My side of the story

[fpb]

I am not exactly inexperienced in polemic. However, the most recent one in which I have been involved - the Blaise Zabini kerfuffle - has taken a form I had not expected, and that I think requires me to state my side of the story.

When you bear in mind that because of my being thrown out of a couple of people's LJ, I do not even know half of what is going, this is inevitably a provisional account. I feel fairly sure that there are charges going around that I have not even heard about, let alone had a chance to answer. On the other hand, even disregarding the large number of people I answered harshly during the quarrel, I think there are a few of my own friends who may not be aware of the background of some of the events. One or two things are more or less unknown to anyone but myself and one or two people.

Like many other fans, I was fascinated by the name Blaise Zabini, and built up a personality on that name alone and a number of stories featuring the character. However, I took quite a liberty with the character - a sort of personal equivalent of the American transfer student cliche'. Knowing full well that a Blaise Zabini in Hogwarts had to be British-born, I nevertheless made him Italian, and placed him in what quickly became an AU.

A couple of years ago, I had a violent clash with a bunch of people who confused the male name "Blaise" with the female "Blaze" and insisted that a Blaise Zabini could be a girl. This was a particularly unpleasant encounter, which left me with a strong feeling that the people involved were pushing a cultural-imperialist agenda which involved their refusal to deal with any local cultural peculiarities - such as the existance of exclusively male names such as Blaise. Another point (which was repeatedly ignored by the people who responded to the f_w misreporting of my comments later on) was that the names "Blaise" and "Zabini" form a whole, reinforcing each other and pointing straight at Italian descent, however distant.

Blaise turned up unexpectedly in theregoresyamum's LJ. I made my points, and the discussion quickly became heated. I do not, now, recall the stages by which it reached the pitch of anger it did, and theregoresyamum has either deleted the entry or made it accessible to herself alone. Either way, even supposing that I stepped over the line in answering someone, I find myself unable to do anything about it. I can neither access the records nor place any appropriate apology there. (And when I see reason to apologize, I apologize in public, on principle.)

In view of the quick rise of temperature on this issue, I decided to move the debate to my own LJ, where I faced an onslaught of know-nothingism and bad manners fuelled by a vilely mendacious fandom_wank report. Now let me underline one thing: I moved the debate on to my blog, and deliberately drew the gathering answer to myself, out of respect to theregoresyamum. I did not want to leave the impression that she had done anything to sanction it, or that she was personally involved. I knew that she was in pain with a broken hip and living with an unsympathetic relative, and wished to spare her trouble.

One matter that had arisen during the debate was straussmonster. This is a person whom I regard as a creep of the first water, who has treated me abominably and insulted my native city, and whom I regard as altogether bad news. I had the displeasure of finding her on the thread, and took the opportunity to give a short account of the way she had behaved to me in the past. She whined - truth hurts - and gave me the opportunity to explain that I regarded her as not nice to know and that I would warn anyone against her. On this I have not changed my mind, and will not change my mind until I see evidence that she has any understanding of why I found her behaviour so heinous, let alone any apologies.

theregoresyamum's behaviour became odd and, to me, increasingly hard to understand, let alone follow. Vague rumours of complaints reached me, making me uneasy, while I was spending all my free time fending off the hostile commenters on my LJ, and, incidentally, coming to know nice people and making new friends. Then, after she had locked or deleted the entries, she wrote to me a strangely muted letter, hinting without clearly stating that I had offended a number of people. Among these, apparently, was one person who had previously refused my offer to friend her - something that never happened before or since - because apparently she considered me a brute. On a later occasion I found her acting brutally herself, and pointed it out. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? Not, it seems, in her eyes; she had not been able to forget and forgive, even though she had been the one who had as good as insulted me in the first place. (How would you feel if, on asking someone to let themselves be friended, you were answered that you were really too violent for her?)

I realize that with the ending of that previous paragraph I am opening myself to sarcastic answers about this person making the right choice, and so on. That is not my point. If you do not consider me a nice person, that is your affair. But it also means that you have placed yourself on an unfriendly footing; and if you find me less than impressed at your behaving in the very same way you charged me with, you are being illogical and unfair. That is the point.

In response to Gun's letter, I said quite clearly that I would never apologize to straussmonster for telling no more than the truth about her; as for the others, I explained that I could not remember what I had said. Instead of giving me an opportunity to see what I had done wrong (by then the thread was already unreachable), she seems to have taken this as a negative - which it was never intended to be, except for straussmonster - and defriended me with a long and whiny public entry.

In assessing this behaviour, I have to remind myself that theregoesyamum is quite young, in an unhappy situation, and in a great deal of physical pain. And what is more, she has been increasingly placing herself in a false and increasingly difficult position in fandom. Essentially, in the last several months, she has been cultivating an abrasive, confrontational, foul-mouthed image, looking for online notoriety, making highly sensible statements in a violent, vulgar and unsubtle manner. She seemed to ache for the position of fandom wolf's-head, and when an "I-hate-Gun" community was started, she declared herself delighted.

Now the position of fandom wolf's-head is something I know about. I have gained it without wanting it, and apparently without effort. It is not something I particularly fancy, and I have said many times that I would rather quietly discuss music or theology with people I agree with than have violent online confrontations with people who hate me, over what may well be non-issues. However, something about my character - my foul temper and inability to keep silent or suffer gladly what I regard as folly - more or less predisposes me to be a stormy petrel. I knew it when I named my LJ, and I accept the consequences.

