“WHAT better way to start the New Year than to save someone’s life?”
This most wondrous of lines was uttered by a middle-aged father to three children construction worker who so happened to be a navy veteran, to a stranger named Larry Hollopeter, at a New York City hospital on January 4, 2007.
Two days earlier on January 2, the ‘saviour’, an African-American from Harlem named Wesley Autrey had rescued Hollopeter’s son Cameron, a White film student, from being struck by a Manhattan subway train after he’d fallen onto the track – shortly before a train happened to be pulling into the station!
Realizing there was no time to getting either of them (Autrey had dove onto the tracks with the intention of taking Hollopeter off them) to safety, Autrey – who in the frenzy of the moment had actually abandoned his two young daughters on the edge of the platform – threw himself over the disoriented student in a drain trench between the tracks where he held him down resulting in the locomotive missing them by a mere 1.27 cm!
The dizzying reaction to his feat of bravura had him propelled into the media and public glare: bestowed with the Bronze Medallion from the then Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg; television appearances on Ellen DeGeneres and David Letterman shows; a personal phone call from President George W. Bush to “hang out” at the White House; a $10,000 cheque from Donald Trump; backstage access to a Beyoncé concert; a brand new Jeep Patriot donation from Chrysler, et cetera!
What followed rendered his heroism to something akin a curse as, inter alia, people started nagging him for money whilst under the impression that it had attained him wealth and eventually with ensuing time, public fatigue regarding his distant feat set in, with the news cycle moving on to other occurrences – thus rendering Autrey’s period of fame to be up!
In explaining Autrey’s heroism eventually petering, the author of the intriguing read titled Fake Heroes, viz, Otto English, mentioned the polymath Aristotle hinting that the role of the tragic hero is always to fall, because only through that fate can heroes reflect the fear and tragedy of mortal human experience – which is in essence – their purpose!
In his non-conformist and thoroughly researched offering, English focusses attention on ten of history’s biggest figures, viz, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Coco Chanel, Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy, John Wayne, Andy Warhol, Douglas Bader (a Royal Air Force pilot credited with 22 aerial victories pending World War II), Thomas Midgley (American engineer who developed leaded gasoline), Captain Scott (British explorer who led two expeditions to Antarctica) and Henry V (King of England from 1413 until 1422 attributed with making England one of the strongest military powers in Europe).
Autrey’s saga – recounted in the book under the title, The Making of a Hero – features as an intro to those of the 10 more universally and historically renowned figures.
Referred to as Ten False Icons, the one who’s unmasking will cause readers to pause and rethink how they previously perceived her, is the globally venerated nun, Mother Teresa. In the segment on her, English debunks the aura around her, in the process lending credence to the argument that history isn’t always the truth.
Born Anjeze Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Macedonia in 1910, from the 1970s until her death on September 5, 1997, the nun in the simple blue and white sari was regarded the altruist’s altruist who gave of her life in selfless dedication and service to others.
Having climbed the ecumenical ladder in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, she established the Order of nuns named Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India in 1950 – with the intention of administering help to the sick and dying.
With time her order would encompass 517 missions in 100 countries with her accepting millions of dollars and awards from myriad benefactors, some with dubious reputations such as US businessman, Charles Keating and the Haitian tyrant, “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
Whilst it was claimed that she had an account (estimated at $100 million at the time of her death) at the Vatican bank – it astounded outsiders as to why she didn’t direct some of the money towards the needs of her mission where serious problems abounded in the manner it was run and the treatment of those who lived and worked there: with rules of sanitation at the hospice not applied; lack of hygiene; medically unqualified nuns using guesswork to treat those in their care; a young boy losing his life because of the hospice’s reluctance to take him to hospital to receive antibiotics; a claim that Teresa even encouraged her followers to baptize the dying despite their Hindu and Islamic faiths, et cetera.
Some of the nuns’ testimonies are not far disposed from the fictional Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with nuns expected to self-flagellate as “a stark reminder that you are a sinner” and those who left or ran away from the mission cut off altogether!
Whilst a 2013 paper by a trio of Canadian academics adjudged her to be rather miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering, in contrast, the figure ranked first in a 1999 US Gallup poll list of “Most Admired People of the 20th Century” was happy to spend it on herself, inter alia, travelling first class when not borrowing private jets from her famous friends and receiving some of the best medical treatment in the world when her health deteriorated instead of at her Home for the Dying Destitutes.
Faith, observes English – who admits to no longer have it – can be a powerful protective force field – allowing purportedly “holy” people who support or do really bad things to get away with it on the basis that a broad mass of others deem them to be “saintly”.
A trade paperback published by Wellbeck Publishing and distributed across South Africa through Jonathan Ball Publishers, Fake Heroes retails for R350 and is available at leading bookstores countrywide.
