YOU JUST BECAME MY PERSONAL HERO, PATCH ADAMS

Last night was the fourth and final night of Carnaval parades, and all the colours, feathers and samba beats were beginning to merge into one. Retiring to my quarters, I switched on the TV, which happened to be tuned to the only terrestrial channel that treats people like human beings rather than just mindless consumers, TV Cultura. A strange looking American was being interviewed, so I stuck around to see who it was. There followed an hour of the fascinating and deliciously controversial opinions of Patch Adams MD that render the eponymous film starring Good Morning Vietnam veteran, Robin Williams, a superficial joke.

For those who don’t know him, Patch Adams is a trained doctor famous for dressing up as a clown and entering hospitals and refugee camps to care for the sick. His philosophy is that health care should not only be focused on “cure” (which, he points out, can never be guaranteed before a treatment begins), but on “care”, which can be given 100% of the time. This is an oversimplification, as, in the best traditions of the Shakespearean wise clown, there is much more to the baggy-trousered pioneer than just a handlebar mustache and a Hawaiian fashion sense.

To paraphrase everything he said would require another blog, so I’ll just mention a few personal highlights. When Adams was a medical student, he observed that those doctors charged with teaching them delighted in conveying their power by humiliating their students whenever they made a mistake, striking fear into their very hearts. Adams couldn’t understand how people allowed this to happen, why everybody just kowtowed, so he started retaliating – whenever a doctor indulged in such practices, he’d snap, “Wow, that was a great put-down, Doctor, you really humiliated that girl! I hope I can grow up to be a big, strong Doctor like you someday!” I’d love to have seen their reaction.

I identified a lot with this. When I worked for a big company here in Brazil, it was the closest I’ve ever come to living under a dictatorship – little by little the boundaries of what I considered acceptable began to shift, and I began to accept situations that I’d never before have stood for, all for fear of losing my job. The first rule was that of obedience. If it’s fashionable now to “think outside the box”, there it was obligatory to think yourself inside a box, stay there and shut up. Weekly meetings with our boss weren’t a constructive exchange of opinions, but a draining, uncomfortable waste of time. He’d arrive scowling like he’d finally decided to execute us all, then would grill each one of us in turn. The more ambitious would make desperate, pathos-filled attempts to be efficient and have all the answers, but I’d just refuse to play the game and sit there like the foreign equivalent of the village idiot, only being monosyllabic when spoken to. Indeed, it was one of these more ambitious colleagues who engineered my downfall, when he apparently thought it essential that some ungracious comments I’d made about our boss in a fit of frustration be passed on to him. Poetic justice was done a couple of months later, however, when he himself was fired after proving incapable of coping with the extra workload he’d created for himself.

Adams railed against just about everything – TV, and how it lacks examples of kindness and loving behaviour, journalism, and how it’s merely in service to power, capitalism, with its incessant creation of dissatisfaction and destructive egotism, as if looking after our own narrow interests really is in our best interests, deforestation, how sports are utterly meaningless and yet we are persuaded to spend our free time watching “millionaires play with a ball”, rather than do something creative or productive to help others… According to him, 90% of Americans never think – it’s become so alien a concept that they have to tag the words “critical” or “positive” onto the front so people can grasp it. “All thinking is critical!” he bellowed. After traveling along São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista, described by one of his hosts as “Brazil’s Wall Street”, he cried, “It’s garbage! There’s nothing Brazilian here! It’s like any other financial street in the world, the same skyscrapers, the same conference rooms full of rich people getting richer and not caring about the rest of the world! Is this something to be proud of?”

One comment he made really hit the right note on the head. Why, he asked, are there people still starving here in Brazil? When you ask people round for dinner, do you start eating before everybody’s been served? Of course not - you wouldn’t think of it (or at least, women wouldn’t – men sometimes do). So why do people do it on a national scale? Why isn’t everybody working to make sure everybody’s fed before sitting down to serve themselves?

With an estimated 36 million Brazilians living under the poverty line (that's the equivalent of around three quarters of the entire population of England), it’s food for thought, if you’ll forgive the pun.

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