We Are All AIDS Sufferers

"'Today, we are all Israelis.' Is this the closest analogy to the way we live now: shaken by terror, reeling from loss, amazed by hatred, wondering desperately if ours are to be the next deaths? No.

"I remember reading, almost 20 years ago on another airliner, the first New York Times article about GRID, or gay- related immunological disorder: the only term they had, in those days, for AIDS. That plane, unlike the doomed jets two weeks ago, arrived safely. But the world in which it landed -- the 1980's world of New York, of gay men, of the arts -- was comparably devastated. With surgical precision, the plague slipped through America's proud medical-industrial defenses to slay thousands. . . . The Israeli analogy is true and apt. But what I thought that Tuesday morning was, 'We are all AIDS sufferers now.'

"Of course, a virus is not a jihad: one is a force of nature, the other an act of will. But our responses to each vary less than you might think. As in the early stages of AIDS, we are still searching to define an enemy that we can understand and defeat. But even now we can name certain patterns of mind that identify those who hate us, that make their hatred possible. One such pattern is fundamentalism, which is as distorting to Christianity as it is to Islam. It is also not confined to religion.

"Fundamentalism is easy to spot with the Rev. Jerry Falwell blames homosexuals and supporters of gay rights for provoking divine retribution in the form of the World Trade Center attack -- as well as in AIDS. It's horrifically unmissable when Osama bin Laden bids Muslims everywhere to murder Americans for the glory of Allah. Wasn't Nazism, too, fundamentalist: a cult devoted to the purity of German identity? . . .

"Art, too, suffers from its own fundamentalisms, and as we work to respond to this tragedy we must not forget them. Orthodoxies of purity, of hierarchy, of rigidity -- theories of music, for example, that politicize its smallest materials, the order of every pitch -- still hold sway over much of our musical life. These orthodoxies are more than nuisances. They support a vision of art as a god devoted to the glory of its priests rather than the other way around. . . .

"American pluralism remains the most resonant political idea of our epoch. All people of all races, classes and genders have value, can speak truth, deserve respect. The question, and the challenge, is to fuse them all into a society as rich as it is coherent. This political idea has artistic implications. It is too late for a fundamentalism of a master system, just as it is too late for an ideology of a master race. As we respond to the tragedy of Sept. 11, as well as to that of tomorrow, we must struggle to reconcile -- imaginatively, flexibly, compassionately, intelligibly --- ur titanic richness of musical resource with unmistakable order. Our nation -the world -demands no less."

The author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer.

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