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