Dear actiongrl,

Sorry I've taken so long to respond. Things have been a little busy over here. There really isn't much to tell. What I saw over on BM-Chicago became strange very quickly, I lost interest, and I left.

My little issue began when Adania asked how to unsubscribe. This was not an entirely unreasonable question for her to ask, since people had been having real problems with the Yahoo login. The good news was that the eGroups site in Japan still hadn't been converted yet. (It still hasn't been). The bad news was that she was under the impression that there was still an active moderator at bm-chicago. If that was the case, then, sure enough, he could have unsubscribed her, no problem. But, unknown to her, such was not the case.

Mr. Buckman will, no doubt, try to defend himself by saying that he acknowledged not being the list owner. This, at best, is a half-truth. That acknowledgement had come some weeks back around the time he made the bizarre claim that everybody on the bm-chicago list enjoyed moderator status. Of course this was so far from being true as to leave people blinking in astonishment. This acknowledgment was also pre-burn, and buried hundreds of posts back. Far more recently, Mr. Buckman made a post in which he announced that he was thinking of throwing somebody off of bm-chicago. This is something that only a moderator or list owner can do, so Adania's apparent misunderstanding was a reasonable one.

However, looking back over the list, it quickly became clear that Mr. Buckman did not enjoy the authority he was trying to convince us that he had. For example, as early as July, he had made an announcement that he was setting up a new homepage for bm-chicago. Months later, no webpage, no change of the settings so that visitors would be referred anywhere for information, not even to his own e-mail address. In fact, there was no sign that he could change group settings at all. He would announce his intention to throw somebody off the list, and days later, the person was still there. Even before digging through the archives brought up Mr. Buckman's admission that he didn't own the list (but none that he wasn't even a moderator), the reality of the situation had become clear.

Adania was left sitting there, waiting for something that simply wasn't going to happen. Worse still, there was no telling when the Japan eGroups site would be Yahoo-converted, especially since almost all of the other national eGroups sites already had been, in rapid succession. Yahoo's software had had serious problems handling lists with hyphenated names. For example, letters to the owners of such lists had often been returned with error messages warning the sender to not crosspost a letter to the owner of more than one list and announcing that the letter had failed to post. Adania, if she wanted to get this done, had good reason to move quickly and see what worked as soon as possible.

I posted a response to her post on the list, telling her how to unsubscribe from bm-chicago, along with a followup telling her what to do if the first suggestion didn't work. Sending by private e-mail would not have been an option since test runs on the Yahoo e-mailing option had produced patchy results at best and I couldn't see which domain she was posting from. All mail arriving to me from bm-chicago is listed as being from "bm-chicago@yahoogroups.com" with the address of the individual sender stripped, and the domain is suppressed in the copy of the post that appears in the eGroups archives. Neither here nor there, perhaps, because everything I said was true, and if it made Mr. Buckman look foolish, it could only be because he had chosen to act foolishly.

Mr. Buckman promptly lost it. In a hostily worded letter, in which I was quoted out of context, Buckman admitted that I was telling the truth, but said that I was a bad, bad person for telling it and suggested that people might put me in their mailfiler/killfiles. He also said that he was going to try to get me banned from the list for telling it the moment that he found out who the moderator for bm-chicago was. Or not. It was hard to be sure exactly what he was saying, because it was so hopelessly incoherent. Here's a taste of some of Mr. Buckman's prose, so that you can see what I mean :

(By the way, my name is "John". Demipagan's name is "Joe". For the record, I had never been in a flamewar on bm-chicago, at the time Mr. Buckman posted this.

" Do what you want about Joe/John, he's been some help to the community and has also been somewhat of a hindrance by turning most interactions (present example in case) into rhetorical battles and vast conspiracies that are really quite unimpressive in their scope of insignifigance to anyone outside of Joe/John. So utilize your filter commands and keep the positive goo mooing. What beauty is rustling in the kneecaps of this city after tuesday night can not be stopped by a few lambs.

More soup. "

Oh-kay, yeah ... wow. How does one respond to something like that? Any meaning attached to such a stream-of-consciousness ramble is speculative, but as near as I could tell, Buckman couldn't conceptualize the notion that more than one person could subscribe to the same free e-mail service. Many times, offlist, there has been open speculation as to whether or not the peerless would-be leader was stoned out of his mind, as he posted or "spoke to the troops". One tends to think so, when treated to the passage below, from an earlier letter, in which Brian invited one and all to come visit him on the Playa:

" as far as where am i camping... well its still very fragile as to whether i will be on the playa this year. i have many a finger in different pies and at least one really fucking fantastic benefactor of sorts who may be loning me the money to be on the playa. may all the stringy porcupines drip cocktail blessings on his shiny bald head. "

We were speechless.

