The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  But recently, God help me, the unspeakable is being said out loud: the Black Plague was not caused by its once-believed causative agent, Yersinia pestis, the deadly bacterium presumably spread by rats. And the Black Death and the bubonic plague were two different things. I hope this caught you by surprise. I only bring it up because We Never Know.

  We never know. Or, as I prefer to word it, we shall see.

  What does nature know of beginnings and starting fresh and cleanliness and taking a bath? What does nature know of anal intercourse and parasites and group sex? I’ll tell you what nature knows. It knows it doesn’t like them.

  Does it sound as if I and nature are prudes? I can assure you that I am not, but I am not so certain about nature. Nature may very well be a very big prude indeed. One has to wonder if we, or nature, caused a great deal of fuss because it didn’t like some things.

  Indeed, what does nature know of prostitution, an affair of commerce, not of spirit or soul or whatever defines nature, which is an indefinable concept. Indians encouraged prostitution. Brothels in teepees dotted trails and passes all across the wilderness. These diverted young men from the other young men they preferred. In some tribes sexual intercourse with the opposite sex was forbidden while on the warpath, so that in many tribes homosexuals were top of the social heap! Where is the historian of that? Absolutely nothing is written about any of this. How dare she infer I am not interested in sex!

  Did prostitution have anything to do with your early plagues? Disease and sex have been intertwined for so long that by now the former is automatically calculated in as part of the price for the latter. But inserting a penis into a vagina (or elsewhere) does not automatically induce a transmissible disease, although it often can and did and does. Indeed, if a young person of ages past was not diseased it was usually because he or she wasn’t very comely, although if one of these days someone will finally write a book about syphilis in the Middle Ages it will be discovered that simply everyone who was anyone had it. Yes, syphilis was a major killer in Renaissance Europe. And we’re still here. Isn’t “nature” hardy!

  Until the arrival of the Jews on your shores, Indians are the prime suspects for spreading and killing off anything and everything. The “Americans,” when they arrive, will then be the next ones accused of knocking off all the Indians to obtain their land. Has it occurred to no one that the Indians did their own knocking off?

  It is A.D. 800. Pilatrachenie deAtribus Few Big Toes, a wise man of the wandering Peyote tribe that will become the Dakotas, writes in his book of skins, “Plague is a multitude of small animals and diminutive worms that fly in the air and when drawn into the body by breathing they poison the blood and destroy the flesh.” How did he know these words? How could he write? How could he have seen worms flying through the air? (How did Grace’s Hermatros see his parasites?) Have we lost some ability to see the unseen, or the harder-to-see, which once existed?

  “One should not be afraid, one should not imagine that one had the disease, one should not paint the devil on the wall. For as soon as the fear of death and imagination obtain the upper hand, then certainly what we dread will occur,” will be the advice of Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century German-Swiss alchemist and physician who finally introduces the concept of disease to medicine.

  But it is A.D. 900, and Varhoot Sioux-in-the-Tallest-Trees, considered the physician of his tribe, which lives in what will be Louisiana, compiles his Book of Illnesses Caused by Forces Outside the Body. He writes (as translated perhaps somewhat loosely by Drs. Paul and Tinker Tribvoss of the Yaddah School of Linguistic Interventionism): “In order to remain immune from scourge, it is best when cleaning out latrines to stand early in the morning on an empty stomach above the latrine and inhale the stench. This is most best for woman. Man should most best drink his own urine of a morning. Then both man and woman, take thine own urine, put it in a glazed pot, and boil it until it is evaporated into salt. After this take a knife full of this salt on a piece of bread that has been dipped in sweet oil and eat it early of a morning on an empty stomach. Menstrual blood is most best for plague as well. But whether it is better to be eaten on bread or boiled to reduction I have not decided.”

  Nostrums like these will repeat themselves for centuries. It is of never-ending fascination how constant the similarity of the attempts to cure Unknowns, and how slim, and extreme, the repertoire. The old regulars—dried toads laid on boils, warm dead pigeons laid on delirious heads, one-month-old puppies for brain inflammations, the swallowing of pus from mature boils (plague pus in itself was considered to be not necessarily contagious)—many of these turn out to be important discoveries, early relations of today’s drugs. Rarely is a name attached to any deed. Names do not become important until the late nineteenth century. (If it weren’t for Grace, Hermatros would be just another dead Indian.)

  Sin. There is no getting away from it. There is never any question in anyone’s mind that plagues are inflicted upon man as punishment for his sins. Sin is the constant companion. Sin stands on everyone’s shoulder, staring one down. Sin is over one’s roof and under one’s bed and in the fields and in all one’s dreams. From the Indians on, every living thing that can make even the most primitive of decisions lives more with the notion of sin than it does with anyone who actually provokes it. Sin was a simpler matter then. One didn’t love one’s someone enough. One was a bad father, mother, wife, husband, neighbor. One lived too high off the hog. Challenging, ignoring, condemning, and/or cursing a god, a higher spirit or power—and believe me, take it as a given, since the first atom there have always been more than enough gods to go around (let us not spend our valuable time defining what God is or where God came from, suffice it to say that everyone had at least one)—was considered exceptionally sinful, although it was obvious that an awful lot of folks cursed at least one regularly. Yes, a church and a god are always involved. There has yet to be a time in history where superstition has not triumphed over sense.

