On Dessa and the Novartis Brand of Biomedical Engineering: Vol. 2
Examining the intersections of music, politics, the personal, and monopolized healthcare.
A note to subscribers: You can read the first posting here, the second posting here, the third posting here, the fourth posting here, and the fifth posting here.
The following is the second post of a serialization of my essay concerning cancer therapy and the hip-hop artist, Dessa - among other things.
If you haven’t already, you can view the first posting here. (I recommend reading them sequentially, since that’s what makes the most sense, but who am I to tell you what to do?) Enjoy!
III. high supply just drives your cost down, they don’t want you involved, just want you around.
– Dessa, “Ride”1
In the fall of 2019, Dessa released an ambitious new live album, Sound the Bells. The album was recorded over two nights in Minneapolis alongside the 90-member, Grammy Award-winning Minnesota Orchestra. Her songs were given a new symphonic treatment that added a live grandeur and bombast to them. I can only imagine the kind of hard work that went into making this collaborative feat a reality; the long hours and days of arrangement, back and forth phone-calls, rehearsals, adjustments, technical challenges, design decisions, and taking it back once more from the top.
What a strong sense of hometown pride must have been felt by those in the Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis those nights. “The fact is that we live in a city,” Dessa says to the audience before closing the album, “that’s game to say, ‘yeah, okay, a Grammy-winning orchestra with an independent hip-hop artist accompanied by some of the best voices in the city.’ That’s a big deal. Not every city does this. And we know that. So thank you for the support.”2 And you can hear that thunderous support in the room. There’s our girl Dessa, come back home to play a show on the big stage. I would have loved to have been there.
Dessa went on tour to support the new album and was enlisting a string quartet to join her onstage to maintain the orchestral vibes. I looked up her West Coast dates happening in January of 2020 and saw that she was doing a show in San Francisco on a Thursday night, riding up to Seattle for a show that coming Saturday, and then back down to Portland the following Sunday night. I figured I could attend the San Francisco show and then drive up to Portland for the Sunday show without totally wrecking myself. I would have the entire Saturday free so that I could rest up in Ashland, Oregon – the town where I attended university.
In the two years since having last seen Dessa, I had graduated from college with a degree in lighting design for theater and went to work for a summer in southern Indiana, the furthest I had yet ventured into the American South. The theater company was called New Harmony, nestled on the edges of the Wabash River, producing three conservative-friendly shows a season for its aging audiences. During one performance of the musical Nunsense, an unfortunate incontinent gentleman shit his pants and left a trail of waste on the carpet that the house manager accidently stepped in. This is a perfect representation of the healthy state that the theater industry is in. It seemed to me that the most interesting thing that ever happened at that theater was Pokey LaFarge playing on its stage a few months before I got there. I found this out by discovering an old show program that had been left behind in the tech booth. I felt cheated by narrowly missing musical greatness.
During that summer of 2018 I took some days off work to travel to Nashville and I unwittingly stumbled upon the Country Music Awards Festival craziness going on there. Every bar on Broadway Street had live music playing all day, every day. It was a Country/Western spectacle and I felt an obligation to participate in the local karaoke scene and sing the twangiest songs I could find. I sought out the best local fried chicken and happily ate at a Waffle House for the first time.
This was also my first time experiencing the thick Southern air, quite unlike anything I had felt before. I had gotten a taste of dense humidity during one summer when I was working at a theater company in Western Michigan. But Indiana was another world altogether. In his work Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin described this phenomenon best as a “liquid heat.” He was writing about a visit that he made to Atlanta. Referring to the South, Baldwin wrote: “Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private.”3 He was speaking from an outsider’s perspective, having never been below the Mason-Dixon Line before, describing his initial sense of the place. Discovering Baldwin’s words later thrust me right back into those sleepless summer nights spent in Indiana, dripping with sweat.
It is well known that sensory perception, particularly the sense of smell, is often inextricably tied up with and even responsible for the formation of memories. We smell a particular cologne and it brings us back to the feeling of that particular lover. We smell fresh baked cookies and it transports us to the kitchen of our childhood home. We smell the dark heat of asphalt and it sketches the pain of skinning our knees after having fallen off our bike. The thick “liquid heat” of Indiana in the summertime, filling my nostrils and endlessly coating my body, was particularly adept at creating an indelible kind of place in my mind.
This particular summer theatre job required a thirty minute drive through the cornfields and golden-green plains of Indiana from the company-provided housing on the campus of the University of Evansville to the New Harmony Theater where the shows were staged. Thank god the company-provided vehicle had a CD player so that I could avoid the plethora of Gospel radio stations – ranging from the saccharine to the hellfire-and-brimstone variety. I brought along The National’s Boxer: Live in Brussels and Dessa’s Chime. I played those two albums over and over again on every trip. I invariably get to know an album by driving with it. Driving is where I have the time and the privacy to memorize the words and to sing along as loud as I want to. The pace of the album determines the pace of the drive. The fast songs make me zoom past the speed limit. The slow songs mellow me out. These commutes in Indiana were the first time I was getting to know Chime. And so its songs became all mixed up with and integral to that novel, Indiana molasses air.
