Alphonse Ouimet should not have been surprised that I would turn the keys in unison and launch every missile in my armamentarium after he proved himself untrustworthy (also unjournalistic and power-drunk).
The Tea Makers has struggled for a raison d’être since the CBC strike ended in 2005. (It was then that people stopped claiming they “liked” the Tea Makers.) The blog was essentially dead when I took it over in July 2008. I then wrote 500 posts – one-third of the total. The Tea Makers has meandered from one purpose, tone, and direction to another since ’05.
In retrospect, the blog should have come to an end when the strike did. It’s true that CBC needs an outside blog or some kind of gatekeeper function. It is hard to defend the proposition that the Tea Makers was always or should have been it. (A recent development shows us how it should have been done: The NYTPicker.)
The less Ouimet worked on the Tea Makers, the greater the influence he tried to exert. (And from a distance at that.) The better I fared at running the place, particularly after the new commenting rules of last August, the more obvious it became to Ouimet that he was a third wheel. It became even more obvious when, by Ouimet’s own recent admission, nobody at CBC, including “boldface names,” had any interest in writing for the site. But somebody had to, and those somebodies were me; Allan; Another Year, Another Plan; and Patrice Nortel. (And Ouimet, under various guises.)
Several other facts surely became obvious to Ouimet, like “I’m never coming back.” I imagine these were upsetting realizations. When you’re too distant to have any credible basis for running a site, it’s gotta hurt.
It must have been an unnerving surprise to look away from his paying work one day last week to realize 500 postings had disappeared over the span of ten minutes. Imagine losing a third of your archives. Except of course they weren’t anybody’s archives but my own. Should it have been shocking that I would fight fire with fire? Because when the only Tea Makers editor who actually rewrote somebody else’s posts dares to limit that power to himself, something’s going to happen.
Ouimet’s years-long insistence that actively poisonous personal attacks are merely the sort of thing we do at the Tea Makers because we prize freedom of expression above all merely signifies that Ouimet lacks connection to the human animal. The CBC and its fans are not actually made up of Vulcans; protecting each other’s feelings is a valid goal of site moderation.
Ouimet is convinced he knows more about Web development than anyone in the room, but I have been online for 19 years. Even if he doesn’t, I know that every online community with any hope of survival removes vituperative comments. Tumours must be excised, a fact of which Ouimet is curiously in denial.
And here’s a bit of news for you: As ever lacking the courage of his convictions, Ouimet didn’t have the guts to just delete the Fake Ouimet account at the Tea Makers. He merely changed the password, which I instantly reset. Now the only power I have on the system is to update my own profile. What I wanted to do was delete all my comments, which are now being reproduced without my consent. A copyright-infringement lawsuit would be inconvenient for a man who cowers behind a pseudonym (now needlessly).
Ouimet’s goal is to shore up the illusion that he actually writes and tends to the blog he created, which has now regressed to an atavistic state. He can’t do anything to harm me and doesn’t have the guts. Is the converse true?