  Since everyone knew the end of the world was near, what was there to lose? Even Indians would figure that one out. And contrary to your determination to trace your homeland’s origins back to savage nobility, Indians were not the brightest bulbs. They were exceedingly superstitious. Their gods were speedy executioners. Elders ranted on about the decline of morals. Slaves—yes, the Indians had slaves: other Indians—roasted their owners. Cannibalism was all over the place. Children slaughtered parents and parents ate their children. Violations of female corpses were standard. Disease was rampant and endless. Plagues arrived swiftly after so many taunting gauntlets were thrown down.

  There was much hate, everywhere. Among Indians. Among white men. Indian tribes hated other Indian tribes. Brothers hated brothers if they lived on the other side of the stream. The healthy hated the sick. And the reverse. The old hated the young. And the reverse. The skilled the unskilled. The fecund the barren. The less dumb the dumber. Sorcerers actually advised the sick to pass any plague on. To pass the plague on to sinners was not itself a sin. Anything to get out of the horrid rut of life.

  Jews and homosexuals are considered the greatest sinners. There are Jewish Indians. There are homosexual Indians. There are Jewish homosexual Indians. Where are their historians? It’s all a fascinating story of give-and-take, a story little known, and I don’t have time to tell it to you. But Jews and homosexuals are always blamed for most things bad. Throughout history there is always much reward for the hater: lands to be seized, daughters to be stolen, goods to be ransomed, animals to be harnessed. For centuries the Jews are responsible for everything untoward—poisoning the wells, bewitching the rats, killing the crops, hexing the children, paralyzing sexual desire—the hate and venom of entire populations spurting all over them constantly. Jews are also considered to be the most lascivious of people until the homosexuals come along. Until then Jews are every era’s homosexuals, accused of everything in sight.

  So killed they both are. Over and over and over again. It has never been a good
time to be a Jew or a homosexual. Homosexuals are not so visible because they do not tend to live together as a group and they are not always recognizable. But they are found. Not in as large numbers as the Jews, but those who are different are usually found. One wonders why Jews ever stay anywhere, until one considers that they have no place else to go, or at least no place that hates them any less. They were here—yes, even here in America, long before you acknowledged their presence. But I am stepping out of bounds. I trust that a Jew expert will be along to lecture you soon enough. I am not familiar with the work of Dr. Israel Jerusalem.

  I have no idea why there is so little literature on early homosexuality. God knows homosexuals have been here forever. There are certainly reams written about Jews, much of it written by Jews. Why are gay people, as they are so quaintly called nowadays, so less literarily industrious as historians? Over the centuries even the most wretched of slaves managed to jot down a few words.

  Is Israel going to tell you about all of this? I’ll stop if he is.

  Sexuality, eroticism of all natures, is rampant everywhere in all of the plague years, as if the threat of death makes whatever moments of life remain more fervent, to be utilized no matter the price, which no one has any doubt will have to be paid. An attitude like this bespeaks enormous courage of a sort and perhaps not unlike what is called for now that a plague’s resurfaced. No one ever considers this. If religion can’t save you and if God is endlessly and now even more so punishing you, then to an increasing number of minds, more and more attuned to rationalism than to the mysterious, the real question of Life is: What the hell?

  I am going to attempt a tiny summing-up, though I know a summation of a summation is scholarly short shrift. The discovery of one side of the ocean by living things from the other side of the ocean forced a contact between two worlds isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years. The consequences of that, particularly the biological consequences, were and continue to be devastating, unleashing hideous health disasters and diseases ever since.

  The European Black Plague, or whatever it’s to be called, led to the transformation of the West, in that it codified discrimination and hatred of minorities in the belief that it is always the minority that carries, from Outside, the germs. Plagues allow extreme coercive power to be exercised over the weak, the politically and socially undesirable, especially when they exist in groups, all under the guise of protection from disease.

  There are many in your country that credit your homosexuals for commencing the present poisoning of us all. As a representative of the cultural hegemony of the other side of the ocean, which has lasted so long, I am not unfamiliar with the art and skill of blaming others. But does no one ever realize that new infectious agents can appear out of nowhere, and can also disappear and reappear centuries later somewhere else far, far away? Yes, sometimes plague—and may we please start being adults here and admit that we are talking, not hypothetically but specifically, about plague, the old kind that kills monkeys and Indians and the new kind that kills us, and threatens to obliterate a goodly number from most of our world as we know it today, or think we do—yes, sometimes plague is transmitted from person to person by airborne droplets, and sometimes it is transmitted from person to person because it has been contracted by a person from another living thing which is or is not a person, and I have no doubt that before I die we shall discover that some of us are genetically incapable of becoming infected with certain things or genetically capable of being poisoned to death at an early age should we come in contact with a source of destruction.

  What I am saying is the sum of all knowledge about this up to this point in time (pace Bosco and Grace). It is not new knowledge, nor is it unavailable knowledge.