There were late nights driving back from an evening performance, winding through the verdant backcountry, where I would be the only person from the tech crew still left awake, at least just awake enough to get us back home in one piece. The song “Velodrome” from Chime was the track that was best suited for these lonely nighttime commutes. More than any other song by Dessa, this is the one I reach for when I don’t want to listen to an entire album. It’s unlike most of her other songs, outside of her usual wheelhouse of heartbreak and well-earned bravado.
“Velodrome” interrogates the nature of freewill, how much control we have in who we are, and whether we tell our life story or if it is told to us. But don’t go looking for these themes to be explicitly expressed in the song. Dessa makes the wise decision to suggest instead of to dictate. The song’s lyrics are economical and elicit a quiet resignation in the face of predetermination. She leaves plenty of room for the music, colored mostly by a beautiful swelling and contracting string arrangement, to breathe and to express on its own without too much over-explaining from her words.
Dessa leaves things nebulous but not opaque: “We spend our days and nights deciding where to go and how to ride there, and in the end again we all vote yes, we all turn left.”4 While perhaps hazarding a boring, over-analysis of word choice on my part, please note Dessa’s essential use of the word “and” in that final line, “and in the end again,” as opposed to the word “but.” As if there could be no other choice. “And” is beautifully inevitable. “And” takes us to where we were always going to go in the first place. “But” is quite too contrary. Through its foggy nature, “Velodrome” is the Dessa song that consistently hits me the hardest, leaving me feeling some kind of way.
That summer saw the final dissolution of a very protracted breakup that myself and my (how do you refer to them in a word that expresses the years and depth of intimacy? girlfriend? lover? partner? best friend?) had been going through. We’d known each other for a long time, close to ten years, and had in a sense grown up together over the course of our formative years. Seeing our relationship end was difficult, all the more so because it was happening while we were a country and an ocean apart – she had been attending Trinity University in Dublin, Ireland to get her master’s degree. What was perhaps just as difficult as the breakup itself was being suddenly alone and without direction.
I returned home from Indiana that summer and tried to simply fill my time. In the fall I saw The National play live for the first time in Santa Barbara. I began recording an album of my own at home. I got back into old theater jobs and tried to continue writing in my free time. But going back to my hometown sucked all the inspiration away. Seeing new places and meeting new people is essential to spurring the imagination. Travel increases the cast of characters available and expands the shelves of concepts to draw upon. Returning home brought nothing new. The autopilot resumed its duties. Old circles of friends were untended to and now inaccessible. Work was what preoccupied me.
In the winter I took a trip to visit the East Coast for the first time. A friend who I’d met in Indiana was working at a theater company in Red Bank, New Jersey, so I planned to spend a week with her there. She and I took a daytrip up to New York City where we had a measly six hours to see as much of the city as we could before we had to get back on the train. The cold was beyond anything I normally felt in California. I had gone to Dublin, Ireland the winter before this to visit my ex-girlfriend and the cold I experienced there, the eye-watering, appendage-numbing cold, was about on par with this winter on the East Coast. I’m not sure what the natives do to deal with the cold, but I imagine it’s somewhat more economical than my solution of wearing at least six different layers of contrasting shirts, sweaters, jackets, and scarves.
After our week in New Jersey I flew from there up to Boston to visit another friend I had met years ago through doing theater at a company in Utah. On the flight over I was gifted with an enthralling morning-time bird’s eye view of New York City. It felt so surreal to see all the things I’d only ever known remotely from hundreds of movies, TV shows, and pictures suddenly laid out below me.
This other friend of mine worked in the theater scene in Boston, her hometown. We planned to spend that whole next week together. What a lovely experience it was to be shown around Boston and Cambridge by a woman who’s lived there all her life and has many connections in the local theater world. We ate at some amazing restaurants, saw some remarkable shows – including the weekly Saturday night tradition of “The Donkey Show,” a disco-themed, Studio 54 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with golden glittered go-go dancers, roller skates, and audience dance-offs. She introduced me to fun and intelligent friends of hers, we browsed museums, walked through Harvard – where I wanted to punch every nauseatingly privileged, business-class bro, putting-on-airs, snobby, avaricious asshole who seemed to surround us – checked out her favorite haunts, and went out dancing. I am still indebted to her graciousness and her mastery of the city.
After returning home from the East Coast I had the opportunity to travel again. This time to Los Angeles in order to put on a show that I had been the lighting designer for. The show went on to be awarded recognition from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. I and the rest of the designers were invited to the national festival in Washington D.C. to receive our awards along with many other students and faculty from around the country.
I was struck by how compact D.C. seemed to be. The Kennedy Center was right next door to the Watergate building which was just across the street from the Saudi Arabian embassy. This was shortly after the Jamal Khashoggi murder had been in the headlines. The lawns surrounding the Saudi embassy were studded with signs telling people to keep off the grass. So I walked all over those damn lawns in order to demonstrate my support for the freedom of journalists. Take that, you bone-saw wielding, bombers-of-Yemen-with-the-aid-of-the-U.S.-military, aiders-and-abettors-of-9/11-plotters, monarchical tyrants! That’ll sure show ‘em. Everybody knows that a monarchy cannot last if it can’t manage to keep the riffraff off its grass.
