"Calcutta is regularly presented as Hell on Earth, the exemplary case of the decaying Third World megalopolis, full of social decay, poverty, violence and corruption, with its residents caught in terminal apathy (the facts are, of course, rather different: Calcutta is a city bursting with activity, culturally much more thriving than Bombay, with a successful local Communist government maintaining a whole network of social services). Into this picture of utter gloom, Mother Teresa brings a ray of hope to the dejected with the message that poverty is to be accepted as a way to redemption, since the poor, in enduring their sad fate with silent dignity and faith, repeat Christ’s Way of the Cross… The ideological benefit of this operation is double: in so far as she suggests to the poor and terminally ill that they should seek salvation in their very suffering. Mother Teresa deters them from probing into the causes of their predicament –from politicizing their situation; at the same time, she offers the rich from the West the chance of a kind of substitute-redemption by making financial contributions to her charitable activity” –From Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies
Of course, this all gets pulled off because of how likable Mother Teresa really is. Note, for instance, the time she appeared in America and argued, against abortion (that is with a twinkle in her eye), that if a woman didn’t want their child, they could easily give them to her. I won’t even go into how unrealistic that was. The interesting thing was how Clinton, a pro-choice politician, responded: stuck in the corner of either agreeing with her or offending (of all people, MOTHER-FUCKING Teresa!!! (simply said something to the effect that the woman was beyond reproach: a clear act of appeasement. The problem, to me, however, is that when the woman expressed a political opinion, she threw her hat into the arena of political discourse. And there, no one is beyond reproach.
That said, the main reason I bring this quote up is that we see a similar dynamic (that which Mother Teresa served as a veil to (at work in advertisements for children’s charities. And how can we resist those big sad eyes anymore than we could Mother Teresa? The problem is that, if you think about it, you have to question the very fact that those children exist in the first place. You have to look at the parents. I mean you’re living in a shit-house shack built on top of garbage heap with barely enough food and clean water for yourself, and your response is to bring a child into it. And I know this sounds harsh. It even sounds rightwing since the right would all too enthusiastically grab onto it without (as the right is all too prone to do (pursuing the issue further.
Were they to pursue it further, they would recognize that the problem is the result of their gag rules on foreign aid that includes counseling on birth control and abortion. In other words, what we see in these ads are Christian groups asking us to give money (that is through the pressure of guilt: the big sad eyes of the children (in order to fix a problem they contributed to in a major way. They want us to fix their mistakes, to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course, in the face of those big sad eyes, we’re not allowed to politicize.