Personally, Jon, I'm sick to death of him. I can handle his attacks on me
personally--to quote Larry Leitner, he's not anything close to a validating
agent in my life--but to watch him start inflicting this abuse on students
and new Ph.D.s is galling almost beyond my tolerance. And yet I feel in a
particularly poor position to suggest anything smacking of censorship,
which could boomerang in reinforcing a view of me as some Hitlerian figure
and other mailbase participants as my storm troopers. Obviously, Bill has
formed his own impermeable conclusions about the PCP community, but I am
concerned about the impressions of an untold number of others who could
take such action as evidence for his construction of events. And so I
remain torn.
Yet, as you point out, there are clear casualties in his reign of terror.
The mailbase itself is one; it has virtually been hijacked as a medium of
communication for the last month by one man, who has bullied others into
elevating him to a position of prominence, a charge that he ironically has
laid at the feet of others. I personally know several people who have
resigned from the mailbase, some of whom--like Ruth Anderson in New
Zealand--were dependent upon it for their major sense of connection to the
PCP world. Anyone who has read Bill's postings over the last month can
surely have little doubt about the reason for any marginalization he has
suffered in his life--he seems almost to demand it as a perverse validation
for his martyrdom and "truth warrior" identity--but the fact that he is
contributing to the marginalization of others who are cutting themselves
off from the mailbase specifically or PCP generally is a cause for great
concern. I have come within a heartbeat of unsubscribing from the mailbase
myself any number of times, and I'm very close to doing so again.
All of this is to say passionately that I share your frustration, and want
to contribute to some constructive solution to the problem. Any ideas
that you have as to how this blight can be handled, I'd be happy to hear.
If my relative restraint has abetted his torturing others, I'm deeply
sorry.
Bob N.
Robert A. Neimeyer, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152
(901) 678-4680
FAX (901) 678-2579
neimeyerra@MSUVX1.MEMPHIS.EDU
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