  It is said that the Black Death, or the bubonic plague, affects us still. Every plague in the world affects us still. Huge declines in population are followed by a rise in the value of people. When the population increases again, people become devalued and expendable again, which is what is happening now, particularly in the third world and in the homosexual world. Similarly, after the Indians were decimated here and new people arrived, the ruling whites could even more easily tighten their control over subjugated populations, foremost among them the slaves. Between 1320 and 1420 the population of Europe was reduced by two-thirds and it can happen again. It is now thought that the population of Europe in 1347 was about 80 million and that it fell to 30 million in just six years. The population of the world has grown since the beginning of this century alone from 1.6 billion to more than 6 billion. People are therefore very cheap. Hundreds of millions starve, billions can’t read, billions are infected with some infectious disease or other. And most of the world lives on next to no money at all. There is never any way that resources or incentives or wills or governments or presidents or those more fortunate are prepared to deal with this.

  London’s first recorded plague was in the seventh century. It is briefly mentioned in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of that city, a book more poetic than burdened with facts. Where are America’s seventh-century entries? You were here, you know. What was going on then that you so abhor its revelation? Did that Black Death start over here?

  Now, aren’t we glad we’ve got all this out of the way? I hope I was diverting. I hope I was not too once-over-lightly. For a moment or two I was worried I might be getting too serious. Levity is so important. I expect I just had to let some of the scholar in me out. I am much more intelligent than Grace, though she is more clever. Now you can see I am not just another pretty face. Not that she is either.

  I leave you, for the moment, with the frightening fact that I believe what is happening will surpass all mortality figures for the Black Death, by whatever name it goes, and whatever cause it claims.

  But rest assured I am here, I now realize more than ever, to prove that indeed you and yours were and are responsible for the current poisoning of us all.

  * * *

  STOP PRESS:

  The great waves of plague called the Black Death that twice devastated Europe and changed the course of history had their origins in China, as did a third outbreak that made its way to San Francisco, where it began in March 1900. Writing in the journal PLoS Pathogens, a team of biologists and medical geneticists say their findings put beyond any doubt that the Black Death was brought about by Yersinia pestis. The bacterium has no interest in people, whom it slaughters by accident. Its natural hosts are various species of rodent like marmots and voles, which are found throughout China.

  (The New York Truth, Nov. 1, 2010)

  FROM ALASKA COMES THE FOLLOWING FROM DR. ISRAEL JERUSALEM

  I hope you all remember that I am the uncle to Daniel and David in Masturbov Gardens, who are the poor mischbocha of Herman who built that ugly place you grew up in and made much money, and I am brother to his wife, Yvonne, the sad Yvonne. Dr. Sister Grace, my dear colleague, who now informs me she was there in Masturbov Gardens with you, tells me, more important, that your group is writing this history of America and I should also tell you about our people from long ago, because they are your people, too, the Jewish people, even though you are, like my twin nephews, and maybe myself at a certain period of time, a fegala. As if one could not be the other or both! Who knew these things in the old days? No matter which our path, there were only hurts and horrors. In the end, there was only science and medicine to try and love and hope they loved me back. Sometimes they did. Most often not.

  Grace wants me to fill you in on so many things, even though I know much more about Jews. That is the expression, no? Fill you in on? Funny short little English words say so much, or try to. German is more pragmatisch. German words are inescapable. No filling in is necessary. After Hebrew and Yiddish my language was German. I was educated at Misch Fehl Medical University, which was in Palestine and run by German doctors. No one today knows about Misch Fehl and nobody knows everyone there was German and no one knows why everyone there was German in 1920.

  German encourage
s long sentences because the verb arrives at the end. I remember when learning it that sometimes I could be out of breath before I got to my point! I will start telling you what I know until they turn the lights out and that is that, for now. I do not know when they let me to continue. I just know today is a good day and these do not come so often up here where it is so cold that my fingers can be too frozen to hold this pen. Tomorrow, no, late tonight, a big snow is predicted. Up here in Alaska a big snow means a big snow.

  From the very beginning of America, Jewish people were here, and from the very beginning of America, Jewish people, boys and girls and of course adults, were hated and actually murdered by non-Jewish people out to get us. This early history is not written down. When Jewish history is written by Jews we simply do not tell horrible stories about ourselves. Go figure, I think is this expression.

  Any study by Jewish historians shows no unpleasant and evil characters who are Jewish. There is no such thing as a Jewish crook, a Jewish murderer, a Jewish sex scandal, a Jewish whore even. Jewish homosexuals? Forget it. No people could ever have been so good. Many Jews obviously would have it this way. Invisibility has its benefits. We learn this fast. No one wants to lose his head. Home is really nowhere. Do not settle down. Do not get too comfortable. That is just the way things are and have always been.

  For Jews sex is always a no-no. Don’t ask me why. We even invent the circumcision to punish the penis for something or other no one remembers what.

  If ever a people are unwanted it is the Jewish people. It is impossible to read any history of Jews without being impressed by how long we have been chased, expelled, condemned, outlawed, murdered, hung, poisoned, slaughtered. The minute a non-Jew sees a Jew he knows he does not want that Jew around.