To be blunt, actiongrl, I have been left with doubts as to the man's sanity. From the standpoint of wanting to get the local public interested in Burning Man, he is a disaster. Take all of the negative things that people think of burners, and he validates them, just by representing Burning Man. Let me give you a few numbers, to put it into perspective.

Chicago, proper is over four times the size of San Francisco. With all of that population to draw from, bm-chicago at its peak, apparently had between 30 and 40 members. Of those, under Mr. Buckman's "leadership", only ten actually turn out for events, or even post at present. Those ten aren't even all from Chicago. Many are from Milwaukee, another good-sized city 120 miles to the north. If the Burning community here 'booms' any more than it already has, it will soon disappear altogether.

I could go into detail on the flamewars that have occured on the list, but I'd really rather not. This letter is getting kind of long. I don't know if I'm boring you by now, but I'm certainly boring myself. Suffice it to say that the flaming was mutual, Brian's friends gave as much heat as they got, and they pitched the proverbial bitch when they found that they were being out-debated. It would be an abuse of a moderator's authority to protect one's friends from losing an argument. Mr. Buckman was no moderator on bm-chicago, and he tried to do just that, repeatedly, through the hollow threat of banning people from the list. Yes, he did apologize at least once, but only after getting flamed by a larger opposition than he expected. The moment a still larger group of flamers gathered on the other side, he flip-flopped again. The only 'principle' he seemed to follow as moderator, was "don't make waves, appease as many people as possible". That's not moderation, that's cowardice.

Perhaps this has all become a moot point.

A new list has been set up for local burners. Yahoogroups and Coollist, like the Playa, are vast and have room for many different points of view. The Chicago Burners List, with its focus on local events, will leave out the career political backbiters who made bm-chicago the nasty experience that it became for so many of us. So far, only one person has been excluded from the list, but if somebody else dislikes how that list is being run, nothing stops her from establishing her own. The problem is largely solving itself.

For myself? I'm not even sure that I'm interested in burning any more. I doubt that I'm going to 2002. The novelty was great, but I'm not sure how thrilled I've been with the people. The backstabbing, the cliquishness, the dishonesty - I can picture putting up with that at work. What's the alternative? But, if I'm experiencing this at a recreational event, what's the point? I wish the people on the new list all the best, but I'm probably going to cut out of here.

I hope this answered your questions.

Sincerely yours,

Medius

"End of letter. At the time, in regard to Ms. Kopp/Grace, I wrote on the chi-burning list homepage

" I really don't know actiongrl at all, so I don't know how much faith to put in her concern. Past experiences with bureaucracies in general, and with the lack of straightforwardness I've seen out of her friends on E-Playa, has done little to build confidence. Still, let's see what happens. "

I was more than willing to give her a chance. And even if she didn't want to do anything, this still wouldn't have been a problem as I pointed out, as I followed the above passage with

" For that matter, let's see if anything even needs to happen. With the establishment of an alternative local list, this local problem seems to have been solved on a local level. If you're still curious about the letter I sent, though, here it is.

linking to the letter which you've seen above, doing nothing more than telling our side of a story which others had already seen fit to spread - the allegedly victimised Mr. Buckman included. Had I had any faith in this stranger to whom I was writing, it would have been betrayed : "Actiongrrl" sooned joined with her friends in dragging our names through the mud. Anything to distract attention away from the mebarassing fact that BMORG had overstepped its bounds, tried to do something it had no authority to do, and used its political muscle to put somebody like Mr. Buckman into a position of influence in the local Burning Man community in Chicago.

Coming up on two years later, where is that community ? Nowhere, really. Its events are still barely attended, and in fact barely even qualify as events. If you're looking for a local counterpart to the San Francisco decompression party, you're in for a major disappointment. The "events" here tend to be along the line of "let's have the ten of us drop by Dave's and Buster's and play really, really expensive videogames to show how successful we are. Or our parents are, as the case may be".

(More being added. Popped out to enjoy the sunshine)"