Money and Food: Thomas Mann, Indiana Jones and the Diamond Prompts

The impetus to write You’re Sick (and It's Your Fault) came from what I learned during my year of tuberculosis treatment, but a singular informing event occurred years before: 

I was visiting a someone in the hospital who was undergoing treatment for cancer. At one point he looked at the state-of-the-art medical equipment then the ocean view his primo hospital room provided, and jacked up on a cocktail of morphine and $15k per/month cancer drugs, he asked, 

“All of this: what do people without money do?”

“They die,” was all I could answer, hopefully in a voice too low for him to hear.

America is noteworthy for its 500,000+ annual bankruptcy filings tied to medical costs*, but being sick costs everywhere.  

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is set in Davos–now home to the current world economic forum–a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium. Nowhere else does the luxury of the setting stand out more than in the dining room, where patients feast on four gourmet meals a day, with food as rich as they are.  (There are occasional comments about the cost of treatment, but mostly it’s tsk-tsking about how the doctor, whose station is far below their own, is making so much money.)** 

Infectious diseases thrive on food scarcity, and surviving tuberculosis demands a lot of highly nutritious food–there’s a reason it was called ‘consumption’. In food insecure areas this means whoever is ill knows they have to eat better than their companions who are far more able to contribute to the well-being of themselves, their household, and their community.  

I think of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Kate Capshaw makes a face at the plate of food she finds unappetizing and Harrison Ford tells her that she’s been served more food than their hosts eat in a week.     

Uncomfortable pause.

“Cut!”

“Good job everyone: we’ve displayed first-world compassion and cultural sensitivity even greater than ‘It belongs in a museum!’ Give me the schedule: We got a chase scene coming up? Is the kid doing something cute and Asian, or is Kate showing some skin?”

But medical treatment is not about an honored guest getting properly fed for a single night: medical treatment and its accompanying dietary needs can last for months. The shame and embarrassment of what may feel like a Magic Mountain lifestyle compared to loved ones’ Temple of Doom hunger is cited as a contributing factor to people not finishing their treatment.***

My own treatment experience was closer to Mann’s novel than most TB sufferers worldwide. And while You’re Sick was designed to be more than broadcast solipsism, this is most apparent in the diamond cards.  There were as many discarded prompts as there were accepted ones because the further I strayed from my own experience the more it felt like performative empathy.

What’s left still feels underdeveloped–and smells of privilege with topics such as medical waste in the global south, blood soaked 401Ks and where do you send your tax deductions–that is, charitable donations .  

I seek collaborators to help advance You’re Sick: to create disease-specific editions, develop revised rules aimed at multiplayer support-group use, accommodate a non-English speaking audience, but most of all create diamond prompts that address these material concerns in ways that working alone I couldn’t.

And shouldn’t. 

* https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304901 

** Yes, I understand that The Magic Mountain can also be read entirely in the context of Europe madly barrelling into WWI, but that’s a discussion for another place–and from someone with more than just an undergraduate degree in literature and an MFA.  [Insert debates on whether Camus’ The Plague really is all about fascism, the level of sincerity in C.S. Lewis’s and J.R.R. Tolkien’s downplaying the Christian allegory in their fantasy works, and that if Mann’s style was bawdy and blue, The Magic Mountain’s dinner scenes would place the novel firmly in the tradition of Petronius’ Satyricon and Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel.]

***Also noteworthy is that South Asia, the movie's setting, has one of the rates of TB worldwide.