To Whom Do We Turn Anymore?

They’re debating whether we can appreciate Bill Cosby’s comedic contributions to our society separately from condemning his sexual assaults.

And whether the Today Show is any place to turn for discussions about that, given how many years the iconic program’s top personalities enabled Matt Lauer’s lewd behavior in front of women.

Think the less ratings-mad public TV would be free of such hideous harassment? Don’t tell victims of Charlie Rose that.

Maybe we need stronger laws to stop the coddling of abusers and harassers, and for a moment, we looked to longtime progressives like Bernie Sanders and Al Franken to sponsor them with their customary integrity. Then Franken left Congress disgraced as a groper, and some of Bernie’s 2016 presidential campaign staffers were revealed to be outright misogynists.

It makes one want to ask, “Is there anyone short of Mother Teresa still genuinely good?” Well, prepare to toss that standard aside as well – the nun operator of palliative care facilities in fact was shown late in her life to be providing poor quality services despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions, wealth that eluded better care givers with less legendary names.

Then came a study by two Canadian university researchers – not disputed by the Vatican – that said Mother Teresa was really motivated to care for the dying by a strange and unhealthy preference for observing physical suffering, likening it to Jesus on the cross.

The study said doctors who inspected several of Mother Teresa’s famed Calcutta facilities for the sick and poor, “observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers."

Noting the nun’s lucrative operating budget, the researchers said the dismal conditions were evidently intentional, quoting Mother Teresa as saying:

“There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”… Good grief!

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LINK to: A saint's 'dark side.'

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Oh, and Mother Teresa wrote the judge in one of Charles Keating’s fraud trials urging leniency for him. Keating had swindled thousands of people out of their savings in the S and L scandal, and had made monetary contributions to her ministry. He frequently blamed others for his pre-meditated crimes, but in her letter, Mother Teresa compared Keating to Jesus. You read right.

You want to scream and smash something against your wall over all this, but you know Gandhi showed the nonviolent way toward justice – except that the Mahatma as well has lost his halo. Even some of his supporters and relatives, like his grandson, peace activist Arun Gandhi, are saying the modern Western world concept of Mohandas Gandhi has inexcusably ignored the reality that he had a sexual affair with his niece while in his 70s.

And his heralded opposition to racist South African “pass laws” has been misunderstood, said Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy in a recent interview. Roy said on the Laura Flanders show that Gandhi founded his nonviolent methods as part of a crusade against lumping Indians in with blacks, not to end discrimination against blacks, whom Roy quoted Gandhi as calling “savages.”

She also said Gandhi, as late as 1936, strongly opposed a movement by lesser heralded Indian activist B.R. Ambedkar to end India’s cruel caste system, and as India won its independence in 1947, Gandhi withheld support for Ambedkar’s unsuccessful efforts to put rights for women in the new Indian constitution.

“It’s such a strange thing that Gandhi should be revered by feminists,” Roy said. “If you look at the things Gandhi said and did about women, it is beyond shocking…. So regressive, and yet he is valorized. And Ambedkar, of course, is unheard of by people outside of India."

Yes, we peace activists for a while were superficial in our attempts to grasp Gandhi the man – which was precisely the title of the first book I read on him. Author and Gandhi acquaintance Eknath Easwaran in his 1973 book, “Gandhi the Man,” subtitled, “The Story of his Transformation” mentioned nothing of the Indian independence leader’s late-in-life improper sexual behavior, though like many, Easwaran has acknowledged Gandhi’s pre-activist sexual libertine youth.

To be sure, Gandhi’s Satyagraha (“soul force”) was politically a wise and compassionate tool of nonviolence -- and it worked for 70 national independence movements or justice struggles from Solidarity to Caesar Chavez -- but imagine my feelings of betrayal by the best historians and researchers who fictionalized a holistic Gandhi personally as devoted to good character as he demanded the economic and political systems be.