My fellow students and I got to see shows in D.C. and attend workshops and interface with leading theater industry practitioners. I met some great people there. Myself and the other lighting designers formed a tight bond in that short week. We commiserated over late night drinks, 24-hour ice cream shops, nerdy theater shop talk, the difficulties of maintaining relationships while moving from one show to the next, and wondering where we were going to go from there. Over the years I have gotten into the habit of saying, “I’ll see you later,” to every fellow theater traveler when it inevitably comes time for us to part. This isn’t a statement of promise. It is a pronouncement of hope. Sometimes it comes true.
That following summer of 2019 I returned to work at an opera company in northern Utah where I had worked three years prior, although in a different capacity then – first as a carpenter, then as an electrician. I developed a meaningful relationship the first time I was there, with my Bostonian friend, the both of us drinking cream sherry, swapping music, and attempting rudimentary swing dance moves over the course of those summer months. So returning years later to the same small college town but without her and the same group of friends as before was a bit dreadful, like trying to relive the glories of the past. But things did get better as the summer wore on. New friends were made. New experiences presented themselves.
I never quite imagined these things for myself, but I participated in a threesome for the first time (which was much less awkward and way more fun than I thought it would be). I ingested psilocybin for the first time (which was less fun than it could have been). I made out with a married woman for the first time. She was in an open marriage! At least that’s what she told me. And it actually really was kinda sorta a true open marriage. For a time, anyway. So don’t judge me! We’re all radically honest consensual adults just trying to live our best, open, ethically non-monogamous, slutty, polyamorous bullshit lives over here. Get with the times, man! There is decadence in every era. It is only a matter of who is allowed to engage in it. Meeting with her husband a few weeks later sure was interesting. We even had the same first name. That was weird.
The following fall and winter passed by without much of note. And so now we have finally caught back up to Dessa’s 2020 tour! I was going to see Dessa play in San Francisco on a Thursday night in January and then again in Portland that following Sunday. I remembered that my cousin Ryan had offered to put me up in San Francisco if I ever wanted to visit. I texted him, telling him what my plans were, and I asked him if his offer still stood. He told me that he and Patrick would be happy to have me over. Ryan had the days off work and Patrick would be getting back from a work trip to China that same Thursday night. Ryan said we could hang out together before the concert and again the next morning with Patrick before I had to get back on the road. Sounded great! See ya then.
I have been to San Francisco several times over the years but I still have no idea how to navigate the city. I recognize certain zones by their landmarks: City Lights bookstore, that one late-night Italian restaurant, Golden Gate Park, that one karaoke bar, Ben and Jerry’s. But I don’t have an image in my head of how to make my way between these places. And I don’t have a smartphone. So once I made it to Ryan’s house I stuck with him for direction.
And what a house! Right in the middle of the Castro. An old, Victorian-style, tall and squished, quintessentially San Franciscan house. We sat in their living room for a bit and chit-chatted about my trip. I told him about Dessa and how excited I was to see her perform with a string quartet. He gave me more details about his teaching job and what specific courses he taught. We agreed to get dinner at a nearby noodle shop in the Castro. As we walked there I noticed something interesting about the crosswalks. “Oh. My. Goodness,” I said, “They’re rainbows!” Ryan laughed at my enthusiasm. Yeah, he said, there was a lot of excitement around when they did that. “That’s awesome.” There was even a large poster advertisement for a Golden Girls-themed drag show which I of course had to stop to take a picture of. Like I said, I’m straight.
Ryan drove me over to the concert after dinner. The show was taking place at The Chapel, an old converted church by the look of it and as suggested by its name. Ryan said he could pick me up after the show but it wasn’t very far to walk so I told him to probably not worry about it. He suggested that if I did walk back to the house I should avoid walking through Mission Dolores Park. He said the park had been improved a bit with more lighting but that it was still sketchy to walk through at night, what with all the homeless people around. He told me that it’s tempting to go through the park because it would be a straight shot from the venue back to his house but it would only add another block if I went around it. I thanked him and told him I would keep him updated on my whereabouts.
I was the first one in line outside of the venue, which would prove to be a running theme for me on this trip. It began to rain, which I hadn’t planned for, so I tried to take cover under the entrance. I had brought along a copy of Dessa’s My Own Devices in the event that she stuck around after the show like the last time I had seen her. I had to stick the book under my shirt to protect it from the rain. Pretty soon a woman came up to me and asked if I was in line for the show and then she joined me in waiting. She seemed about my age, perhaps a year or two older. She had brought along an umbrella and kindly offered what she could of it to me.
She and I began chatting about how we first heard of Dessa. I told her about the Tiny Desk Concert. Her story was much better than mine. She had gone to college up in the Minneapolis area and had seen Dessa and Doomtree perform there several times. I told her I was very jealous of that. I asked what brought her out to San Francisco. She told me that she and her college roommate moved out there together on a whim and fairly quickly got some jobs. She said that her roommate was going to be seeing the concert that night as well and she later joined us in line. I told them I was acting like a groupie and going up to Dessa’s Portland show as well. They told me to let them know how it was. Once the doors to The Chapel opened I parted ways with them so that I could get right to the edge of the stage. No matter what kind of performance I’m seeing, a play, a concert, a street performer, I always like to be as close to the action as possible. Being on the far end of the venue just isn’t worth it to me.
