Watching the whole Buffy Sainte-Marie fiasco work its way through the culture has got me thinking about the idea of hero worship. This is an important issue for me, as I’ve always been a sucker for the idea of heroes.
I used to believe, for example, that Mohandas Gandhi was some sort of heroic figure in that he is considered the creator of non-violent resistance to colonialism. Unfortunately, the more I dug into his life and teachings, the more I found out that he was a sex-obsessed religious weirdo who was pretty hard on the women around him. Plus I found out that when confronted by NAZI persecution of the Jews, all he could come up with as a solution to the Holocaust was for victims to pre-emptively commit mass suicide in an attempt to shame Hitler and company into realizing that the whole antisemitism thing might be a misstep.
“Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
– Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with his biographer Louis Fischer.
There are other examples, but I’m sure we’ve all heard our share by now. The fact that the much-loved Buffy St. Marie is really a ‘pretendian’ who has built a career around performing in ‘red-face’ is just another in a long-line of people who we thought we knew, but really didn’t.
I think that this might be one of those ‘teachable moments’ that another hero with feet of clay—Barack Obama—used to talk about. And if it is, I’d like to toss a new question on the fire of public discourse: Is it time to give up on the idea of heroes?
I ask this question because recently I’ve come across the idea that part of the reason some people support authoritarian political parties whereas others don’t, is citizens tend to see the world in two distinct ways. For the former, the world consists of ‘good people’, who always do the right thing and ‘bad people’ who often do the wrong. The latter, in contrast, see just people who all sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad. If you’re one of the former people and one of the latter calls you to task for doing something bad, you get angry because you read this comment as saying you are a ‘bad person’.
If you are someone who has a hard time differentiating a person’s worth from their actions, any attempt to change your behaviour feels like someone is attacking you. As a corollary, anyone who does do something that is objectively bad—such as becoming a drug addict—means to the authoritarian person that he or she should no longer be considered worth support as a member of society. People of a more ‘liberal’ bent would, in contrast, suggest that various anti-social or self-destructive behaviours are generally accidents of personal history or social disadvantage. As such, they would suggest that these folks need a helping hand, not a judgement call about whether or not they are ‘worth the effort’.
I’d like to turn this idea on its head. How about we do the same thing with people that society considers heroes? Maybe the perceived good people do is just as much an accident of personal history as the bad?
I’ve been involved enough in ‘progressive’ politics to understand nothing really good and transformative in society comes about because of the actions of any one person. For every ‘hero’ our society puts forward, there are lots and lots of ‘nobodies’ who are paying the bills, organizing the rallies, doing the public relations, cooking the meals, cleaning up after them, and so on. In progressive movements, the majority of these folks don’t even get paid.
In a sense, the fiction of ‘heroic leaders’ leading people to the ‘promised land’ is an artifact of Capitalism. After all, if we really believe that the mass of workers are just as important as the managers to business success, how can we justify the outlandish difference in remuneration between the shop floor and the corner office?
This thinking goes deeper than economics, however. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) believe that there are ‘blessed’ and ‘damned’ individuals. They pay lip service to the idea of redemption, but ultimately they separate people—not their actions—into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. They hold that a loving God will torture the ‘bad’ for all eternity in a divine Bergen-Belson and send the ‘good’ to a Holiday Inn in the sky. (Is it any wonder that so many evangelical Christians are against wasting government resources on things like prison reform or welfare if God is just going to torture these folks for eternity anyway?)
So where does Buffy Sainte-Marie fit into the above? I remember years ago hearing that the Dalai Lama was surprised to hear that a great many Westerners feel a deep sense of self-loathing. He maintained that this was something that is not so common among Tibetans. I don’t know if this is true or apocryphal, but I can certainly attest to a certain alienation that I’ve always felt from modern, capitalist Canada. I don’t like materialism or competition, and I think a lot of society is needlessly crass and insensitive towards both nature and the poor. I can certainly understand a sensitive, artistic soul like a young Buffy Sainte-Marie wanting to stop identifying with America and instead merge with a culture that seems more in tune with her own values.
Please note, I’m not trying to excuse an individual human person. Instead, I’m trying to understand a behaviour. I know Buffy isn’t a perfect, marble statue on an pedestal. Neither am I. We’ve both done dumb things. We’ve all done dumb things. Sometimes crazy-ass, really damaging, hurtful things. But those things are actions that were done and we are not the worst things we do. We are human beings who can transcend our transgressions and be more than their sum.
One of the more startling things about this revelation is the reaction of her adopted Cree family. Here’s a quote from Global News:
“The adoption process, it took years — it took days and months and years of getting to know each other and trusting each other and going to ceremony and getting her Indian name (from my mushum) to finally look at her and be like, I acknowledge you as my daughter, you’re officially part of our family.”
It was done in Cree custom and while Sainte-Marie didn’t claimed proof of blood relations, she is accepted as kin because of that ceremony.
“It’s really insulting that someone would question my great grandfather’s choice and right to adopt Buffy as his daughter,” Piapot said.
“No one has the authority to question our sovereignty, we are a sovereign nation, we are sovereign people and our adoption practices have been intact since time immemorial.
“Having someone question the validity of that adoption … it’s hurtful, it’s ignorant, it’s colonial, and quite frankly it’s racist.“
This quote really gets me thinking about the difference between seeing someone as a ‘hero’, and someone as a human being who sometimes may do something heroic, or even just good—along with other stuff that is bad, or just plain dumb. It appears from this quote that they may see the pedestal that modern, Canadian society put her on is silly, and it’s just as silly to freak out when she falls off it. They don’t seem to want to have anything to do with this way of understanding the woman they’ve adopted into their family—and appear to be offended that anyone would suggest they should repudiate her because of it. Buffy Sainte-Marie is a symbol to Canadians in general, to the Piapots, she appears to be a real human being.
That’s the entirety of all I know about the situation—it doesn’t amount to much. But I do have real concerns about the culture of celebrity and the machinery of fame that teaches all of us to put some people on pedestals and others into holes. I have a friend who says that we should stop building statues of and naming schools after famous people. We can have PS 142 and the Statue of Liberty—but please, accept that all humans are a complex mixture of mud and gold and stop putting them up on pedestals.