The Franklin Files

The Finders and Patch Adams

Kenn Thomas
Tue, 22 Dec 1998 14:51:43 -0500

-Caveat Lector-

> 1. There is a new issie of Steamshovel, #16 and chock full of nuggets. An
> excellant interview with the founder of THE FINDERS and many other fine
> articles on all our favorutes. Go out and find.

Thanks for the recommend!

Here's some info on the Finders that does not appear in the issue. (CTRL reaers
unfamiliar with the Finders should know that the group has been accused of being
the pedophilic procurers for the intelligence community in DC. The groupd denies
the charge but does cop to the story that they had children in attendance at a did
a ritual goat sacrifice.):

Marion Pettie is not alone in his defense of the Finder's philosophy on
self-governing child rearing. No less unusual source than Patch Adams, the
maverick psychologist who became the subject of a 1998 Robin Williams movie
directed by Tom Shadyac, talked at length about it. Adams has been a friend of the
Finders for 25 years, working almost as the group's personal physician. An
unconventional and controversial figure in the medical world himself, Adams
affirmed that he has found no instance of child abuse among the Finders. He
dismissed the notion that the group included pedophiles and characterized it
instead as one of "over-educated" eccentrics presenting an alternative to social
norms. Adams told a reporter at the Rappahannock News that "I'm embarrassed for
the news media . They really made a mistake here. I can see a giant legal case
coming out of this."
Of the pedophilia charges, Adams said, "That's a bunch of crap!" , noting that boy
and girl scout camps contain the same rings of stone Washington police found in
the backyard of the Finders' Washington residence. "What other evidence have they
uncovered? Ritual blood-letting?" Of the goat slaughter, he added, "On the farm
it's called harvest. It's animal husbandry, a practice thirteen thousand years
old. Farmers traditionally include their children, particularly their male
children in the annual fall butchering of livestock. I've met city people who
think milk comes from a carton. Urbanites are often ignorant of the realities of
food production."
Adams described the Tallahssee bust this way: "When you have two adults taking
six small children on a camping trip, they are going to get dirty. If they're not
dirty, then the adults in charge either unbelievably organized or they haven't
been camping. As for bug bites, if you're camping, particularly in the south,
you're going to get bug bites. I just can't imagine the Finders tolerating sexual
abuse. If it should turn out that a child has been abused, it's a private problem
with a member of the organization with the organization unaware of that problem."
The iconoclastic Patch Adams gave this view of the Finders' philosophy:
"Marion Pettie [is a] very intelligent, extremely well-read, a perceptive thinker
who gathered around him over-educated people who find current society, as I do,
not very interesting. They dropped out of whatever it was they were doing to play
games under Pettie's direction. The anthropological, psychological, sociological
game of life with each other. Never to my knowledge have they done drugs of any
kind. They like playing games, more in their heads than in their hearts. This is
not Scientology. I know lots of Finders who have left. We get together. We laugh
and joke about it. They're probably laughing about all this right now. Marion
Pettie is not an angel. He's not a devil. He's a regular person, unless a regular
person is someone who is bored with his job, his life and is dissatisfied with his
life. If that's the definition, then I guess he's not a regular person."
Adams concluded that "Their way of child-rearing isn't mine. Yes, they're
strange. Yes, they're maybe misguided, but there are a lot of other kinds of
neglect out there. If their children have been neglected, it wasn't meant to be
neglect. They mean to give their children enriching experiences. This could be a
lesson of survival. If you wanted to show our society it is messed up, this
certainly will do it. "

And the smiling blonde woman who opens the front door looks far less like the natives you've met than like a young Swedish university professor. Which, it turns out, she is. Introducing herself as Merrie Shaker Pettie, female skeptic, she explains in softly accented but fluent English that she arrived two years ago from Stockholm, where she worked as a lecturer in philosophy. Her father was American, and she moved here when a relative bequeathed her this house.

Inside, the house has the same zen/zany elegance as outside. It's nothing less than a live-in library, with bookshelves lining every wall including the kitchen and bedrooms. A large globe hangs from the living room ceiling. Upstairs, there's a photo of two horses having sex. Out back is a hot tub, while two large Southern-style screen porches are set up as lounges looking out on the bamboo grove.

And more quotes. On a kitchen shelf, "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature--Frank Lloyd Wright." Next to the sofa, "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.--John Keats." Nietzsche is in there somewhere.
A Laboratory for Living Well

Pettie, 42, is launching a unique clubhouse--she calls it a social laboratory--for freethinkers. After she gives you the grand tour, curled up over steaming cups of tea in the cozy Biographies section, you ask her to clarify.

"It's a global, live-in or live-out, mutual aid society for experimenting with how to live well in a godless world." Sounds good. Who's invited? She rattles off: "Skeptics, free inquirers, perspectivists, agnostics, Franklinites, infidels, eupraxsophists, sinners, secularists, postconventionals, and other persons with a good sense of humor--a/k/a perspective."