Monakr was opening for and backing Dessa on this tour again. The three piece band is based in Chicago and their lead singer, Matthew Santos, also served as a backing vocalist on Dessa’s Sound the Bells. The show was divided into three parts. First, Monakr played their opening set, then Dessa came out backed with just the band and an additional singer, and finally the string quartet set up and finished out the show. Dessa first appeared on a dim stage wearing a hooded cloak and was greeted warmly by the audience. The opening song was “Ride,” a brooding number that also opens the album Chime. At the song’s closing swell, Dessa, in a single deft move, cast off the cloak, fully revealing herself to more applause.
It was good to see her again. I had followed her career more closely since the last time I saw her. Perhaps this is an unearned thing to say, particularly since I’m not from her hometown and am much less familiar with the rest of the Doomtree collective than many of their other ardent fans, but I felt proud of her. She had accomplished so much in the intervening years – releasing a book of memoirs, recording a new live album, writing travelogues for National Geographic and New York Times Magazine. And now she was selling out all of the shows on this tour.
I was going to these shows alone this time, so I had no one else to worry about. I could be fully engaged with the performances. There was a short break between sets to allow the quartet to set up. The stage itself was quite cramped, so once the strings were onstage and blocking the wings Dessa had to come back on through the audience and jump up onto the edge. What amazed me was that each stop on the tour required a different set of musicians for the quartet. There were no touring string players. So every show needed a quick rehearsal with new musicians before hitting the stage.
This stop in San Francisco seemed to go off mostly without a hitch. The strings were well balanced in the mix. The only issue I saw was on the song “Velodrome” when the strings didn’t play their intro part before the first verse and the musicians started looking awkwardly between themselves and flipping through their sheet music before coming back in one member at a time during the verse. But Dessa played it off with aplomb.
I hung around after the show for a bit and the members from Monakr began to peek their heads out, amble by the stage, and chat with some of the audience. But there wasn’t any sign of Dessa so I waved goodbye to the friends who had shared an umbrella with me in line and I slowly wandered outside. Thankfully the rain had cleared up. I stood outside for a few minutes before those same friends exited The Chapel and invited me to come get drinks with them at a nearby bar. I hurriedly joined them and thanked them for the invitation.
We settled on a place called Elixir. It was a nice quiet Thursday night in the bar. We each took turns buying rounds for each other. We switched between beers and hot toddies. They both told me about their unhealthy obsession with the Bachelorette as well as their dabbling in witchcraft. I told them about my theater travels. The woman who had shared her umbrella with me had very striking strawberry blonde hair.
That’s not true. She’s not actually a strawberry blonde. She’s actually a true dyed-in-the-wool redhead. The only reason I called her a strawberry blonde just then is because she told me over those drinks that she hates it anytime someone calls her a strawberry blonde because she is so clearly a redhead. Mackenzie, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for intentionally pushing your buttons. I know that you’re a true redhead. And you know better than anyone else that redheads are a global minority which are dwindling in number and they need to band together in defense from any asshole who would dare call them a strawberry blonde. Keep up the good fight.
And thank you for inviting me out for drinks, truly. You two were very funny. Hey is it possible to really miss people who you only knew for a few hours? I mean, nobody else I know even knows who Dessa is. And if you’re an OG Minnesota fan of Dessa then isn’t that a fantastic reason to maintain some kind of long-distance communication? Do you think it would be a good idea to try to start a “Fans-of-Doomtree Dating Network®”? I mean, they’ve got those for Trekkies right? Hell, there’s even dating sites for fans of Ayn Rand. Christ, I can only imagine what kind of humorless, selfish fuckers reside on that secluded hill trying to feel superior to everyone else by reading C-grade literature while they justify exploiting the labor of billions of average Joes because some homely Russian woman convinced them that they don’t owe anything to the society that produced them.
But what about a Doomtree pen pal organization? What about a strawberry blonde (read: redhead) fans of Dessa group? I know that I couldn’t be a part of that group but still, it seems like that could get some traction. Your group theme song could be Dessa’s “Fire Drills.” Or maybe “Team The Best Team” by the Doomtree collective.
And so, anyway, after drinks the three of us said goodbye and I started to walk back to my cousin’s house. I cut straight through the park that my cousin had warned me about because, like he said, it was just so convenient. I held on to my pocket knife just in case. But no one else was around except for a couple homeless guys minding their own business. Maybe it was just my small-town naiveté, but I felt like my cousin had been a bit dramatic over nothing. Yes, there’s human feces in the streets. Yes, people are having mental health crises. Yes, resources are drying up for the poor. Yes, violence can occur. But fear is a response that justifies itself and blinds us to the real issues.
I once lived in an affordable housing complex for six months with my partner up in Oregon. We were surrounded by very sketchy looking people and other general tomfoolery such as drug use, package theft, petty and boisterous fights, harsh parents demeaning their children on the other side of our wall, and people urinating in the washers and dryers. There was mental illness, physical disability, and poverty. Honestly, when we first moved in, we were afraid. The place was sickeningly infested with cockroaches and smelled of decades of stifling tobacco smoke and body odor. But it turns out that when you get to know them, people are just people no matter their situation. We made friends. Our neighbors were kind and did favors for us. They confided in us. They asked us to drive them places. Yes, poverty breeds crime. Violence can result. But the people on the other side of the tracks are only scary if you don’t cross the tracks. I promise you, if you make an effort to talk to people who seem to inhabit a different world than yours, you will be pleasantly surprised by your shared humanity. This manufactured competition for resources is an insidious trap that drives people to fear each other. Don’t fall into it.
