Columns

Dear Editorbeing,

This article was submitted by Doc Logger(163/110) who managed to spend a whole week at home. The front lawn of his house was choked with Ilana vines and a small community of badgers had taken up residence on the front porch.

Roll da flic, Zorch....

Dear Reverend Visage,

There were a couple of approaches I could take to the events of the last week. My first inclination was to gloat and assert that a victory had been achieved but in practical terms what has unfolded has more tragic dimensions.

In a nutshell, the events of the past week are as follows. A whole net in Region10 pulled up stakes and moved to Region12. They did so because they could no longer countenance the behaviour of Bob Kohl. When the new entries in the nodelist were published, Satti responded almost immediately and demanded of the Region12 RC that the nodes be removed from the Region12 segment. Satti went further and said that if the R12C didn't remove the refugees, that Satti would edit the nodelist segment himself. In response, Region12 prepared to issue an entirely new nodelist which would have corrected any editing attempts by Satti. When several of the backbone echomail distributors and the Z2C agreed to distribute the new nodelist, Satti was emasculated. For the first time since the Peefour brigands hijacked Fidonet, the sysops were able to make Satti irrelevant and refuse to be bullied by his idiocy.

Whether Satti responded to the speeding train, or whether he independently changed his mind makes little difference. The Region10 refugees graciously accepted Satti's offer of a geographic exemption which obviated the need for a nodelist showdown. Satti's lack of management skills as the issue unfolded are only a minor part of the tragedy.

The real issue is what became of Bob Kohl, who started out as a sysop, and who eventually held some of the highest titles in Zone 1 (being both an RC and the ZEC.) It appears that Kohl will lose both titles in the coming week. The question that puzzled me was: How could Bob have gone from being a helpful sysop (as accounts of his earlier Fidonet existence attest) to one of the most odious miscreants on the landscape? I think the answer to the question lies in the same realm that explains the behaviour of Richard Nixon. Both Kohl & Nixon lacked the sense of self-worth requisite to ignoring the urge for retribution against their enemies. They mistook attainment of power for the need to act responsibly. Like Nixon, Kohl had sycophantic toadies leading him to acts of venality. And like Nixon, Kohl believed that those who exposed his egregious behaviour were enemies of Fidonet.

Another part of the tragedy is that we have seen David Bowerman labouring in the Z1C echo, like Ron Ziegler, trying to justify the notion that *Cs have the right screw sysops because Peefour grants those powers. What is missing from Bowerman's messages is a sense that ethics and justice are overriding concerns that ought to take a primary place to a slavish adherence to policy. Bowerman was calling on the R12C to resign because messages from Satti threatening nodes in region12 had been crossposted into the regional echo. Bowerman didn't see the irony in the fact that only despots fear having their actions publicized. It is more than a little pathetic to see relics of Satti's regime cling by their fingernails in the fading days of their abuse of Fidonet.

I'm going to digress a bit and gum a few mashed bananas about the ancient days when I was NC of our net. I was elected in a fractious period where the newly foisted Peefour was used by every mouthbreathing cretin with an ax to grind. I campaigned on the statement that anyone who filed a policy complaint was de facto, "too easily annoyed" and that Peefour was not the law of Fidoland. The relevant part of this reminiscing has to do with the use and abuse of power. There was a sysop in our net who whined incessantly about everything and filed policy complaints on an almost weekly basis. This individual would dutifully quote every obscenity he found and then demand that something be done to clean up Fidonet. I truly loathed the man, particularly since he was one of the first in our net to quote every message like a crack-crazed banshee. One day it occurred to me that as NC, and if I accepted the cretin's notions of Peefour, that I could bounce him from the net. I was sorely tempted. The temptation and the fact that I spent a few nanoseconds contemplating action led me to conclude that the powers granted to *Cs under Peefour was a poisonous and almost irresistible slide towards the wrong sort of management.

Our net had a subsequent NC who wasted no time at all on using his presumed powers to attempt revenge on his enemies. That NC was eventually recalled by a sysop level vote when the excesses became too great to stomach.

The point of this reminiscing is that in nets or regions with no democratic traditions, the tendency for power to corrupt absolutely is quite severe. Both Kohl and Satti succumbed to the inevitable because they both slavishly adhere to Peefour which is a document which guarantees their isolation from accountability.

In an ideal world, Satti would recognize that he has lost the confidence of a large part of Zone 1 and call a sysop level election for a replacement. I have little faith that Satti will recognize political reality and expect that he will continue to blunder his way through another set of profound management errors. It has been months since Satti posted messages in the Z1C echo and it appears that he will keep hiding in his bunker, sheltered from reality.

I must go Visage, Bob Moravsik has invited me to play in the "Budfoon's Tuba Marching Band" and you know how insanely jealous he gets when someone disrupts his bottom-feeding frenzies. I shall make your apologies for being unable to attend Walloonetta's graduation ceremonies and explain that the amount of Kava you ingested left you immobile for the whole week.

Regards,
Doc Logger,
Furlang Island,
South Pacific