LA Police Riots and "Everything is Tuberculosis"
I sat down today with every intention of writing about the ongoing situation in Los Angeles. But I don't have anything to add that I have not written before or that far smarter people than me haven't already said.
This is at least the sixth major urban protest movement of my adult news-consuming life: Seattle WTO, Anti-Iraq War, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2015 and 2020.
I've seen enough of Wolf Blitzer's faux-anguished face and somber tone as he watches some teenager get their face smashed in by a projectile to last me a lifetime.
The playbook is unchanged.
In each prior movement, the tactics used by police were needlessly violent and disproportionate to threats presented by protestors. Violent policing turns peaceful demonstrations into riots. Thus, why I refer to each of these as police riots.
In each, opinion pages and pundits spent more time critiquing the tactics of protesters than addressing the valid grievances they raised.
In each, national media played the role of stenographer, repeating and amplifying the lies and distortions communicated by law enforcement about their actions and the actions of protestors.
Finally, in each, the voice of impacted communities largely went unheard.
Oh, did you hear that? That's the sound some of my less-melanated brethren hitting “unsubscribe” which is what happens every time I write about policing in the newsletter. And honestly? Good.
Now that I got that off my chest, let’s turn to the actual topic for this week.
I want to offer you a quick review and endorsement of John Green's book Everything is Tuberculosis. You may recall in a prior newsletter I shared my planned summer reading. I completed Green's book recently and am about a third of the way through Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Not bad considering school ended Thursday.
Narrative nonfiction is a genre that has always spoken to me and Everything is Tuberculosis is the kind of book I wish we got more of. Sarah Frier’s No Logo and Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara are two other examples of the genre I’ve discussed. But Green’s book or more precisely his writing is the apex of the genre. The book is well paced, full of historical anecdotes about the disease that stick with you, and he makes the narrative personal by centering a young man from Sierra Leone, named Henry, who is battling the disease.
I found myself hanging on every depressing update on Henry’s health and treatment.
Green’s brain works like mine does. Anecdotes and bits of data just seem to stick with me and he serves up acres of them in the book.
For example, Green talks about how TB helped New Mexico become a state. At the time, New Mexico, like Puerto Rico today, was a US territory that wasn’t considered “sufficiently white” for the country to fully embrace it as a state. So people in the territory capitalized on the widespread belief that warm, dry desert air could cure TB. Sanatoriums—places where people went for TB treatment—began to appear all over the state. New Mexico made itself the Las Vegas of TB care. By 1920, an estimated 10% of the state's population were so-called “dry lungers,” people who had come seeking relief in the desert air. They were supported by thousands more new arrivals providing them with care and each, the patients and their caretakers, brought families ballooning the territory’s non-Hispanic and non-native population.
In another passage Green discusses the Victorian view of TB as a disease of the affluent and in doing so makes comparisons to the heroin chic fashion trends of the 1970s. To be clear I was not around for either, however it really helped me to contextualize many of the portraits you see from the Victorian era. That glazed eyed, alabaster pale look was the equivalent of 80s goth or UGG Boots for the late 1800s and brought to you by TB.
I could list fifty more of Green’s anecdotes like that.
But the best part of the book is when Green turns his attention to the practices of for-profit medicine and pharmaceutical companies and the extent to which they keep TB in business. We've had the cure for TB since the middle of the twentieth century and hardly anybody in the “developed world” dies from the disease today. However, because pharmaceutical companies put profits above people, treatments and medication are artificially cost prohibitive in much of the developing world. Consequently, TB is one of the leading killers on planet Earth.
Green’s descriptions of the monopolistic practices, price gouging, and manipulation of medical patents to prevent generics from coming to market is searing and enraging. In this book, Green is clearly on a journey. A more radical version of this book is called Everything is Structural Racism or Everything is Neo-Colonialism but he's not quite there, yet.
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I'm traveling to the States Monday and we will be on the road next weekend, so they're probably won't be a newsletter Sunday. On the other hand, I might pop one off a mid-week missive from an airport lounge.
You never know.
Lastly, we hit a big milestone last week—the newsletter now has enough subscribers that my hosting costs on Buttondown are about to go up (a good problem to have, I guess!) As you might recall, I started this thing on Substack, which is technically “free to use” but comes with moral costs and compromises I’m not willing to make. And, I won’t be doing a paid newsletter. Those are weird.
That said, if you get joy, value, or even just a weekly dose of righteous irritation from this thing, feel free to toss a couple bucks into the PayPal or Venmo jar to help cover the rising costs. If you do, I’ll gladly give you a shoutout in a future edition, unless you’d rather remain a mysterious benefactor, lurking in the shadows like Batman.
I’ll leave things there for now.
Thanks for reading and your support.
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