Quarantine The Quarantiners!

Kansas has just passed a law that, among other things, allows medical and other institutions to quarantine HIV/AIDS patients. (Salon). State Senator Marci Francisco attempted to restore an amendment to the bill that exempted people living with HIV/AIDS from medical isolation, but her colleagues passed the measure without updating the language. Kansas is, of course, a conservative state and one can't help believing this is a backhanded attack on homosexuals, even as the fastest rising group contracting HIV/AIDs is heterosexuals. But if we are to quarantine those who do not directly threaten the public, but only in the bedroom with intimate contact, it occurred to me the list of potential disease carriers might be expanded.

At the top of the list to me would be advertising execs. Like everything that is evil in the universe, it started in the world of advertising. Not only do they spread lies and half truths on a daily basis, but they sell discontent and unhappiness to the public as a rule. Transformation advertising is based on the idea that there is something wrong with you. Otherwise why would you buy the products offering "fixes" to these problems? From being overweight, to not attractive enough to the greatest sin for women in America (aging), billions and billions of dollars are spent each year trying to fight a losing battle (and I don't mean weight). Beyond transformational advertising, is the equally distressing world of aspirational television and advertising, that sell idyllic worlds and bodies with little to no resemblance to anything even remotely attainable. And almost all advertising in the past 30 years has worked with Lacan's notion of lack, selling products that provide proxies for the distance between I and me that defines the fantasy world that desublimates our deeper desire for oneness.

Of course advertisers alone do not exhaust those whose job it is to make our lives worse. Next on the list should be pharmaceutical company execs. They shill their elixirs and panaceas like shucksters of old, even making up diseases along the way. Many of those elixirs do more harm than good and their influence has kept us from enacting a more sensible healthcare policy for decades. And while we're at it, why not add the oil and banking industries polluting our environment and economies under the auspices of a "greed is good" ethos that challenges our collective future. And that brings us to politicians, the middle men that serve the interests of all of these sellers of false dreams. But wait ... who would that leave left? 

Maybe we should start at the top, with the very embodiment of what is wrong with America today. Quarantine Justin Bieber. Now that sounds like a sensible policy to me. "Illegal immigrant?" If there is anyone who has done more harm to the auditory senses of our teenagers than that Canadian interloper, I can't think of him.