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Trial by Internet: An archetypal spiritual drama |
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 Marc Gafni could well turn out to be the hero of a spiritual epic—or, at least, a psychosexual whodunit blockbuster.
A rabbi and a Biblical scholar with several published books and a
recently approved doctoral dissertation from Oxford, Gafni presently
lives in Salt Lake City. (He anonymously authored “Spiritually
Incorrect,” an occasional column that appeared last year in CATALYST.)
He came to the new Zion two years ago from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he
led a large, vibrant movement of Jews who lived on the alternative
edge, beyond the fringes of organized religion. Perhaps too close to
that edge, where dangerous things can happen—and for Gafni, they did.
Talking with people about Gafni, a certain pattern emerges: Here’s a
guy you’ve hung out with, watching TV and knocking back almond crunch,
someone who calls up in the middle of the day and talks your head off,
someone who has the usual knotty relational history. He’s a friend of
yours, a normal, somewhat eccentric guy. Then, little by little you
realize that there’s something kind of, well, saintly about him.
Stories about Gafni’s actions lean toward the saintly as well: People
say they have seen him go out of his way to bring estranged friends
together. They’ve seen him take an entire room full of people through a
journey of laughter and tears. They’ve felt an atmosphere around him so
affectionate and wild that it sparks off energy most haven’t felt since
childhood. They’ve heard him speaking about God and human
responsibility and what it means to take care of others with a wisdom
and nuance that makes them search their souls.
And even wilder—they know he is the subject of Internet stories that
paint him as a guy who “harasses” women, a “sexual predator.”
Everything you observe and intuit about him says “Really good person.”
The Internet gossip sites say “Really bad person.” Then you get to see
hundreds of documents proving the Internet stories run the gamut from
distortion to out-and-out lies, reflecting all the most shadowy sides
of the blogosphere. It begins to occur to you that something deep is
going on here.
On the surface, it’s a common story: A coalition of women accuse a
charismatic spiritual leader of sexual misconduct. The stories sound
convincing. It must be true. The leader falls.
Examine the evidence in this case, and you see something quite
different: Years of recovered email and instant messages from the women
involved, some as recent as three weeks before complaints were filed,
flatly contradict their own stories. The messages show that every one
of the women was quite enthusiastically involved with Gafni on her own
initiative. What happened that caused them to band together and file
complaints of harassment? And what caused their complaints to do so
much damage? Spiritual politics, “victim feminism,” Gafni’s human
complexities, and the Internet.
The more you get to know Gafni, the more you suspect he is being put
through an epic spiritual test, what we might call the Test of Slander.
It’s actually part of the biography of countless other teachers whose
lives didn’t fit the “normal” social pattern and who ended up
redefining a spiritual tradition. Gafni’s story is still in process.
Perhaps 25 years from now it will be told as a saga of purification,
trial by fire and, hopefully, ultimate liberation.
In the meantime, Gafni—this larger-than-life presence tucked into the
compact body of a playful 47-year—old is living more or less
anonymously in Salt Lake City.
The story we’re about to tell has certain all too familiar elements:
one more example of how, in the Internet age, false accusations can
become as established as fact, and how a gifted teacher with an
anti-establishment bent and a bohemian lifestyle can find his private
life subjected to what legal scholar Allen Dershowitz called “sexual
McCarthyism.”
Rabbi Gafni—author of seven books, including the best-selling “Soul
Prints,” and a popular lecturer and workshop leader—was founder of
Bayit Hadash, an alternative spiritual movement in Israel. The
organization held retreats, classes and massive services, often
gathering hundreds of enthusiasts for Gafni’s celebratory Sabbath
services, which included music, chanting and dancing. His lectures and
classes on Jewish texts, and on the interface between spirituality,
ethics, sexuality and what Western moral philosophers have called “the
good life,” were not only widely attended, but had brought thousands of
disaffected young Jews back into conversation with their tradition.
“Rabbi Gafni was doing something that had not been done in modern
Israel,” says Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who attended his teachings in
Israel. “He was presenting the traditional Jewish teachings in a way
that revealed not only the mystical experience embedded in the
tradition, but also offered a powerful experience of ecstasy and
community. Most importantly, however, he was the first modern Jewish
teacher I met who taught that Judaism was at its core a path to
liberation.”
Born in Massachusetts in 1960, educated in a yeshiva (a Jewish
religious high school), Gafni began teaching in the Orthodox community
around New York City. From his early days as an apprentice rabbi and
youth group leader, Gafni had a gift for bringing together the
spiritual with the secular, working with people who wouldn’t normally
talk to each other, and creating communities. He was known as a
passionately committed teacher. He spent time as a rabbi in Florida,
tripling the size of a young congregation. Then he moved with his
second wife and two children to Israel, where he was rabbi in a
settlement on the border of the West Bank. In the ’90s, he emerged as a
popular public teacher in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, writing
books, lecturing to packed houses, and appearing at conferences and
spiritual venues in the United States and Europe.