Now, obviously my cousin was simply looking out for my safety in an area where he felt there was some potential danger at night. I don’t think he was consciously making an elitist political statement by telling me to avoid Mission Dolores Park. But that’s also kind of the point. People don’t usually take the time to interrogate the reasons for their anxiety about people who aren’t like them. But this kind of fear and insularity has profound effects on society, particularly a society with such staggering socioeconomic inequality such as ours. Insularity does nothing but foster complacency about the injustices we see occurring around us every day. It breeds animosity towards people we perceive to be outside of our group. And this animosity justifies our attitudes of who we see as worthy and unworthy of empathy.
This stratification of people isn’t just harmful to establishing broad-based political solidarity (an essential goal of our times), it’s also a recipe for further violence. When people become so absorbed by their own separate realities which they construct for themselves, whether it is political ideologies, religious strictures, class divisions, elite education, or anything else that walls people off from the experiences of their fellow human beings, they begin to speak in a language that those on the outside can no longer understand. As the journalist Chris Hedges observed regarding the deadly conflicts in the former Yugoslavia:
The embrace of non-reality-based belief systems made communication among ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural or historical language. They believed in their private fantasy. And because they believed in fantasy, they had no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth and no way finally to communicate with anyone who did not share their self-delusion.5
We see these same kind of absurd divisions play out every day in the U.S., exacerbated by news outlets that cater to either of the two main political parties. Shallow tirades are spewed out by mainstream corporate media outlets playing upon people’s fear of their own neighbor. But your neighbor, regardless of which of the two political parties they root for, has a hell of a lot more in common with you than you do with Wall Street billionaire criminals that the corporate media subserviently represent.
It is a healthy exercise to consistently ask what the function of media, particularly journalism, is in society. If journalism is to be a watchdog, a necessary pillar of democracy, then we must ask how it may best go about practicing that role. Do our journalistic outlets provide necessary information for bolstering informed, democratic demands and movements? Do news stories sufficiently shed light on corrupt power centers? Are the faces of poverty given a voice? Are systemic societal ills given their due attention and properly diagnosed? Or are news outlets – which, it must be remembered, are businesses at heart – merely catering to their audiences in such a way that deflects any true reckoning away from our broken political institutions?
Ridiculous outlets such as CNN and Fox News, hell, even the seemingly more even-toned NPR and The New York Times, cultivate their own shit realities and shovel it into their audiences, raising tensions between people – mostly across shallow party lines – to a fever pitch. This is done without ever actually threatening those who hold any real institutional power over our lives, because those same media outlets rely upon the very ideologies of that institutional power in order to perpetuate their business model.
I need not go over the well-trodden ground of Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model as they explain it in Manufacturing Consent. But in his quasi-updating of the classic Herman and Chomsky analysis, Matt Taibbi, in his book Hate Inc., reckons with his position in the news business and the role journalists played in crafting our current partisan media landscape. He writes of the news outlets that have tailored their reporting to serve particular political ideologies:
This is not reporting. It’s a marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions and shut any non-consumerist doors in your mind…This creates more than just pockets of political rancor. It creates masses of media consumers who’ve been trained to see in only one direction…As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become…First, we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest…Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems. We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.6
Resisting these very human proclivities of separating ourselves into in-groups and out-groups is the only way forward for a successful progressive movement that can challenge entrenched power on its own terms, to pit people-power against moneyed interests. And this gets to the heart of why treating your fellow human being as worthy of the same universal rights and material comforts as you, instead of as an object of fear, is so important for any movement. We have to concern ourselves with the well-being of others, not just because it is the right thing to do on principle, but because it is foundational to creating a justifiable and moral movement with broad appeal and possibility for success.
But many people believe in the hardships they’ve had to endure and do not wish it any better for the others who share their plight. Two years ago I received my undergraduate degree. I am proud to say that I was able to graduate without having to go into debt. I was able to avoid taking out student loans because I attended a local community college that was essentially free apart from textbook costs. I also took a break from school in order to work and save money for university. I mostly paid for my first year of university out of the savings I had. Thankfully, I also received some modest help from my uncle and from my significant other who was generous enough to cover our rent that first year. Once my second and final year started, I was granted several scholarships through my university which were able to cover the rest of my tuition expenses.
Sometimes when I tell people that I do not have any student debt, I get asked a question along the lines of, “Don’t you think it would be unfair if the government wiped away student debt after you already went through college without taking out loans?” My answer to this question is an emphatic, no. Likewise, I’ve previously had the option of receiving some modest healthcare coverage through my employer. And I hear people ask the question, “Wouldn’t you want the option to retain your private insurance instead of paying for universal healthcare?” My answer to this question, again, is an emphatic, no. And when I hear people ask these sorts of questions, I am reminded of these entrenched and permissible attitudes which only serve to protect the systems which manufacture resource scarcity. When we look at the amount of taxpayer dollars that are used to bail out Wall Street and fund the bloated, unnecessary, and self-perpetuating military budget, we realize how much could instead be allocated to our dilapidating infrastructure, our woefully underfunded public education system, and our broken healthcare networks.
