Columns

Dear Editorbeing,

This article is submitted by Doc Logger(163/110) who was awash in mashed bananas which he was gumming in teary-eyed nostalgia about the good old days. Of course, for Logger, the "good old days" are anything that happened before yesterday but that is a minor semantic quibble.

Roll da flic, Zorch....

Dear Reverend Visage,

This may be longer than my usual bird cage liner because it represents a sort of milestone in my less than sterling pursuit as a Fidonet columnist. There have been miscellaneous articles and letters before I started sequentially numbering them, but this represents the 50th column that I have submitted in the format of letters to you. The fact that you are stuck in a Thai bordello with opium vacuity in your eyes, large lizards trying to eat your spleen, and vicious nightmares involving Henry Kissinger tormenting your every waking hour, are all of small consequence to me. I've already become independently wealthy by selling the future rights to your brain. Surprisingly, the Smithsonian Institute was outbid by a small tribe in Borneo who claimed that it must represent the largest earthly repository of pure Ibogaine.

I meant to start off with something sentimentally touching like "Roll da flic, Zorch, Tom, Thom, Dale, Vince, Tim, Sylvia, Donald & Christopher.." In honour of all the Fidonews editors who have seen fit to include my weaselings in the esteemed Snooz organ. It is a great credit to all the people on the list that the Snooz at least withstood the slings and arrows of outrageous elflords and remained true to its purpose. It is not as if there weren't moments when Fidonews was in peril, particularly from elflords like Bonine and the occasional whining from Dallas Hinton. I have just completed reading all the Fidonews that have ever been issued and what a strange and interesting history it represents.

I'd would like to roll back a few pages and talk about the Glory Days of Fidonet. (If it isn't too much trouble, you may want to cue up some sentimental music...something that stirs the heart... y'know, music with tubas and all-nude majorette dancing girls.) I have in my study, a faded and yellow print-out of a chat I had with Bert Binary in December, 1985. He had just set up his BBS and we were discussing the concept of creating an echomail conference that could be passed between our systems. During the conversation, a spider strolled across Bert's monitor. The spider became a topic of discussion and somehow got named "Spike." The echomail conference became "Spike's Bar" - a sort of semi-fiction, roman au clef, circus, roadshow and irreverent conversation echo. I subsequently discovered that the echomail conference was among the first of what were ultimately called "rogue" echos. It propagated outside the backbone structure reaching Vienna, Montana and occasionally we would get strange and incomprehensible netmail from Australians who had somehow linked into the echo.

What made the echo remarkable was the the messages were creative, witty and there were hundreds of them every day. I do mean messages, and not the quote-'N- grunt vulture shit that permeates echomail conferences today. One of the Great Themes that emerged in that echo was the delicious pastime of satirizing the various presumptive rulers of Fidonet. In general, we chose local targets but since that represented the era where Tom Kashuba's many personalities reigned, it was a rich environment for poking fun at the morons.

Spike's Bar was where you made your echomail debut with the immortal line: "Your lips are like two roses in dung." You brought us Lucie LaFlamme whose short-short skirts and whose Franglais language was a great amusement. Out of Spike's Bar, five full length cheesy electronic novels were spun off.

So, at this moment, I'd like to hoist another glass of Ibogaine to Spike, and all his characters and friends who gave me years of enjoyment from Fidonet. It is an acute embarrassment that I have been reduced to an old troll whose message output is almost entirely devoted to poking sticks at dumb, confused Fido elflords. If I were honest about it, which I'm rarely inclined to be, I'd say that a great deal of my disgust with the Fido elflords has to do with the fact that their intrusions led all of us to get lost in the process and to forget that the medium is capable of magic moments.

The second nostalgic event is of a savage and ugly nature. I'd read Fido admin echos with detached amusement as the elflords battled with serfs, and as tyrants like Bonine stamped their jackboots across the noble dream that Tom Jennings had created. The only "political" inclinations I had concerned my absolute joy and wonder that a whole network could be created with anarchy as its guiding premise. The militantly public domain status of some of the early software, the lack of commercial domination, and the fact that it joined a world - were all things that caused me to marvel in wide-eyed amazement.

The event, which was 10 or 11 years ago, that toppled me from complacency was a netmail message from a friendly local sysop who advised me that I really ought to attend the upcoming Net163 sysop meeting because on the agenda was a resolution to remove my nodenumber for "bringing Fidonet into disrepute." I did attend the meeting and was stunned that the issues involved the International propagation of the Spike's Bar echo. This may sound incredible now, but the theses of the sysop who proposed the resolution was that Fidonet was a medium whereby sysops should be "serious" exchanging technical information or talking about computers or software. In the proponent's mind, there was no place or room for fun in Fidonet and certainly no allowance should be given to an echo which featured a spider who worked as a bartender.

Our NC at the time, a fellow named Al Hacker who had all the literate skills of a Bob Kohl and half the brains, took the resolution seriously. I glanced around the room and it occurred to me that the NC, the NEC, and all of the HUBS ran Mail Only systems. Not only did they not have human callers, but the only messages they ever wrote were self-referential commentary of how many kilobytes (it was kilobytes in those days) of mail they moved through their systems. Fidonet to them was all form and no substance. It was a mechanism and not a medium.

