The courage deficit

For those of you that couldn’t make the Glen Iris Board meeting Monday evening, you missed a good show. The usual cast of characters was there, and in a sign that the Blog is causing real and growing concern about their ability to remain so, they had their attack dogs in tow and their guile polished to a blinding gleam. 

It quickly became apparent that the Board had met in secret at some point before the meeting as the minutes from last month’s meeting had already been approved - proving that their pledge not to have secret meetings to do so this year lasted all of a few weeks. No surprise there. But things got more interesting when Stuart delivered his remarks about the authorship of the Blog. Acting as if he alone was this century’s only university graduate that learned more than they ever cared to know about the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – a/k/a the ‘Nazi Party’ - and their bottomless hat of slick rhetorical devices, subterfuge and demagoguery, he implored all in attendance to ‘come forward’ with the name of the Blog’s author if they ‘had any courage’.

To start, who said there was only one author? And what kind of ‘courage’ is he talking about?  Did he mean the kind of ‘courage’ he and his wife don’t display every time they forget how to type or say their own name and, instead, slip into that now well-worn tic of referring to themselves in the third person - as ‘The Board’?  When was the last time you remember seeing a Board member’s actual name on anything? I think Earl Thomas was the last one to courageously do that, but that was years ago. Better yet, when was the last time you ever heard a Board member evoke their own name in taking a position on anything? Or, would Stuart be referring to the kind of 'courage' evidenced by his recommendation to the Board in July of 2004, that any record of individual Board members' votes be stricken from all meeting minutes going forward? 

Just to make sure we’re all clear on what Stuart was asking of everyone, he wants you to be 'courageous' and turn in the names of your friends, parents – whomever – to him, even though he hides his actions behind the rusty tin moniker of ‘The Board’ with such frequency it's unlikely that anyone that's lived here less than six years knows him by any other name. Okay, we got it. And what end would such betrayal serve? He couldn't possibly be so duplicitous as to then turn around and use that information to better hone his effort to silence criticism and crush dissent, could he? Pahleeze.

Predictably, Stuart lapsed into attorney ‘auto-pilot’ and made the usual veiled threats amid vague claims that what has been published in the Blog has been ‘slanderous’ and very ‘hurtful’ to his wife. As far as the latter is concerned, having the world discover one’s predilection for being disloyal and caddy by way of having one’s own e-mail message made public, no doubt would be very hurtful. But that’s hardly the fault of the messenger, and it’s also a fate easily avoided – stop being so disloyal and caddy. And on the former, it’s worth noting that a statement has to first be untrue to be slanderous. We actually spend an extraordinary amount of time researching all claims of fact made on these pages. If many of the claims we put forth seem slanderous, perhaps it's because the actions and conduct we report on are, themselves, routinely so outrageous.

Stuart Sutherland, along with everyone else, certainly has the right and the ability to publicly deny any claim made by the Blog and have his or her comments appear, uncensored, on the same page as any post. An extension of courtesy, that is, by the way, about twice as long as they have ever seen fit to extend to others in any forum. And, of course, Kit or Stuart could easily request that we retract any post they deemed untrue or ‘slanderous’ by simply providing a convincing reason to do so. We consider accuracy of paramount import and would either correct or remove inaccurate information immediately upon discovery. But, so far, we have never heard from either of them - ever. Of course at times we voice our opinion on various matters, but we usually preface such by saying so and, there is the other obvious clue that we may, from time to time, interject editorialized opinions into our posts – it’s a blog.

But there was more entertainment yet to come. In a shift from the completely transparent to the just plain bizarre, the attack dogs asked for anyone that knew the author of the Blog, to ask them to ‘stop publishing’. That’s sort of a bone-headed request, if you consider that anyone who wished to so could simply do that themselves; our e-mail address is plastered all over this Web site. Yet no such request has ever been received by the Blog, from anybody. While no one can ever be certain what goes on in the mind of another – nor would one necessarily want to know in this case - it wouldn’t be a stretch to surmise that none of them have done so because it’s widely understood that one of the ‘golden rules’ of remaining in the Sutherland Socialist Workers’ Party is that one relinquish themselves of nearly all independent thought or action.

Here’s an idea. How about 'the Board' spend less time engaging in witch hunts for bloggers, pointing fingers at people and practicing their religion of pitting one homeowner against another, and, instead, spend more time doing what they were elected to do, and doing it in an open, ethical and transparent fashion?  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if they did that, they wouldn’t have to worry about who’s authoring the Blog - because there wouldn’t be anything to blog about.

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