Naturegirlgroves’s Weblog

http://www.harpmagazine.com/articles/detail.cfm?article_id=6529

George Tabb is being murdered. The central, most maddening and often funniest character in his memoir Surfing Armageddon and Playing Right Field, his brutally abusive and demented father, didn’t do him in. In fact, young George was well-adjusted enough to achieve his dream of actually becoming a member of the Ramones (if briefly). And none of the Greenwich Gestapo—who all but gassed him for growing up Jewish in the wrong place—tracked him down at a Furious George, Iron Prostate or Roach Motel show. No. After all he’s been through, George Tabb is being murdered by greed.

On September 18, 2001, Tabb and about 70,000 others were told it was safe to return to their apartments in lower Manhattan. It wasn’t safe, and Tabb suspected as much. Perhaps you saw him shortly after the attack in People or on television saying there would be a cancer cluster in New York? At the time, the media had nothing to lose putting Tabb on the air. “I was an oddball, a kook, a freak, a conspiracy theorist,” he writes from his apartment on a rare day when he’s well enough to email.

George Tabb suffers from polycystic kidney disease, which causes his kidneys to resemble moldy grapefruits and feel like a pair of appendixes that are about to burst. It’s incurable, though treatment can prolong life, and the only way to get it other than inheritance—and there is no trace of PKD in Tabb’s family—is from extreme exposure to harsh chemicals. He also, in his video blog, lists blown-out sinuses, severe asthma and other pulmonary and gastro-esophageal problems. If it seems like the EPA’s claim that it was safe for lower Manhattan residents to return home was bogus, it’s because according to one of the agency’s own scientists, it is. Senior EPA chemist Cate Jenkins, in an email to Senator Hillary Clinton, stated that the EPA flat-out committed “scientific fraud.”

The number of deaths from 9/11-associated illnesses is placed between 130 and 200. Tabb is one of an undocumented number of residents who are severely ill. He experiences periodic blindness and deafness, extreme pain aggravated by motion, and dangerously high blood pressure. Unless he wants to risk death, he’s been advised to do nothing but watch TV.

Though there’s no other explanation for it, Tabb’s illness is not formally recognized by New York’s two federally funded clinics as something that could result from exposure to the fallout dust in Manhattan. But those clinics’ primary function has been merely to diagnose, not treat. When Tabb visited the program at Bellevue Hospital, it took several minutes to find anyone who had even heard of the program they were supposed to be administering.

Out of a $1 billion insurance fund set aside by the government to cover injuries from 9/11, the only person to receive a dime is a man who fell off a ladder doing cleanup. Meanwhile, $47 million has been spent to fight claims like Tabb’s. In the meantime, Tabb’s insurance benefits have been exhausted, leaving him to pay for operations and medications out of pocket and with donated funds.

So why has no mainstream news outlet picked up on Tabb’s plight as of late?

“No one wants to tell the truth about the poisons downtown,” he says. “They all own real estate down there and are afraid to lose money.” This, while ex-EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, whose handling of 9/11 is still under investigation, invokes meaningless jingoistic clichés to justify her own personal “mission accomplished” embarrassment. She told Congress in 2004, “We weren’t going to let the terrorists win.”

The government appears acutely aware that the costs to treat the 70,000 people who are potentially sick would be astronomical, especially since some doctors estimate that 70% of them will be come ill in the next 20 years. Add interest in the form of political embarrassment and it’s only going to get worse—it’s a harsh reality for everyone, especially George Tabb and his fellow victims.

Tabb’s friend and primary advocate, Obituaries vocalist Monica Nelson, who gives speeches on Tabb’s behalf and helps raise funds (MySpace.com/helpgeorgetabb, MySpace.com/whirlwindcoalition), notes the contrast between the patriotic party line on 9/11 and the passive murder of the tragedy’s newest victims: “The people exposed to that toxicity had no choice in it. Nobody deserved that. It’s un-American to ignore that.”

She believes we ought to turn to Tabb’s memoirs—which, despite his own struggle, show him championing underdogs from a mentally handicapped kid to a wimpy wrestler—for inspiration. “His writings have never been about feel-sorry-for-me kind of stuff. It’s surviving and helping somebody who’s worse off than you, picking somebody up.”

First printed in Jan/Feb 2008