The Gura and Others, Revisited

Posted on December 18, 2002 in Hypocrites Morals & Ethics Silicon Valley

Something else I remember about that night: a substantial section of people who pushed their way to be as close to the dais as they could possibly get. As I noted before, this particular cult believes that you can attain salvation by getting as close to the person of an enlightened one as you can. Something like the little story in the Bible where the woman reaches through the crowd to touch Jesus’s cassock so that she can be healed. Or to put it another way, the gura was like an isotope, radiating wisdom and goodness to everyone.

Her influence and the memory of her spiritual mentor, I dare say, probably had an effect like plutonium on innocent minds. Think cancer if not intellectual death.

I encountered the group in 1984, a couple of years after the sexual escapades of the old lecher were exposed. The room was huge and packed to the walls. The faces in the front rows all fixed on the gura, took her every word and gesture as a wave of goodness. They didn’t see her cruelty when she laughed at some of those who came up to see her. If someone had stood up and denounced her as a sexual pervert and a hypocrite or asked about her sexual relations with her predecessor, I can imagine the crowd jeering at the messenger.

I doubt that any could gainsaid the gura, either, on even the slightest matter such as whether a picture frame was off or not. The whole scene was profoundly undemocratic and, I dare say, dangerous.

The blindness of her folllowers and the complete silence about the scandal among them suggests to me a very cynical lesson: that corruption organizes well to protect its own because many who defend the misdeeds of their leaders have, themselves, something to hide. All those bright faces, I think: what darkness hides behind them?

What follows may anger some. So be it.

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Again, I speak as an exorcism. I felt that in the events of a few weeks ago, when I confronted a certain someone about her malicious misunderstanding of something I said and her suggestion of violence towards me, I saw pretty much the same thing. No one within that group took the side of me, the newbie. I attempted to walk away. My accuser sent people after me and then made it out to look as if I was stalking her.

This prompted me to tell her off, majorly, bringing up the alcoholism she freely touted on her blog. This person had misunderstood me, made comments that struck me hard, unleashed a gang on me which accused me of doing far more than I had. Only one person suggested that we were both out of control and suggested that we stop the fight. I immediately acceded to the request. I’ve waited two months before bringing up my side so that I might do so in a somewhat less heated frame of mind.

Shortly thereafter, there arose a controversy about a demonstration against the war. It was announced in the context of doing it in addition to going to the Queen Mary for fun. Others immediately wondered aloud “Well, what should I wear?” “Oh, sixties stuff.” It did not seem to me a proper mood to go to a demonstration. I said so, in one line of a longer article. This was taken as a personal attack by the organizer (who ended up cancelling the event down the road). She deleted my trackback link and quite hypocritically posted a nasty remark as a comment to my article. The gist was “Don’t attack me or my friends.”

I had another question about the demonstration. What exactly was its purpose? A few of you know about my experiences in former Yugoslavia in 1992. Less probably know that before that I was the volunteer facilitator of the Middle East conferences at PeaceNet during the Gulf War. (I do a lot of things for free.) My phone was tapped. I might have been followed for a time. I take anti-war actions very seriously. And I had participated in the demonstrations at the start of the Gulf War. As a result, I questioned the good they did. Would people go to the demonstration and then not do anything else? I’d seen it happen.

In classic pack style, my words got twisted around. First, they called my tone “insulting” which doesn’t mean that I called them “stupid assholes” — it means that I had the temerity to suggest that maybe they hadn’t thought things through. Not exactly a definition of insulting that would hold up in a court as slander or libel, but then I was in a kangaroo court. (That was insulting.) Second, they start arguing with me as if I was totally against the demonstration. This is another classic pack tactic: when you can’t argue with the actual point, make a straw man and burn it.

The debate took place on the weblog of someone who called herself “Switzerland”: she fully took part in the attacks. (Shortly before, “Switzerland” sent me a letter explaining how to conduct a blog war.) Another self-appointed “holy woman”. The first person to declare that he was losing it was myself. I said so and left. I put a couple of blogs on the back burners of my site (they’re still there) so that I would not be tempted to go there while I was still angry.

I’m the one who bears the brand of “not being nice”. They’ve done their job, it seems, of culling my blog from those in their in-crowd. I feel fortunate in having friends who not only retained me but have not sought the names of those who did this to me in some kind of reverse pogrom. It hurts to see these others praised as some kind of majestic saints on earth after what was done to me, who makes no claim to be a saint, but I live with it. It’s possible from my end to be their friends and mine, too.

I know I sound extremely selfish right now. So does a starving woman when the subject of food comes up. Those who have read my blog in the last few weeks have some idea of the shit that has rained down on me all through my life. I’m not a terribly good people person. I don’t defend myself well under attack. I surrender the field and allow the bad news about me to disseminate without saying a thing in rebuttal, though it would in the minds of many redeem me or at least make the way I acted seem a little less crazy and much more forgivable.

I’ve made one change recently and that has been to speak up about the wretched way I have been treated. I’ve not been a saint. I am not a saint now. If there is a God who has any mercy, I hope He/She assigns me to Purgatory because it is all too clear to me that I don’t deserve Heaven and I can’t believe that any deity purporting to be charitable would damn me to Hell.

I will continue, however, to withhold the names of my persecutors. I do not want to put other people on the spot. I’m certainly not neutral about what was done and neither are the folks on the other side. The moment I start naming names up front, I am asking you to choose. To tell the truth, I feel I would not be chosen if this were the case. I’ve already seen myself chosen out of many blogs in the wake of this and that has been by keeping my mouth shut and telling no one my side of affairs. If there is no afterlife, these others have seen to it that I would be put in the closest thing they dare devise for a hell. All in the name of maintaining a fantasy world of peace, flowers, love, and excessive servings of alcohol or nitrous.

I’m sorry to vent this, to tell the truth. But if I keep it in, it will kill me. It’s not that they will win if I keep my silence that bothers me: it’s that this thing will kill me. I’d rather be a living loser than a dead saint.