| Y |
Q: It's an honor to talk with you today. How is your recovery coming along?
JEFFERSON: "I am getting better however, slowly, swelled legs being now the only serious symptom, and these, I believe, proceed from extreme disability. I can walk but little."
Q: That's nice, Mr. Jefferson, but I was talking to Superman over here. Mr. Reeve, you've been outspoken in your support of the National Endowment for the Arts. What should the role of government, with regard to art, be in a free society?
JEFFERSON: "I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and procure them its praise."
REEVE: "Art can be disturbing; art can be challenging. Some of it may be politically and socially activist."
"Having listened to all points of view, I come away with a renewed conviction that there is a crucial role for the government to play in developing the arts and culture in this country."
JEFFERSON: "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
Q: Powerful words, to be sure. Mr. Reeve, you've also been actively lobbying Congress to increase funds for spinal-cord-injury research. Tell us about that.
REEVE: "We are all family . . . we all have value.
"Now, if that's true, if America really is a family, then we have to recognize that many members of our family are hurting."
JEFFERSON: "It is a duty certainly to give our sparings to those who want. . ."
REEVE: "And just to take one aspect of it, one in five of us has some kind of disability. You may have an aunt with Parkinson's disease, a neighbor with a spinal chord injury, or a brother with AIDS, and if [we're] really committed to this idea of family, we have got to do something about it."
JEFFERSON: "And why give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, when we can do it at short hand to objects under our eye, through agents we know and to supply wants we see?"
REEVE: "Right now, for example, about a quarter million Americans have a spinal cord injury, and our government spends about $8.7 billion a year just maintaining these members of our family. But we only spend $40 million a year on research, that would actually improve the quality of their lives, and get them off public assistance, or even cure them. We have got to be smarter and do better."
JEFFERSON: "A most powerful objection always arises to propositions of [public works]. It is that public undertakings are carelessly managed and much money spent to little purpose. . . If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy."
Q: Mr. Jefferson makes a good point, Mr. Reeve. Is simply dumping more tax dollars into the laps of bureaucrats really the best way to find a cure for any disease? Couldn't patients, doctors, hospitals, drug companies and charities -- the people closest to both disesase and remedy -- more effectively direct health-care dollars?
REEVE: "Now that regeneration has been proved possible and will probably be in human trials in a very short period of time, there is an extremely realistic hope for recovery. . . And that's not something I could have said to you four or five years ago.''
JEFFERSON: "The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of the public moneys."
REEVE: "I've seen rats in the that have had spinal cord transfusions and now are walking normally. The protein inhibitors have been knocked out by antibodies."
JEFFERSON: "It is not enough that an individual and an unknown one says and even thinks he has made a discovery of magnitude... Not only explanation, but the actual experiment must be required before we can cease to doubt whether the inventor is not deceived by some false or imperfect view of his subject."
REEVE: "What they're working on now is humanizing that antibody. Once that happens, and I think it will within the next year, then the central nervous system will be able to reconnect, particularly with someone with a high-level injury like mine."
Q: Whoever figures out how to do that is sure to make a mint. Now, do either of you have anything to say which isn't taken verbatim from your established public record?
JEFFERSON [Turning to Reeve]: Now, son of Jor-El, kneel before Zod! Snoochie-boochies!
REEVE: Snoochie-boochies?
Q: That's it, I quit.
Have they finished that new Bodo's yet?