Author's note: This completes a three-part series. View Part 2 here.

Satire

At the pinnacle of the pyramidal hierarchy of the "white-savior industrial complex" are the religious-missionary NGOs, the best known example in recent times being Samaritan's Purse, whose recent work in the Ebola-affected parts of West Africa has received global attention.

Missionary NGOs making available the volunteer services of professionals, such as doctors and nurses, often working under dangerous conditions, are the white-savior industrial complex's equivalent of reality TV challenge shows, providing the full-blast of the spiritually certifying experience of haloed "saviordom."

Regardless of attitude to their self-appointed mission of "spreading the gospel," you won't find any "educated African" questioning the purity of the sacred hearts of medical missionaries like Nurse Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, the two US Samaritan's Purse health care workers who caught Ebola in Liberia and had to be evacuated for treatment in the US.

On the individual level, the Christ-like, self-sacrificial work of such volunteers is admirable, radiating an authentic luster compared with the counterfeiting efforts of the parallel for-profit industry.

You only need to go through the comments section of news reports highlighting the work of the Writebols and Brantlys in the latest African disaster spot to encounter the ubiquitous counterfeits hovering like vultures, awaiting the inevitable opportunity to dive in with a proclamation of their unique credentials in contributions introduced with words such as "I spent three months working in northern Nigeria...," or "I did volunteer work in Uganda....”

Yet, even for the Writebols and Brantlys there is a drawback, not of their own making, but of the larger picture of the circumstances of their service. To put the blame on them is to do a great disservice to the sincere spirit of humanity that compels their self-sacrificial service.

With regard to such, the term "saviordom" transcends mere metaphor. Yet, unfortunately, the authenticity of their individual sacrifice is often unable to escape the besmirching impact of its global setting in the white-savior industrial complex.

When, a few months ago, questions were raised about the rationing of the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp and restriction of its use to white health workers, G. Kevin Donovan, director of Georgetown University center for bioethics, was reported in the media, saying that Samaritan’s Purse members Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were specially deserving because “these are people who deliberately put themselves in harm’s way.”

Sadly, the ethicist's comment ripped apart the saintly fabric of the authentic sacrifice of these medical missionaries by helping to perpetuate through their work the make-believe voluntourist model of saviordom: The white savior of black humanity as god-incarnate, who voluntarily sets aside the comfort and security of his "First World" upper realm abode to partake of the poverty, wretchedness and the Adamic curse of Ebola death pronounced by divine decree on "Third World" mortals.

By virtue of his act of supreme self-sacrifice, consisting in voluntarily giving up his First World privilege for incarnation in a lower, inferior Third World realm he becomes eminently and uniquely entitled to the privilege of ZMapp third-day resurrection from the dead, according to Ethicist Donovan.

And indeed, the ability to sum up the courage to undergo the incarnation, descent into the dark nether realm, survive the ordeal of life in poverty-stricken, diseased lands, and ascend by jet flight back to the upper realms, to the right hand of the Father in heaven, comes with a flavor of cultural triumphalism that is --uhm--"spiritually uplifting."

But Donovan's argument that “these are people who deliberately put themselves in harm’s way" ignores the equal fact of hundreds of other volunteers, doctors and nurses, not considered deserving of Zmapp resurrection from Ebola death, because, being Africans, natives of the continent of the Ebola plague, they could not be considered to have "deliberately put themselves in harm’s way."

Catholic nun, Sister Chantal Paschaline, native of the Republic of Congo, died "from Ebola in the Hospital San Jose de Monrovia" in Liberia, a few days after the Spanish priest Father Miguel Pajares was evacuated to Spain to receive Zmapp treatment.

She served equally in the same religious order as the European priest.

The moment that God stretches forth the mighty arm of his salvation, to separate his favored sons and daughters from the less favored mass of humanity, through a rare boon of the power of vertical translation, is replicated in at least two separate occasions in the scriptures: Elijah ascending on a chariot of flames to the heavens and Jesus on clouds from the Mount of Olives.

In each case, a favored one was translated, less favored ones were left behind.

That moment of triumphalist ascension in jetliner back to the upper realms, after all work is accomplished, is the cherished culmination, the hoarded moment that gives meaning and significance to the incarnation of the god-man in the lower realms:

And behold! there was brightness, thunder and lightning, and the semblance of a jetliner-chariot wherein the white god-man ascendeth to the heavens clothed in the radiant raiment of glory and terrible of white countenance that for awe the Africans dare not look upon him…

And then a voice out of heaven, as the voice of many waters: Obama [a black man!] calling out of heaven, "Kent Brantly, Nancy Writbol!" and they answered in unison "Lord! Lord!" And the Africans beheld them, the son and daughter of Obama-God, rising up to the skies amid clouds of angels ascending to the glory of eternal brightness....