I think about what it takes to realign people’s ideas about what is possible and to reevaluate what we see as inevitable. And for me, it comes down to aligning ourselves with those most in need. We must concern ourselves with the most marginalized, the most punished, the most impoverished, because, given the logical conclusions of the unchecked avarice of global capitalism, these injustices visited upon the historically downtrodden can, and increasingly are, happening to any one of us. The wars we perpetrate abroad are done so in the name of national defense, but in reality they destabilize whole societies including our own, as necessary resources are diverted away from our public goods.
And our militarization beyond our borders serves as a dress rehearsal for the militarization that is finally brought back home to us in the form of total electronic state surveillance, occupying police forces terrorizing the disenfranchised, and mercenaries working hand-in-hand with giant corporations to stifle dissent – as climate activists are monitored, union organizers are intimidated, and animal rights groups are prosecuted into oblivion. We ignore the plight of our impoverished citizens and of the people we decimate abroad at our own peril.
We must recognize that the fates of others are our own fates as well. Indeed, this is what it means to adhere yourself to a selfless moral imperative. This is what it means to understand that fighting for the rights of your fellow human beings, regardless of their relative status, is not only the right thing to do, but it is also essential to sustaining the longevity of any civil rights movement. Tom Stoddard, the late, openly gay civil rights attorney and gay rights activist understood this essential component of organizing and movement building:
There’s no point in having a movement if you’re just going to turn everyone into a suburban homemaker. The whole point is to celebrate difference. And there is something deeply offensive about a movement that only argues for its own people. (. . .) If the idea is equality, it can’t possibly be said that it should be equality for only one group of people. The idea of equality has to apply across the board, and therefore, it’s not just that there ought to be interconnectedness between the African American community and the Latino community and the gay community. It’s that what motivates those movements is exactly the same thing. And it is a terrible thing to just promote one’s own equality. (. . .) It’s unprincipled and it’s selfish – and it will never sell. We are engaged in the remaking of the culture in a way that benefits everybody. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that: the significance of the black civil rights movement for white Americans. (. . .) It uplifted people. It not only touched them – because it made people listen to him who otherwise wouldn’t – it made people feel better about themselves and their culture. It moved them forward. We want a richer, more diverse, more compassionate culture, in which everyone feels the possibility of self-expression and self-actualization.7
When you fight only for yourself, not only do you alienate others who aren’t already on your side, you can also be so easily assuaged by a modest increase in your own wages or healthcare benefits. You can be so easily placated by being co-opted into the status quo. You can so easily take solace in your own personal security. We see this play out time and time again across society. As Berkeley professor Wendy Brown pointed out regarding the reticence of tenured faculty to support progressive movements:
The fact is that tenured faculty have enormous amounts of power, and here’s the problem: by the time many of them get there, they’ve basically gone over to the other side. That is, politically they think they deserve what they have and that the problems of the university and the underclass and the poor (. . .) are not their problems and that in fact what they’re concerned about is making sure that their benefits and their perks, their sabbaticals, their research funds, their laboratories, and all the rest are funded first.8
If we become so focused on our own narrow causes, failing to see the interconnectedness of our community, if our goal is defined as wanting to become a respected part of the existing power structure, then we will lose all motivation as soon as the opiates of small personal comforts are gained for ourselves. This kind of institutionalization was a significant reason why the radical lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s went out of fashion and died out. As Lillian Faderman discusses:
[A]s many lesbians of the ‘70s got older in the ‘80s they tended to become less radical and less critical of society in general, perhaps because they found a not-uncomfortable niche in the mainstream world. It was not atypical for them to say, as one Omaha woman did of the women in her social circle who were in their forties: “I think the whole picture has changed. The women in our group have it all together. They’re happy with what they’re doing. They all have good jobs. They’re career women who chose to be career women. They have nice homes. They have the money to take the kinds of vacations they want to. They don’t wish for anything to be different. Our group is happy.”9
But this security is a false security because it is in fact built upon a forced inequality. This inequality is so dispassionately and routinely enforced that it becomes banal. It is the invisible fabric which holds the systems of power together. But the effects of this inequality are not invisible to those who suffer greatly from it. They are not invisible to those who work every day only to eke out a slim existence. They are not invisible to those who put themselves in harm’s way in order to stand up for justice. And they are not invisible to those who truly listen to their fellow human beings.
When we choose to adhere ourselves to this moral imperative, to this mission beyond just our own material comfort, to the will to fight for everyone, to fight for human solidarity itself, then we begin to chart a path forward together which defends this movement against being co-opted. This moral imperative resists being bought or sold or brought into the fold. When we fight for each other we create a lasting movement which cannot be stopped until every one of us has been reintegrated into society regardless of our race, gender expression, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, age, or class. By allying ourselves to each other, by standing in solidarity for our inalienable rights, we create a perennial movement which cannot be splintered by petty tribalism.
But the hard work of organizing a progressive movement based on class consciousness isn’t just about getting people to recognize their shared plight, their shared oppressors. It is also about recognizing people’s own agency and their right to democratically participate in determining what this movement looks like. Call it a bottom-up, grassroots approach. The labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey stresses this point again and again in her work, that building working-class power requires identifying natural leaders in the workplace and community – people who wouldn’t otherwise be on your side and who don’t consider themselves to be activists – and having uncomfortable conversations with them.
