ACT UP's AIDS "Ashes Action" October 11, 1992 White House, Wash. D.C. [View all]

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Last edited Tue Dec 4, 2018, 01:10 AM - Edit history (1)

The Nation, Dec. 1. 'It’s a Disgrace to Celebrate George H.W. Bush on World AIDS Day. The 41st president’s “civility” hid the vast nature of American state violence,' by Steven W. Thrasher. Just after midnight on December 1, World AIDS Day, I learned that President George Herbert Walker Bush had died. And I was dismayed not just that the hagiography afforded dead presidents would overshadow Bush’s own appalling legacy on AIDS, but that his death would eclipse the tens of millions of lives we should be remembering today.

When I teach AIDS history, I always show a clip of ACT UP’s October 11, 1992, “ashes action” at the White House, in which brave activists took the cremated bodies of loved ones who had died of AIDS and hurled them onto Bush’s lawn. (If you’ve never seen it, I dare you to watch without crying).

The ashes action is brilliant not just for how raw it was but also for how it held a powerful man to account without civility. (ACT UP had also gone to Bush’s vacation home in Maine, and they hounded him up until the night he lost reelection, when they marched the dead body of Mark Fisher to his campaign headquarters.) For in life—and, sadly, in the first obits, in death—Bush dangerously hid the vast nature of American violence beneath the seductive cloak of civility, that opiate of mass media that gets journalists and readers to let violence go unremarked.
More, https://www.thenation.com/article/george-hw-bush-world-aids-day-obit/