This is, I suppose, a rhetorical question, but it's been troubling me for
some time, and the continuation, as well as the distortion, of the list
"conflict" leads me to share it. I don't really expect a logical answer,
because I fear there is none, but perhaps there could be some useful
insights. Or even some soul searching? (OK, I take that back -- I don't
expect miracles.)
What most puzzles me is why didn't the folks so disturbed *after the fact*
of Terry's "banishment" counsel him to cool it WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING--
while he was launching his ugly, poisonous, demented attack, concocted
need I add, out of whole (tho crazy) cloth, before our very eyes. It went
on quite a while, in cinematic slow motion, well, perhaps it wasn't as
long as it seemed to me while I was enduring it, but surely several weeks.
Did any of my colleagues so troubled by the inevitable denouement utter a
word of caution, let alone *warning* before then? Where were these
latterday friends of Terry while he lit his funeral pyre and leapt on it?
For the life of me I can't recall any reproach or caution from the folks
now so full of lament, yet there could have been no other decision *if the
list were to survive.* (Could some perhaps have even enjoyed the
spectacle?)
It wasn't all that long ago, within memory of even notoriously
short-memoried Americans. As the target of the campaign, perhaps I
remember more keenly than most, but hey guys, 6 weeks, isn't all THAT
long.
I'm also deeply hurt (I confess) as well as puzzled by the lack of outcry
or even a word of sympathy from these same folks at what I endured.
Perhaps, I speculate, they were just accustomed to it, didn't see anything
odd or special, there had been so much, for so long, from the same
quarter.
In fact I fear that today Gord is too kind to suggest the offense was
merely the claim that Post-Factory had "insulted" the alt-photo-list. That
was by far the mildest, not to mention the most *plausible* of the lies
that flowed before and after. (You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to
figure out where the notion came from -- that is, guilt, the sense that
I'd been so badly used I *ought* to insult the list!)
But the character assassination before and after (and continuing, one way
or another, I'm told, on other lists to this very day) was just as plainly
untrue and *far* uglier. The fellow launching today's List Wreck calls it
simply "raising too much hell for our members' tastes"... Hello? How
much hell would be too much for HIS taste? What more could have been said?
The mind boggles, the imagination swoons.
But anyway, now that we're having Q and A, can somebody please tell me
when the "banishment" is going to begin? Terry remains a presence and
source of conflict on this list as surely as he ever was. Whether that's
just boys and their war games, or a particular genius of this particular
man, I don't know, but I do know the presence is palpable. The conflict
is whipped up each time it subsides, renewed every few days.... and NOT by
the good guys, folks who keep quiet out of concern for the health of the
list. (I also note that history is re-written a little further each time,
tho I HOPE not to have to go into that.)
Thus, painful as it is, I can only conclude there's some kind of mystical
double standard at work, permitting today's "love to have Terry back,"
while I am expendable. Or perhaps even undesirable? Because searching for
an explanation of this disparity, the indifference to, or even pleasure in
my distress, side by side with the noble concern for Terry, the LEAST
unflattering theory I can come up with is,
*Any* man is by definition preferable to any woman.
Or....????
I'm told that Sysops say that in some 80% of troubles of this sort "the
victim or primary target is a woman." Painful as that thought may be, it's
preferable to the thought that it's something personal.
Judy