McAlevey argues that in order to reverse inequality, we must embrace “unions that are democratic, focused on bottom-up rather than top-down strategies, and place the primary agency for change in workers acting collectively at work and in the communities in which they reside.”10 We cannot simply align ourselves with class struggle and stop there. We must then take the difficult steps of organizing, talking with people who are not on our side, and building up power in order to assert democratic control over our workplaces, our communities, and our politics. As McAlevey writes in her book, No Shortcuts:
To effectively challenge the excessive corporate power that defines our era, unions must create a whole-worker organizing model that helps – rather than hinders – large numbers of Americans to see the connections between corporate domination of their work lives, their home lives, and their country’s political structures.11
This kind of organizing takes time and it takes hard work. It cannot be accomplished by handing out flyers or by having esoteric, masturbatory arguments with people who already largely see the world the way you do. As one member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Benjamin Y. Fong wrote:
The gravest danger to the DSA is to spend too much time on internal politics, under the mistaken assumption that we are the primary constituency that must be properly organized, to the neglect of externally organizing the working-class majority to demand transformative changes in U.S. society. Without a mass base, socialists are nothing but reading-group fodder.12
This kind of organizing requires stepping out of your comfort zone and relinquishing any selfish pride or elitism you may have. This kind of organizing must recognize the democratic impulse within all of us, the deep need to determine our own fates. It must harness that very human, libertarian desire in order to perform collective action.
A powerful, moral movement is built upon a loving selflessness. A powerful, moral movement recognizes the inherent worth of every human being. A powerful, moral movement rejects the magical thinking which tries to tell us that true justice will be found in the hereafter, understanding that the justice we seek can only be attained in the physical world. A powerful, moral movement understands that a multiplicity, not a monolith, but rather a multitude of ideas, backgrounds, lifestyles, and viewpoints are to be cherished as the wonderful miracle of human variation. A powerful, moral movement understands that we all share a collective destiny.
And perhaps most importantly, a powerful, moral movement requires courageous acts. As James Baldwin wrote: “To act is to be committed. To be committed is to be in danger.”13 Indeed, to be in danger is to name and to speak about the systems of power which hold so many of us in lower stations. To be in danger is to upend the status quo. To be in danger is to act against the atavistic forces of hate which seek to divide us into paranoid groups. To be in danger is to lift up the vulnerable amongst us. To be in danger is to fight against the grotesque hyper-masculinity of our culture. To be in danger is to antagonize unchecked corporate greed that commodifies human bodies and the environment in which we live. To be in danger is to stand against the international crimes of empire that export death and starvation to the peoples of the world. To be in danger is to stand with your fellow human beings, not just intellectually but also physically. To act bravely, kindly, and with radical love against the systems of power that seek to destroy such a powerful movement by bringing a select few of its members into the fold with promises of wealth and power at the expense of the many.
Do not accept the lie that caring for and trusting your fellow human beings is naïve and dangerous. This lie only serves to support the entrenched institutions of power. Do not seek shallow comfort in your own small, personal securities. We must recognize our interconnectedness. As Eugene V. Debs said in his statement to the court upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act in 1918 for the “crime” of speaking out against the conscription of U.S. citizens to fight in WWI: “[W]hile there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”14
We are not free while there are those in chains. We are not rich while there are those in squalor. We are not healthy while there are those who are sick. We are not at peace while there are those suffering from war. We are not enlightened while there are those kept in the darkness. When we fight for each other we do not rest. When we love each other it is for our collective survival. When we speak for the rights of our fellow human beings we demand the necessary change and progress which we all benefit from and so desperately need now.
The day after Dessa’s concert in San Francisco, Ryan’s partner Patrick arrived home from China sometime early that morning. They decided to take me to a nearby popular diner for breakfast. It was over our eggs and toast that I began probing for more answers from Patrick regarding the pharmaceutical company he worked for, Novartis.
I started by asking about his trip to China. He had been there to scope out whether or not certain hospitals could effectively institute the various protocols that are required in order to ensure that Novartis’ leukemia therapy, known as Kymriah, could be properly administered. Patrick later told me that Novartis is currently conducting clinical trials of Kymriah in China, with the intent of future commercialization of the drug in the country.15 As a reminder, Novartis owns the patent to this particular cancer therapy, but it’s not the only drug of its kind currently on the market. There are also more clinical trials of these kind of cell therapies in the works by other companies.
The way the drug works, very basically, is it involves taking blood from the patient, reengineering the immune cells found in the blood – specifically white blood T-cells – to begin destroying specific cancerous cells, and then reintroducing those modified T-cells into the patient. The patient’s blood needs to be harvested and handled in just the right way in order to make sure that it arrives at the Novartis labs in good condition and is re-administered to the patient correctly. Novartis currently has five locations where blood samples can be sent for the manufacture of Kymriah – in Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, and its main lab in New Jersey. Novartis is also planning to expand its manufacturing capabilities into Australia and China.16
Patient trials for Kymriah are currently being conducted in Shanghai. As Patrick later told me, since a patient’s blood needs to be sent to one of Novartis’ manufacturing sites, and since there is not currently a manufacturing site in China, they had to get special permission from the Chinese government to ship blood samples out of the country because China’s laws currently forbid the export of Chinese genetic material. Patrick said that this was the first time China had ever allowed exporting of genetic material, in this case to Novartis’ main lab all the way over in New Jersey. Eventually Novartis plans to open a new manufacturing site in Shanghai so as to avoid such long shipping times.17
According to the FDA approval of Kymriah, the modified T-cells need to meet a certain minimum threshold of viable cell numbers in order to be considered within specification.18 Much of Patrick’s job is to travel the world making sure that hospitals which want to administer this treatment are following the proper protocols so that the treatment will be effective and within the appropriate specifications. There are currently about 260 qualified treatment centers for Kymriah around the world.19 Good job, Patrick!
