Resignation of Mary W. Matthews from active service to Tampa Bay Mensa
Resignation of Mary W. Matthews
from active service to Tampa Bay Mensa
May 2003
There is a much longer version of this resignation that provides painfully
detailed factual citations of exactly who said exactly what on exactly which
day. If you're masochist enough to want to, you can read
it here. What follows is a much shorter version that is still as absolutely
factual as I can make it, given my preference for jesting to mask the pain.
As editor of the Tampa Bay Sounding, newsletter of Tampa Bay Mensa,
and as a member of the TBM Exective Committee, I made a 35-word statement of
fact on May 14, 2003, that was incidentally somewhat unflattering to the TBM
Local Secretary [president], Maxine Kushner.
Maxine decided that I had deliberately set out to offend her, and her response
was to publicly attack my character to the general membership of Tampa Bay Mensa
at great length. Two members publicly rebuked Maxine for her intemperate “flaming”
of me, while the other members of the ExComm said and did nothing. A 19-year-old
member wrote to me privately, asking what on earth had gotten Maxine so upset,
and why was she acting like a middle-schoolgirl on a bad day? I tried to reassure
the 19-year-old about her LocSec, and in the process publicly apologized to
Maxine, twice, for having unintentionally offended her.
Maxine's response to my defense of her and to my two public apologies was to
send me a private e-mail that patronizingly explained that she had publicly
defamed a fellow member of the ExComm to the general membership of the group
because I was a malicious, arrogant intellectual snob with no social skills
who was emotionally unbalanced. In other words, like the typical rapist's defense,
I was “asking for it.”
Angered, I privately replied with what I consider to be the truth: Maxine
had behaved in an immature and unprofessional manner that reflected badly on
the leadership of Tampa Bay Mensa.
Maxine went ballistic. Privately, she sent me an e-mail so vitriolic it almost
caused my computer to melt down, all about what an evil monster I was compared
to her easy-going saintliness. Then she declared war, repeating her private
caricature of me in a public e-mail so invidious that either she or, more likely,
her close friend Dana Groulx, subsequently destroyed all evidence that it had
ever been sent. For a second time, two (different) general members of TBM rebuked
Maxine, and for a second time, the other members of the ExComm stood by and
said nothing.
The only public response I made to Maxine's one-sided vendetta was to state
that I would resign all active service to Tampa Bay Mensa — editor of the
newsletter, webspinner, and member of the ExComm, for which service I had prompted
nine nominations for Mensa's 2003 Publications Recognition Program awards —
unless Maxine responded appropriately within 24 hours. I thought any fool would
be able to tell that this was the equivalent of, “Apologize!” Maxine's
response, within two or three hours, was to publish a third attack on me, in
which she deliberately portrayed my calling her “beautiful” as “poisonous,”
my calling her “wonderful” as “back-stabbing,” and my calling
her “magnificent” as “insulting.” The rest of the ExComm,
each of whom knew the truth of the matter, said and did nothing.
A day or two after Maxine joyfully accepted my resignation — coming close
to singing, “Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead” — she repeated her
caricature of me to the M-Editors mailing list, to which approximately 100 Mensan
editors are subscribed. According to this caricature, I am an arrogant intellectual
snob, impossible to work with, and emotionally unbalanced if not downright schizophrenic,
and I live only for the joy of demeaning and humiliating others. Almost four
years ago, according to Maxine, I began a deliberate “campaign of aggression”
against her that was, as she had earlier told the general membership of TBM,
poisonous, back-stabbing, and insulting. And in a later message to the M-Editors
list: No one had demanded my resignation for my ugly misconduct, but she had
been delighted to accept it.
My ugly misconduct? Exactly what did I do? I made a 35-word statement
of fact. She attacked. I tried to placate her. She attacked again. I told her
the truth, privately, and she declared war. I demanded an apology, and her attacks
segued smoothly from caricature into deliberate misrepresentation of the truth,
which I believe is also sometimes called lying. I resigned, and Maxine continued
to publish the same caricature of the Evil Bitch Monster of Death to whomever
would listen.
I don't need this B.S. I'm a nice middle-aged lady with dear friends at my
church, in whose leadership I am active. I have a master's degree in theology
— summa cum laude, which I worked my behind off to get. I have been
involved with the editing of one Mensa publication or another since 1985. I
am not the Evil Bitch Monster of Death. As a writer, and sometimes also
as an editor, I get fan mail.
It sickens me that the other members of the Tampa Bay ExComm sat by and watched
Maxine wage her one-sided vendetta on a fellow member of the ExComm — just
like a middle-schoolgirl who imagined she'd been accused of being in love with
Carrottop — and most of them said and did nothing. Dana Groulx, of course,
joined Maxine's one-sided war against me and engaged in dishonorable conduct
of her own. She's a former and possibly a future LocSec of Tampa Bay Mensa.
How admirable.
When I resigned in May, I detailed in my resignation the misconduct of both
Maxine and Dana, and urged TBM members to vote, in the upcoming June election,
for the two remaining candidates for office, Barbara Loewe and Ronan Heffernan.
When the actual vote count was published in the August Sounding, Barbara
and Ronan had beaten Maxine and Dana by a margin of almost two to one.