I start to feel the kind of alienation that anthropologist Margaret Mead warned about. After I read her “Coming of Age in Samoa” when I was 13, Mead’s deft analyses of our society’s incongruencies and hang-ups were singularly cogent to me.

Then came reports that she had revised parts of Samoan society to fit her preconceptions. Moreover, Mead-inspired sociologists who followed in the wake of her groundbreaking 1928 book over-studied the Samoan people, making the granting of a for-pay interview to a research team virtually an industry among some residents of those mid-Pacific islands.

Though “Coming of Age in Samoa” was defended by many, including in a 2009 study published by the University of Wisconsin Press which called Mead’s conclusions about Samoan society essentially correct, some critics say the relatively small number of Samoan subjects she talked to (25 adolescent girls of whom over 40 percent were sexually active) make her conclusions about Samoa's comfortable attitude toward sexuality among youth too sweeping.

The United States’ version of Samoa may be Muncie, Ind., where the “Middletown” study of American life released in 1929 was followed up 50 years later by a PBS series which at first was praised as an enlightening look at the mix of Muncie life. But PBS retracted one portion after allegations that underage people recorded while riding in a vehicle in the city were possibly coached, or at least enticed by the prospect of stardom to talk in straightforward sexual ways that may have exaggerated their sexual behavior.

Re: Samoa, I’m comfortable with and confident in Margaret Mead’s work, but about the same time I read “Coming of Age in Samoa” in 1972, the world was dazzled by the discovery of a truly self-contained society called the Tasaday in a Philippines rainforest. They slept in caves, gathered food in the wild, used stone tools and had never contacted other people.

NBC, Life Magazine and National Geographic all portrayed these people as idyllically self-reliant living in something akin to a Garden of Eden.

We were charmed by the Tasaday, and scientists jumped at the chance to study a human society as our species was tens of thousands of years ago. It was reassuring that a bit of that primal humanity was still around.

Media seemed satisfied with the story’s authenticity, though a few scientists questioned the Tasaday’s legitimacy. Well, after the overthrow of The Philippines’ pathological lying dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, the doubts grew, and ABC television soon reported that the “tribe” was an invention of Marcos and a wealthy government official/businessman who made themselves millions of dollars off controlling media and scientist access to the Tasaday.

There are still defenders of the theory of the Tasaday as genuine, but today many in media and science believe the “tribe” were people recruited by Filipino government official Manuel Elizalde to play Tasaday in return for promises (not kept) of financial rewards.

True, hoax, or embellished, the gentle Tasaday.

Still others who have studied the issue have said the Tasaday’s language is free enough of outside words that they do seem to be the tribe they say they are, but add that the Tasaday clearly had long maintained contacts with the outside world. Perhaps they are descended from a few who split off from the agricultural-based tribes of their region only a few decades before the Tasaday’s early 1970s “discovery.”

In other words, the Tasaday may not be the hoax critics call them, but their “primitiveness” is an exaggeration by dishonest promoters not properly scrutinized due to wishful thinking by 20th Century urban society, and media and scientists anxious to score a big hit.

And the search for something unambiguously great goes on – the roadside littered with the remains of what long appeared the best of our world, but today rusting from marginal taint to outright fraud.

Perhaps we should dispense with “great” in favor of a simpler good -- not availed to publicity, not concerned with getting credit or maintaining financial pipelines, and distributed widely among the people, not piled high in a very few honorific celebrities.

Maybe the answer lies in readers of Mead, Gandhi and so forth not looking for elegant, all-encompassing explanations of the world.

Read prepared to evaluate a work for its merits and human limits, not to find a utopia in the rainforest.

Brian Arbenz is an activist, writer and researcher in Louisville, Ky. USA

Three Children Ascending the Steps Alone

George A. Morrison, left, writes the news for WAVE-TV in Louisville circa the late '40s. His son, Brian Arbenz (nee George Morrison), at a book signing in 2011. 

 

“What do you know about war?”