In addition to these nuts and bolts questions, I wanted to know who could realistically get access to this cancer treatment, which is priced at $475,000 here in the US.20 Do health insurance companies even cover this expensive treatment? Patrick told me that a certain Saudi national had travelled abroad and was able to purchase the Kymriah therapy outright in cash. Thank god for all that oil money. Fuck those innocent Yemeni wedding parties, am I right?21
I wanted to ask Patrick about Novartis’ ethos regarding this cancer treatment. Does the company take into account the ethical implications of determining a pricing model? How much does Novartis mark up the price in order to make a profit? However, I did not have the necessary underlying knowledge to be as probative as I wanted to be. We talked in a tangential way about the price of Kymriah and how the cost differs in different countries based on their respective healthcare systems. But I think what I really wanted to ask him then, and which I did not have the language to do, was why did this company Novartis have an ownership over this cancer treatment? This seemed like an awful lot of power bestowed upon an unassailable corporation.
But I did not yet know how to get to the heart of the issue because I did not understand the history behind this cancer therapy. I did not know about the relationships that Novartis and other pharmaceutical companies have, not only with our branches of government, but just as crucially with our university research departments.
If we’re going to have any chance of righting the fucked up healthcare system in this country, and indeed in the world, then it is essential to understand these private-public relationships. Let me try to explain.
Thank you for reading part 2 of this essay. You can find part 1 here. In the next installment, we’ll get into all the nitty-gritty details of stifling IP protections in the medical industry. Stay tuned!
And if you haven’t seen the open letter to the food bank industry, give it a read and spread the word far and wide. Each one of us shares in the responsibility of demanding and acting to create a better society.
Dessa, lyricist, "Ride," performed by Dessa, by Lazerbeak, produced by Andy Thompson, on Chime, Doomtree Records, 2018, compact disc.
"Flyer Is a Verb," performed by Dessa, on Sound the Bells: Recorded Live at Orchestra Hall, Doomtree Records, 2019, compact disc.
James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name," in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York, NY: Library of America, 2008), 203.
Dessa, lyricist, "Velodrome," performed by Dessa, Dan Lawonn, and Andy Thompson, by Dessa, Lazerbeak, and Andy Thompson, on Chime, Doomtree Records, 2018, compact disc.
Chris Hedges, "Vigilante Violence," in Wages of Rebellion (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2015), 163.
Matt Taibbi. Introduction to Hate Inc. (New York, NY: OR Books, 2019), 21.
Charles Kaiser, "The Nineties," in The Gay Metroplis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2019), 345-346.
"You Are Not a Loan," interview by Astra Taylor, video, 45:11, Youtube, posted by The Intercept, January 25, 2021, accessed February 28, 2021,
Lillian Faderman, "Tower of Babel," in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 276.
Jane F. McAlevey, "Introduction," introduction to No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 26.
McAlevey, "The Power to Win Is in the Community," 70.
Benjamin Y. Fong, "Does Medicare for All Advance Socialist Politics?," in "Medicare for All," special issue, Democratic Left, Spring 2018, 3.
James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time," in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York, NY: Library of America, 2008), 294.
Eugene V. Debs, "Statement to the Court," speech presented in Cleveland, OH, September 18, 1918, Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2001, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm.
Patrick Heller, interview by the author, virtual meeting, January 19, 2021.
Kyle Blankenship, "Novartis Fills Manufacturing Gap for CAR-T Therapy Kymriah with First Asian Production Facility," Fierce Pharma, last modified October 30, 2020, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/novartis-looks-to-hurdle-manufacturing-crunch-for-car-t-therapy-kymriah-first-asian.
Heller, interview by the author.
Ned Pagliarulo, "Novartis Still Hasn't Solved Its CAR-T Manufacturing Issues," Biopharma Dive, last modified December 11, 2019, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/novartis-kymriah-car-t-manufacturing-difficulties-cell-viability/568830/.
Novartis, "Novartis Expands Kymriah® Manufacturing Footprint with First-Ever Approved Site for Commercial CAR-T Cell Therapy Manufacturing in Asia," news release, October 30, 2020, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.novartis.com/news/media-releases/novartis-expands-kymriah-manufacturing-footprint-first-ever-approved-site-commercial-car-t-cell-therapy-manufacturing-asia.
Eric Sagonowsky, "Novartis Could Cut Its Kymriah Price to $160,000 and Keep Its Profit Margins: Study," Fierce Pharma, last modified February 18, 2018, accessed February 28, 2021, https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/group-says-novartis-kymriah-should-cost-160-000.
Ryan Devereaux, "New Details of Attack on Yemeni Wedding Party Prompt More Demands Obama Explain Drone Policy," The Intercept, last modified February 20, 2014, accessed February 28, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2014/02/20/report-yemen-wedding-drone-strike-may-violated-laws-war/.