When I asked why the other sysops would care about an echo which went out on my dime when it left the net, or went by non-Hub routed means within the net, their answer was equally amazing. They said that only *they* had the right to move mail and only they had the right to determine whether content was appropriate. In fifteen minutes of insane discussion I heard enough proprietary declamations to choke a whale. It was "their net" or "my nodes", or "my mail Hub" etc. etc. on and on. Another social observation became obvious as I looked around the room at the various people who were laying claim to dominion over various aspects of Fidonet. In every case, whatever titles they'd acquired in Fidonet were their highest achievements in life. They were variously unemployed, low level government clerks, janitors, hotel bell hops - but not one of them in real life had either the skills or the education to rise to management. But there they were, infesting Fidonet, and like any long disfranchised class, they were hell-bent on flexing the only power they'd ever acquired in life.

Mercifully, the resolution to hoof me from Fidonet was narrowly defeated. The incident caused me to look at the Fidonet elflord structure and I realized that there was a stunning overpopulation of similar real-life failures occupying elflord positions. It is no small wonder that this collection of mutants tried to foist Peefour on what they hoped would be a somnolent populace. These cretins needed rules because they had no shreds of judgment of their own. They needed the lash of policy to inflict their totalist revenge on everyone and everything that they should have recognized was the only prayer for freedom they ever could achieve. A generation of swine, to steal Thompson's phase, burrowed like maggots into Fidonet's structure and gave viability to every sniveling, whining, social misfit who had an ax to grind and a keyboard with which to file a policy complaint.

If you have the right music on, and you squint your eyes just a tiny bit to catch the contrail, you can see the trajectory from Dodell through Bonine and Peace all the way to Satti. A lineage of wild peccaries who took as their anthem the sanctity of a policy document and who fiddled while Rome was burning. We have Kohl whose pathology is devouring Region10 and we have Bob "noted" Satti with all the management skills of Euglena; telling us that "they are bound by policy." It used to be that humanity was bound by common sense and the civilizing influence of justice. That, I think, was when there were people with the strength of character to make decisions.

The third rumination concerns my first letter to Fidonews. I remember sitting at the computer, filled with trepidation about whether I should send it. I feared that Tom Jennings would never publish something from a fido serf, particularly because the tenor of the letter was to swing large broadaxes at a collection of Fido elflords. To my joy and amazement, Tom not only published the letter but sent me a kind netmail suggesting that the whole network could use my kind of irreverence. Tom didn't know it then, but his words were like giving milk to a stray kitten.

Whenever I had doubts about whether Fidonet had fallen under a cloak of despair and sycophancy towards the elflords, I merely had to look at the netmail responses to my various articles. To all of those people who wrote, even the ones who wanted to carve out my liver, I thank you. To those whose writings in Fidonet I admired most - it is sad that most of you are gone, even though there was a consensus among you that writing for Fidonews was "proselytizing to gas station attendants." I dearly miss the energy and literacy that a fair number of people devoted to their messages.

Anyway, those are my flashbacks from an earlier Fidonet era. I realize that the last worthy windmill to tilt at is in the lack of content of echomail messages. I also know that my opinion represents a very tiny minority. It is infinitely ironic that in one of Fidonet's echo conferences devoted to writing, there are only a couple of people who actually take the care to write as opposed to barf back previous messages while adding their own minor trail of phlegm to the end. I've recently had occasion to read nine doctoral theses of people who were recently blessed with the title "PhD" and I was appalled that not one of them possessed basic communication skills or even knew how to write a coherent sentence. It caused me to muse that knowledge without the means to use it or convey it is a trivial pursuit. When I give business seminars at one of the local high school, I give the students a choice of submitting either a ten thousand word essay or four paragraphs of cogent and original thought. I rarely get students choosing to write four paragraphs.

In a couple of weeks I shall toss the cameras into my mid-life crisis car and go on a driving adventure. Eventually I'll meet up with a collection of friends who convene once a year to embarrass each other about past proud assertions that we were going to change the world. For some of us, merely surviving in the world is triumph enough. We'll talk about the novels we never got around to writing, or the fact that our art isn't gracing galleries across the country, or the fact that we aren't in politics making some sort of difference, or the fact that we gave up acting careers for something as pedestrian as wanting to be able to pay the rent. As a group, we need to torture ourselves with these failures of nerve and spirit. We also want to wish on our children the old resolve to go out and make a difference in some fashion while suppressing the fear that their generation will be riding the downward side of the asymptote where dreams and reality are implausible partners.

I've already written too much. Poor Dallas' lips must be horribly bruised and the batteries must be dead on Kohl's Speak 'N Spell. I must go Visage, and this has nothing at all to do with the fact the car is rumbling ominously with tanks full of nitro-methanol, *serious* driving music racked up in the dash CD player, and a need to get back out there to reset the edge.

Regards,
Doc Logger
Furlang Island,
South Pacific