The Gandhi Nobody Knows was linked to from Alamut recently, and I have to say I enjoyed it as much as the various pieces that Christoper Hitchens wrote after the beatification of Mother Theresa: A Fanatic, a Fundamentalist and a Fraud on Slate, as well as an interview with Hitchens that appears on secularhumanism.org. The author of the Gandhi piece brings up everything that was omitted from the film: salacious details such as the enemas administered daily by teenage girls, massages administered daily by teenage girls, "testing" his chastity by sleeping naked with...teenage girls, as well as the endorsements of violence from a man portrayed as the ultimate pacifist, his latter-day and much delayed excoriations of the caste system...it goes on and on, and roundly debunks the myth perpetuated by the Academy Award winning (and Indian Government funded) movie, as well as many of the official biographies.

We can't live without heroes. They provide us with examples of lives to which we may aspire, and compel us to build better selves. And yet there is an abiding need to destroy or unmask them, to bring them down to our level, whether by means of a considered essay in The New Yorker, or Slate, or by publishing photographs in supermarket tabloids of celebrities without makeup pumping gas, cigarettes dangling from their lips. "But what about the guns, the drugs and the pederasty?" I asked loudly at various points during the insufferably pious Graceland tour, just for the pleasure of the angry looks I'd get from Elvis's idolators (and of course, they quickly complied). The only word that I can use for the feeling I get when enjoying toppling of various types of saints, and that word is glee -- "glee" implies a kind of malicious joy, or as my OED says "scornful, jesting mockery".

LINK | 5:57 PM | TB

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