This question from my father in 2003 was contained in an e-mail, so I don’t know precisely in what tone he meant it, scornful or mildly skeptical.
It was the crescendo of an on-line discussion about the issues peace crusaders such as myself, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, are always absorbed with, and it forced me to pause from my usual fervency and acknowledge that as a veteran of four years of submarine warfare going toe to toe with German u-boats under the Atlantic, his qualification to comment exceeded mine.
I searched my memory for what scant experience I had with war, including stumbling upon tanks training for Vietnam at Ft. Knox while on a hike at adjacent Otter Creek Park as a startled 10-year-old at school camp in 1969.
Very quickly, however, I became stuck in the vulnerable spot some peace activists find themselves in when confronted with the question of whether we must know of what we speak; whether Dwight Eisenhower‘s statement: “I hate war as only a soldier can” is the ultimate logic.
Of course, consider the life of former FOR national secretary Doug Hostetter, a conscientious objector who spent three years in rural Vietnam during the war teaching literacy and Gandhian-style small scale economics, then “saw enough pain to last a lifetime” while trying to mediate the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s. Add to this, the daring peace stands of those who have voluntarily stepped into grave danger to serve in base communities in Colombia or accompany refugees in Guatemala, and Ike is compelled to amend his observation to “as only a witness can.”
Still, on that point, my then 78-year-old father was right to question what I really know about the subject I spoke and wrote about regularly. And yet, the answer was wrapped inexorably in the fact that e-mails, letters and phone calls were nearly the only way I had communicated with George A. Morrison.
So irregular and confused were my contacts with my biological father (I first saw him in my conscious life when I was five) that I did not find out about his passing at age 82 until four months after he died in Albuquerque, the place he had spent most of his adult life.
Whereas I never in my memory sat on my father’s lap, I’ve placed on my own lap two of the three books he wrote, including “College Street,” his memoirs centering on growing up in a Louisville orphanage on that thoroughfare just off downtown next to what is today an ecumenical center called Unity Temple.
The book vividly details Dad’s riveting recollection of the incident that led to his being placed there in 1928 -- the fatal shooting of his new stepfather, a German POW from World War I who had moved to Russell, Ky. after receiving asylum. This was offered as part of a policy the U.S. has maintained regarding enemy prisoners since the Revolutionary War.
The bulk of the Russell police force shot this man one afternoon while – according to the memory of my then three-year-old father – he was in the process of surrendering to them. The former warrior for the fatherland had, in a fit of rage, taken the family hostage in the boarding house he and Dad’s mother operated in the small town near Huntington, W. Va. after discovering her in bed with one of the guests.
Dad remembered to his dying days exactly the position his stepfather’s hand was in while he was beginning to drop his gun, then exactly what the barrage of gunfire sounded like that slaughtered him in full view of his three-year-old stepson. This was just months after Dad’s heavy-drinking though economically prosperous birth father died of pneumonia.
My father, who went on to become a prosecuting attorney after a career as a broadcast journalist, was certain that the Russell police force’s excessive, hair-trigger response was due to the fact that virtually every one of the town’s officers and reservists also had fought in the Great War.
If before, his stepfather had been not well liked in the little Ohio River community for his cold ways, in this irreversibly agitated moment, he became once again the enemy. Ten years after the armistice, the guns didn’t really fall silent until the Battle of Russell, Ky.
And what’s militarism without sexism – the courts blamed my grandmother for unilaterally causing the carnage by failing to be the humble and selfless ideal woman of the era’s close-to-the-hearth imagery.
Immediately taking her three children away was the judge’s idea of punishing her, but it imposed a life of regimentation in a cavernous orphanage on three innocent and emotionally battered children who needed warm and caring intervention, not institutionalization.
Dad’s book said the driver ended the 200-mile trip to the Louisville orphanage by releasing the three onto the building’s steps, instructing them to go inside, then driving off as the trio, all age seven or younger, ascended the steps alone. After registering, Dad learned the Kentucky Christian Children’s Home was gender segregated; he would see his sisters on only Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. He didn’t even discover the existence of a grown half-sister until decades after she had died at age 32 in 1932.
After World War II, which the U.S. entered months after my father joined the Navy at age 16 on a forged birth record he created to enable him to quickly escape the orphanage, the same excuse for a family services system that had warehoused the three Morrison children, turned them loose.
Dad, of course, had the GI Bill in hand, and soon put it toward earning a degree from the University of Louisville, then put his love of the language and personal charisma to work in the newsrooms of the nation’s new dominant medium. He started by writing the news for Livingston Gilbert and the other anchormen of WAVE-TV at the station’s inception in 1948, then anchored news himself in Albuquerque and Indianapolis.
Viewers knew my father’s debonair appearance and polished voice. Off the air, that charm combined with his emotional neediness made for a toxin deadly to our family, which was portrayed as happy and stable in a brief Albuquerque newspaper feature while in real life it was being torn asunder by my father’s footloose ways.
The marriage ended in Indianapolis when I was not yet three. I never again lived in the same city as George A. Morrison. The anchorman seen nightly by the public was to be seen by me about every ten years.
The carnage in Russell may have had little to do with the events that set my fatherless life in motion. Or, perhaps, I am a third-generation emotional casualty of – would you believe it – World War I, an historical calamity that commenced with the firing of a gun at an obscure archduke 44 years before I was born.
So, to answer your inquiry, Dad: that is what I know about war.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