I completed the June Sounding before Maxine commenced her campaign
of vitriol (at the mailing party for which Maxine could not be bothered to work,
as LocSecs are expected to by TBM custom, because she was too busy publishing
attacks on me and destroying evidence). Thanks to my own promptness, my
name was on the ballot, and I know that I received a minimum of two votes (my
own and my husband's) despite my having resigned and withdrawn my candidacy.
The TBM Scrivener, Chris Drumm, deliberately omitted publishing the number of
votes that I received in the 2003 election, although she reported every
other vote cast, even the frivolous ones. I can only conclude that she deliberately
omitted reporting how many votes I had received because the facts would have
raised questions embarrassing to Maxine and Dana.
And then, according to the minutes published in August, the 2003-04 ExComm,
knowing full well that for the last five weeks Maxine had been libeling me both
publicly and privately, re-elected Maxine to her position as LocSec without
discussion. Unanimously. I feel, to a much lesser extent, like Kitty Genovese,
learning in heaven that her murderer had been elected to high office by the
unanimous vote of those who sat by, listened to her being murdered and crying
out for help, and did nothing. Maybe I should have cried out for help —
but what was I to say? “I am not the Evil Bitch Monster of Death”?
Or, wait, how about “I am not a crook”?
I can't tell you how much it sickens me. I can barely stand to look at the
new, unimproved Sounding when it arrives, a pallid mockery of what I
believe I do quite well. I've won awards from national organizations for the
excellence of my editing and writing. I've won at least one award for editorial
excellence in the Mensa Publications Recognition Program every year I have entered
the competition since 1985. (I won two for 2003.) And that woman rejoiced that
she had vanquished the EBMD, who, she has always said, is a fine editor and
writer but way too mentally ill to be in a position of leadership in Mensa.
I feel betrayed by the people I thought were my friends. As a theologian, I
naturally think of the angry psalms and lamentations — “the wicked
gnash their teeth at me, they cry: ‘We have devoured her! Ah, this is the
day we longed for; at last we have seen it!’ ” (Lam. 2:16) The
newsletter Going Forward: A
Pro-Mensa Publication portrayed Maxine's one-sided vendetta as a “dispute”
between us. What's the dispute? Whether or not I really am the EBMD?
Whether I should have just continued to work for the good of Tampa Bay Mensa
and allowed Maxine to publish any libel of me her fantasy could think up?
I think what the dispute ought to be about is, What qualities of character
ought we to expect in someone whom we have elected to lead us? What forms of
misconduct are tolerable, if any?
When I was young, I had the naive idea that a leader ought to be admirable:
honorable, gracious, mature. Possessed of good judgment and a sense of proportion.
King Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Josiah Bartlet. And then came revelation
after revelation of immoral behavior in high office — JFK's satyriasis,
Nixon's crookedness. Iran-Contra, that lovely venture into vitiating the Constitution,
at about which time the Reagan administration was also giving quiet help to
Saddam Hussein and the seedlings of al Qaeda. The beginning, in 1992, of the
ongoing Republican campaign to transform Bill Clinton from a better-than-average
president into the Evil Commie Monster of Priapism. And don't get me started
about President Rob-the-Poor-to-Give-to-the-Rich.Oooh, the midterm elections
are approaching, and President Subliminable wants to be elected for the first
time when he runs again in 2004. Let's start a “Wag the Dog” war to
distract the nation from Elder Brother's
stealth campaign to eviscerate the U.S. Constitution, the economy staggering
under the most mind-boggling deficits in human history (“Let them eat TastyKake”),
and the failure to apprehend either Saddam or “Osama bin Forgotten,”
both of whom the last I heard were walking the streets of Baghdad, surrounded
by adoring followers galvanized into worse hatred of the United States by the
arrogance of the Bush Administration, all chanting, “Nanny nanny boo-boo,
can't catch me!”
We need hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for all this? President Honest-As-His-Working-Day-Is-Long
knows the perfect answer: Lower the taxes on those who control 98 percent of
the wealth in the United States. Yeah, that's the ticket.
So maybe I should stop moping about my unwilling “apodaemonis” into
the Evil Bitch Monster of Death. Obviously no one in America shares my delusions
about what qualities an admirable leader ought to possess. I have never in my
life published even one word libeling Maxine's character. She has published
literally thousands of words libeling me. The TBM ExComm sits by, morally supine,
and does nothing but rubberstamp Maxine's misconduct, and ditto for our Regional
Vice Chair. To take a stand, to say to someone directly, “The conduct you
have been engaging in ranges between reprehensible and contemptible,” would
be to risk having to take a little responsibility for one's own moral values.
Besides, our elected leaders commit worse crimes all the time, and we voters
pay them huge salaries anyway. The members of Congress just voted themselves
a 2.2 percent raise, making their average pay approximately 16 times what minimum-wage
workers get. But we mustn't raise the minimum wage, heavens, no — the economy's
in trouble, haven't you heard? We peons need to tighten our belts and eat more
TastyKakes. President Bush did not have social or political relations with that
man, Ken Lay. Ethical corruption is standard operating procedure, from the highest
reaches of our government all the way down to Mensa local-group politics. It's
inevitable, so I might as well just learn to “relax and enjoy it.”
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