A month after Dave Séguin shut down the Tea Makers for good, I want to examine the sins of the project, of which I am guilty of some. As with all tales of sin, a moral of the story emerges.
Dave was the best writer. How could he not be? It was his baby. Do not make the mistake of underestimating this man. (That also means don’t underestimate how he can hurt you, and how much he wants to.) Even when I was posting most days of the week as Fake Ouimet, sometimes, out of the blue, a post would appear from Alphonse Ouimet (“Ouimet Classic”). Invariably punchy, flavourful, and full of life, I wondered why I couldn’t write posts like those.
The obvious answer is because I was writing my own kind of posts. And they were not shite. I was the only Tea Makers contributor who did research, checked facts, and asked sources for quotes, all while maintaining the op-ed-blog nature of the Tea Makers. Nobody else even tried.
Plus I unfucked other people’s posts. I fixed their spelling and HTML. I repaired their links. What I mostly unfucked, though, was comments.
Actually defamatory comments were removed, with an invitation to rewrite (sometimes accepted).
Some egregious grammar and misspelling, when obviously not committed as a form of writerly intention, were fixed.
Personal attacks against anyone not a legitimate celebrity, like Strombo or Gian, were removed. In fact, later on I went in and rid all the archives to which I had access of every insulting reference to one specific person, who never showed an ounce of appreciation even after it was pointed out.
Let’s be honest and list the venial sins of the Tea Makers. These irritants didn’t have to exist; we could have fixed them at any time.
Giving Allan a platform. Allan Sorensen had exactly one defender in the Tea Makers demimonde, and that was Dave. He was protected by the guy at the top. Mob rule is an ugly thing and persecuted minorities need protecting, but in this case the mob was right. Allan’s intensely unhinged posts, at once paranoiac and obsessive, on the never-ending topics of Tod, Gian, and Strombo stopped being welcome, let alone interesting, after a month and a half. Of course he covered other topics. If only he’d covered nothing but other topics.
Allan is a complex case, living in the shadows and out in the open all at once and prone to starting up customized hateblogs if you rub him the wrong way. He blew off at least three invitations to meet and get to know me, while of course attending every Tea Makers “blogging summit,” and personal meeting with Dave, secretly offered to him. He once wrote me that he himself didn’t quite understand why he wrote for the Tea Makers. I don’t understand why he did either. He has a point about Tod, Gian, and Strombo. We just didn’t need to hear the same point over and over again.
In journalistic fashion, I gave Allan a chance to come up with his own posting for this page. He didn’t bother, but then again, I didn’t assign a firm deadline. (He did spread my invitation around to PoonGirl, who engaged in her usual mockery until I called her on it.)
Allan has run out of second chances.
Failing to crush Inside the CBC. It is a scandal, albeit of small proportion, that the national governing broadcaster cannot manage to run a blog about itself. Every aspect of it has been a failure, even at the level of basic software setup, in that blog posts don’t even show the date they were published. Tod Maffin was too thin-skinned to run the place, while Paul Mcgrath shows cowardice, reticence, and lack of judgement where bravery, forthrightness, and decisiveness are called for. And nobody else wants the job of running Inside the CBC, including the obvious candidate. Well, who would?
The Tea Makers should have exerted whatever force it had to ridicule Inside the CBC until it was shut down. I am not pretending we actually had enough such force, but we should have made the effort. At that point, we should have hosted a public discussion – an out-in-the-open blogging summit, you might say – to think of something new, then kept at it till we made it work.
I am saying the external, unauthorized blog should have conspired to destroy the official one only to rebuild it later. Very Schindler’s List, but imagine if we’d actually pulled it off.
Staying online after the strike ended. It’s been five years. I don’t want to live in denial anymore. I am willing to state categorically that the Tea Makers should have shut down, but remained online untouched, after the strike ended. The Tea Makers came into being in a state of emergency and, as with any extraordinary measures, should have been rescinded once we zapped the patient back to life.
The entire post-strike existence of the Tea Makers amounted to a futile crusade to answer the unanswerable: Why does the Tea Makers exist?