The Children Born to Virgins Study

A new study of children born to virgins says they are more likely to die young, have trouble with the law and have highly zealous and preachy personalities.

However, the study of 2,000 years of records of people of virgin parents also concluded that they tend be becomes subjects of highly successful literature, movies and musicals.

The Children Born to Virgins Study
Brian A. Arbenz (BriArbenz@gmail.com), Matthew, Mark, Luke, John contributors

Abstract

Objectives To determine whether children born to virgins experience lifelong consequences from their manner of birth.

Design Systematic thorough review of documented historical examples.

Data sources:  The Gideon Bible from the Motel 6 on U.S. Hwy 31 in Clarksville, Ind.; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.

Study selection:
 Studies showing whether children born to virgins have lengthened or shortened life expectancy, a tendency to engage in zealous public activism, higher or lower rates of arrest for alleged criminal activity, and an increased or decreased likelihood of receiving death sentences from criminal justice systems.

Results:
 We were able to identify each available documented historical example of a child born to a virgin.

Introduction

Virgins giving birth is a rare phenomenon. However, data have shown correlative, and possibly casual connections to specific outcomes, consistent over the 2,000-year-period of the study.

Definition of outcomes

The major outcomes studied were early deaths due to public executions, preceded by tendencies to challenge authorities, to persuade large populations to reject attachment to material goods and to love enemies.

Meta-analysis

Our statistical approach was to assess written accounts of the life outcomes of subjects selected from 2,000 years. Difficulties we faced were due to frequent re-writing of accounts during the 2,000 year period to conform to political, racial and gender bias of ruling elites. We selected a funnel plot to assess publication bias visually and Egger's and Begg's tests to test quantitatively. Stata software, version 7.0, was the tool for all statistical analyses.

Results

Our research strategy found that children born to virgins are consistently more likely to adopt activist mindsets, zealous advocacy of economic egalitarianism and conflict resolution via non-violence. They are also shown to be more likely to be arrested and face criminal trials and death due to capital punishment.

These subjects also consistently over 2,000 years were demonstrated to be more likely to become topics of literature, film, song and theatrical performances, and to have their names used in a profane manner. Subjects also tended to inspire pendants worn around necks and bumper stickers frequently visible in some of the largest suburban parking lots. 

Important Information About Bananas

Want to learn how to buy bananas in a more fair way that refrains from harming people? Listen:

https://www.splendidtable.org/story/buying-organic-matters-even-with-bananas-fair-trade-co-op-says