And if I do not particularly like the position, even my enemies will agree that I am sufficiently suited for it. I am capable of answering dozens of hostile or neutral questions on the trot, I have a cultivated gift for invective, and while I dislike rows, I love debates. I am 43 and set in my ways, and I am used enough to these things as not to feel crushed by the weight of hostility and occasional genuine hate that reaches me from time to time; especially when I find that it comes from people whom I would not respect in the first place.

theregoresyamum fancied herself in a similar role, but I do not think she is. For one thing, she is much too young. It took me 43 years to get tough enough to bear the knowledge that some people hate me; for most people, the very thought is intolerable. And for weeks if not months before the Zabini row, theregoresyamum had been showing signs that the burden of it all was getting at her. It is one thing to fancy oneself as an all-in wrestler, and quite another to have to do it. Insults aimed at you are not funny.

I fancy that the Blaise row made her snap. At a time when she was suffering in her private life, and already feeling the burden of widespread hostility, why should she take the blast from yet another row that she had done nothing to start? The pressure and injustice of it all grew on her till she exploded, defriending me and blasting me from her own LJ.

The involvement of another person I find much harder to bear or forgive. If there is one thing that friend and foe know of me, it is that I have long been an enthusiast for kennahijja. I regard her as a genius, and, quite frankly, I have repeatedly let her get away with things I would neither have excused nor forgiven anyone else. On a couple of occasions, I quietly deleted phenomenally offensive or foolish comments from her rather than having to upbraid her in public. Where genius is concerned - and she is a genius - I am a bit of a sucker.

In particular, her intervention in the Zabini row was so insulting that if it had come from someone else, they would have been banned. She declared, and insisted even in front of my firm and angry denial, that my reason to write as I did was self-interest - because I have written stories about an Italian Blaise.

I will have to give credit to everyone else who commented, even the basest: nobody sank so low. This kind of "ascribing motive" is not only the same as calling my reasons to argue corrupt; it is the end of any kind of argument whatever. Once a person starts assuming that you are arguing for any reason except that you believe in the argument itself, the argument is dead. You cannot answer that your motives are honest love of argument, because that road has been closed. You cannot set up another argument, because your reasons to do so will always be under attack. The only thing you can do is recognize that every chance of debating rationally with this particular person has come to an end.

Once again, I quietly hid this enormity from kennahijja and reproached her in a strictly private form. And the next thing she did was to go over to theregoesyamum's whiny entry about me and metaphorically pat her on the back, saying there, there, I have had the same problem with this person, he is clearly unreformable - and taking bloody good care not to inform anyone that I had just tried to give her a private lesson in ethics. I find this behaviour monstrous.

This is where things stand as far as I am aware, at present. If these things were reckoned by numbers, I might console myself by saying that I lost two friends and found ten. But that is poor consolation. I am very glad of the various nice, fun and interesting people I met; and I am more than glad, I am grateful and awed, at the magnanimous and open way with which ani_bester has waved away some past issues between us and admitted that she was not wholly without blame. That is a truly lovely thing to come out of this row.

But I regret, deeply and unmixedly, the loss of Gun and Hijja as friends. A friend is not a modular part of your machine, that can be removed or changed according to need; she or he is a part of you, of your life and your experience, a part of your intimacy, of your mental home. They are people who help weave that sense of personal warmth and acceptance that does so much to make the difference between despair and happiness. They are things that increase what you are, what your experience is, what you live for. And inevitable though I think - especially in the case of Hijja - the final smash, I can never stop wishing that it could somehow have gone differently.

P.S.: I just made the kind of discovery that usually makes me explode with fury. There is an entry in theregoesyamum's journal dedicated to this matter. It is full of things addressed to me personally, in a nice reasonable tone. I have already answered a couple of points, but by chance, and without meaning to, I entered the answers as anonymous. I went there today, intending to post a couple of points in my own name - and found that the whole nice reasonable screed, addressed to me and apparently expecting an answer from me, was f-locked against me.

Now I hope that Gun just did that at the start when she was angry, and forgot about it. Because otherwise all those professions of wishing things to end for the best would amount to the grossest kind of hypocrisy. Yes, I know that I can always answer as Anonymous, like all the people I banned from my LJ lurk and write in from time to time; but I am afraid that my self-respect will not let me do that. The first time was a mistake; there will be no second time. I will answer as myself, or not at all.

Comments

[livii.livejournal.com]

That story about the white labour has stayed with me powerfully since I heard it at your house; I've repeated it to a lot of people, and it makes a very interesting conversation starter. It boggles everyone's minds, but it also ends up stimulating a lot of thought.

/ot!

(Also: lovely work here, hon; you make some really good, reasonable points, and interesting historical ones!)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have a problem myself, not with colour of any kind, but with how frequently I find the offices of British public organizations - ministries, local government, etc. - staffed by people who are obviously first-generation immigrants, often with poor English. Private employers, within limits of law, may of course employ whoever they think best, but one would expect the public matter to be handled by citizens and natives - whatever their colour. This not only because one does not like to see the state employing cheap labour to keep wages down - which is the only reason I can think of why there are so many first-generation immigrant clerks and employees - but because I feel there is some sort of issue with loyalty to the place and people. After all, the expression "civil service" is complementary to "military service" and means, not just any kind of commercial work, but something in the nature of a service to the country and the people.