Enabling the culture of fear. I asked this already over at Inside the CBC:
[W]hy don’t we go back to first principles here?
Why don’t we ask why the CBC needs a pseudonymous and anonymous hate blog? Why was the CBC an environment of such fear that there was a roiling volcano of pent-up opinions to express but nowhere to vent? Does this have anything to do with the fact that the giant journalistic organization known as the CBC can’t seem to swing something simple like an official blog? (CTV doesn’t have one either, but is that the true standard or comparison?) I know that people who could do a good job of writing the official CBC blog wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Why?
Is CBC still so much of a poisoned work environment that people are still afraid to say what they think under their own names?
Are these not important questions to ask even now?
A cover story, behind which the Tea Makers often hid, held that CBC employees needed to be anonymous or pseudonymous (a distinction rarely understood) just to avoid reprisals. That might have been defensible if only legitimate Corpse employees could remain anonymous or pseudonymous, but in point of fact everybody could. Anonymous comments destroy sites. Comments in general tend to do that, but anonymous comments bring down the ship.
The Tea Makers affected the guise of protecting CBC employees rather than asking why they needed to be protected. In so doing, it established a structure – commenting without accountability – that undermined itself.
Enabling David Séguin. I met him several times, but every single thing we discussed before, during, and after my turn at the rudder took place in writing. Hence I not only can deny that Dave ever strenuously objected to my work there or tried to “help [me] through it,” I can prove it. There seems to be no end of self-aggrandizement and outright lying he’s willing to do when the topic at hand is me.
We are discussing mortal sins here, so let’s run through Dave’s.
Altering posts. To my knowledge this happened twice, both times to me. I don’t think I need to spin out an elaborate justification why rewriting other people’s work on a group blog is egregious and intolerable in any measure. Now, did he do that more than twice? I don’t think so. But that was already two times too many.
Destroying the archives. After Dave rewrote my posts and refused to address my private complaints about same, I deleted my own work from the Tea Makers. He put it all back, I threatened to out him (I should have just done it), then he re-restored the deletion. I assure you my removal of archives was never meant to be forever, and in fact my restored postings are the only record of the Tea Makers.
Why? Because Dave not only deleted an entire thread with a thousand comments, ostensibly because he added another discussion forum to the site, he later deleted the entire site.
While Little Shits™ hiding behind cloaks of anonymity pretend I was the worst thing that ever happened to the site, Dave Séguin is the one who killed it. If I may paraphrase the Mole from South Park, Where is your God now?
Inculcating a culture of personal attack. Little, if anything, bothers Dave. He has a quasi-ideological commitment to the mythology that the Tea Makers existed for “discussion.” There were no effective limits on the personal attacks the Tea Makers would host, including attacks against me and especially including attacks Dave wrote against me. If you support that sort of thing, you are, like Dave, an amoral menace to society.
We have no such thing as actual media criticism, and everything we’ve tried in the last 20 years – Frank, Antonia Zerbisias, the Tea Makers – has either proven inadequate to the task or simply failed. (Two of the three went tits-up and Antonia simply called it quits.)
Canada is run by oligopolies. So are Canadian broadcasters, with the CBC a family unto itself. These are families that don’t like to be talked about in any way they didn’t actually buy and pay for. Media oligopolies treat Canada the way the Irvings treat New Brunswick.
The CBC did not get the Tea Makers it deserved. But something else it doesn’t deserve is no outside scrutiny at all.
Meanwhile, in the genteel and journalistically responsible segment of the media-criticism market, Australia supports a solid, unflinching, yet respectful and popular crit program on national television, Media Watch. That sort of thing would never fly here. We’re much more interested in running two or sometimes three news-parody shows on CBC Television and calling it a day.
There is none. Barring calamity, Dave will never come back to Canada. In his shoes, I wouldn’t, either. He will, however, pop up from time to time, hiding behind a shopworn pseudonym, to attack me. The problem is I have all the facts; you read some of them here.
Still got a problem? Come over for a cup of tea.
Posted: 2010.09.15