After the success of General Motors’ Cadillac ad campaign that used a Led Zeppelin song, for which the English band was paid a lot of money (I heard the number $17 million although GM hasn’t made that number public), other car companies were looking to buy up rights to other famous rock songs. I heard through the grapevine that one such American band was offered substantially more that what Led Zep was paid, but that they ultimately turned down the offer because they didn’t want to support the car and oil industries. Good for them, I thought, but then I wondered whether it was the best possible decision. What if one took the money and then quietly donated all, or a portion of it, to a good cause? For example, one could take money from a car company and then turn around and support climate change research.
It would be a difficult thing to pull off. The public, especially the band’s fans, might not appreciate their selling out unless they reveal that they have given the money away in a press release. In fact the idea of taking money from a tainted source and handing it over to a good player and NOT revealing the latter became a story that I have been thinking about for several years. I imagined the personal strength of character one would have to possess in order accept the scorn and hatred that could be the result. In my story a cook, or a musician, starts working for a warlord, who is despised by the people, with the intention of carefully building his influence and using that influence to help as many people as he can. He ends up saving dozens of lives and does a lot of good, but, of course, the people cannot find out about this because he would lose his influence and so he dies a lonely and hated figure. The Hollywood ending would be that someone who knows what transpired lets people know what a good person the cook or musician actually was. In the European ending nobody ever finds out and the very last scene shows a villager spitting on the man’s grave.
It is an interesting dilema…seems there is always a paradox in being human to every situation…and so much about one side or the other, good or evil, right or wrong for our human thinking.
There is a story I read once about a Native American WWII Soldier who spoke fluent Navajo. He was (force) drafted and used in U.S. Secret Intelligence, spying basically. He got caught by the German Nazis, and sent to a concentration camp as a prisoner of war. In the camp, emiciated and with no hope of surviving, he was daily force-fed raw worms by the same German soldier. Enraged at the soldier for the lack of apparent compassion, but helpless to fight for his dignity, he endured and did survive.
Eventually, after the war ended and he came home, feeling lost, in shock and resentful, he sat with the elders of his tribe. They discussed his hopeless and angry condition and the events that he had endured. They told him he had to make a decision to “live” or not. They tied his arms and legs and proceeded to throw him in a lake. He thrashed about, gulping water and in panic as any drowning victim does. And somewhere in that gulping and thrashing and panic, he said that a vision came to him about the soldier that had force-fed him worms daily. He said that he was shown that the German soldier was actually trying to save his life by feeding him worms since food was scarce, and that the soldier could not make it look like he had compassion for this prisoner of war. He was able to get himself out of the water eventually, and was released of his trauma, having a new perspective on the events he had experienced in the concentration camp and on his current life.
I pick the Hollywood ending. Otherwise it is unbearably dark, but you do wonder if this good person really exists right now, being completely unknown for who he really is and what love he has for humanity.