curran recognizes that Francis’s rants about AIDS deaths damages his and the CDC’s ability to get funding for other things like cancer research, moderates see progressives promoting “Drag Queen Reading Hour” in CA and recognize how that doesn’t play in WI, PA, OH, MI and other states they need to win. The progressives’ response to that is always “That’s just homophobia!” or “Get rid of the Electoral College” but that’s not the world we currently live in, and is not the playing field for the 2024 election. The more progressives push their far left idealism on a general public, particularly without regard to areas outside of dark blue strongholds, the more it damages Democrats’ abilities to get the votes they need in the places they will need to win the White House next November.
Last week, I published an open letter to Progressives to STFU and to fall into line and temper their more idealist activist instincts. This was my way of taking the Dr. Curran role in saying, “You aren’t helping your cause when you go off on tirades, protest everything you hate and alienate the very centrist democratic stakeholders in major swing states you are going to need come Election Day.” My interests in posting that are completely aligned with progressives; I want to see Trump defeated, I want to see Democrats win next year. I’m approaching it from a bigger picture, from a step back to look at where we need to win. I still stand by everything I said in the piece.
There’s a scene at the end of the film where Francis sees Curran at a diner in the early hours of the day and admits he doesn’t get the beats of Curran’s job and doesn’t understand how he does it. From Francis’s standpoint, he hates bureaucracy, he’s impatient and completely frustrated by the slow practical process of how government actually works. Curran replies “If you hate it so much, why have you spent your entire career working in it?” Francis replies that it’s just the place an epidemiologist should be, right in the center of all the bugs. Viruses everywhere. The conversation serves as a good reminder, that they were on the same team all along, but just work toward those ends in different ways, with different methods and with different results. It’s good to have the heart and the drive, but you need to follow a steady, calm hand to get what you want.
Progressives, it’s a good thing you’re in the fight, right where you need to be. You bring heart and energy. Just please restrain some of your most eager, more excessive impulses so that we can win in those areas we need to. Come 2025, once we’ve defeated the virus, you can go right back to being yourselves again.
PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories
I recommended the book last week. Here is the Amazon page. Go buy it now if you haven’t already read it.
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
The phrase “And the Band Played On…” comes from an article April 19, 1912 describing the Titanic disaster after the first surviving passengers made it into New York on the Carpathia. While the Titanic was sinking, the musicians were put to the main deck while the passengers were being put on lifeboats, thinking the music would keep everybody calm. It quickly became apparent that it wasn’t helping but the musicians continued to play anyway on the sinking ship; none of the musicians survived. After the Titanic finally sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912 and those that made it to the boats were rescued making it into NY on the 18th, many of the survivors telling their stories to the journalists eager to learn what happened would comment how the band just kept playing amid the chaos. This only fueled further outrage at the events of the disaster.
Since then, it’s become a shorthand for an absurd calm or diversion consciously ignoring the catastrophe all around.
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
I genuinely hope progressives take my advice on this. It would genuinely suck if on November 5th, 2024 Trump wins, because we lost in all the places I warned them about. That would be an event akin to the Titanic sinking but it would be AMERICA.
—PurpleAmerica
Interesting analogy and a good summary of the issues regarding 2 camps on the same team.