Gafni hosted a weekly hour-long national TV show in Israel for several
years. In the U.S., he led crowded workshops on the alternative Jewish
and spiritual scene. He taught around the world, including appearances
at important synagogues and the Harvard Negotiation Project. When
terrorists blew up school buses in Israel, he presented a series of
spots on national television urging people to hold on to their humanity
in the face of horror. He has recorded dialogues with the Dalai Lama,
Byron Katie, Ken Wilber and other spiritual and philosophical leaders.
“Soul Prints” was a best-seller in this country, won the prestigious
NAPRA Nautilus award as the best spirituality book of 2001 and was made
into a PBS special.
And in a conservative society, he supported gay rights and the
ordination of women. His teaching pointed out the presence of a hidden
goddess element in the Jewish religion, and called for the re-emergence
of the feminine in spirituality.
A career like this tends to arouse envy—even, or perhaps especially,
in spiritual communities. “People would complain that Gafni took up too
much space,” says Gershon Winkler, himself an important Jewish teacher
and author of many books, including “The Magic of the Ordinary.” “After
he fell, one guy told me that he was actually relieved, because some of
Gafni’s people now came to him.” There appears to have been a cadre of
colleagues, older teachers and even a few students who wanted him out
of the way.
 Gafni’s
main vulnerability was his counter-cultural and often bohemian
lifestyle. Throughout his career, Gafni had several love affairs
outside of marriage. “I tried to push the boundaries of what was
possible. I experimented,” Gafni admits. “I sometimes chose a moment of
love over other loyalties. Sometimes I was right, sometimes dead wrong.
Where I was wrong, I’ve tried to ask forgiveness.”
During the period following his divorce from his third wife, his lovers
included a few women who had worked with him in his community, taught
with him, or served on the board of his organization. “I was working
literally 24/7, teaching and traveling around the clock,” he says. “It
seemed natural to be involved with people who were part of my circle.
At the time, in my hubris, disguised even from myself, it felt to me
that there wasn’t a moment free for anything like normal dating or
personal life.”
He says he kept these relationships private, not because they seemed
inappropriate or “wrong,” but because, like many people in his
position, he preferred not to have his personal life the subject of
gossip or attack.
One lover wrote after their relationship was over: “It’s easy to love
you and it has been beautiful to discover you, to feel you, to explore
you.” And added, “I’m grateful that we touched each other on this
path.” She then thanked him for being in “full intention and clarity”
in their relationship and honoring her “sacred autonomy.”
This woman would later file a complaint on the advice of a lawyer,
saying that Gafni had promised to marry her to gain sexual
relations—--a felony in Israel, where they lived. This claim, and the
claim that Gafni somehow manipulated her, is refuted by both the tone
and content of literally hundreds of her emails to him.
In 2005, Ha’Aretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, ran a glowing article
on Gafni’s work, stressing his belief that the feminine godhead and the
softer, more erotic aspects of spirituality need to be restored to
contemporary Judaism. The article was widely quoted, causing an
incendiary reaction among rabbis in the Orthodox community.
Traditionalists who felt threatened by his influence and provocative
personal style objected to his stress on the goddess in Judaism, and
some of Gafni’s former teachers and colleagues denounced him for
promoting “pagan Judaism.” The Wikipedia entry on Gafni credits
him—or accuses, it depends on how you read it—with leading the
movement to bring eros back into Judaism.
At about that time, and some say as a direct result of the Ha’Aretz
spread, a rabbi who had clashed with Gafni in his youth gave a story
about him to the proprietor of a website devoted to outing Jewish
clerics alleged to be sexual predators. The site collects rumors,
innuendos and complaints about rabbis, some of whom are undoubtedly
people who indeed abused their position. But the site is also known for
its maliciousness, venomous language, and for mixing fact with outright
fiction.
The site’s proprietor is Vicki Polin, who in 1989, under the name
Rachel, presented herself on national daytime television as the
survivor of a Jewish satanic cult which sacrificed babies. She claims
to have sacrificed—that is, murdered—at least one baby herself. She
considers it her mission in life to report those whom she calls “Jewish
abusers.” Ironically, the site so evokes the energy of anti-Semitic
hate sites that several such hate sites link to hers.
In Gafni’s case, the stories described two relationships, one when
Gafni was 19, the other a one-time encounter when he was 24. Gafni
insists neither involved more then petting, and that both were mutually
engaged. Couched in the hate-speech style that has become so familiar
in the blogosphere, the stories called Gafni a “known predator” who had
“molested young women” and included purportedly first-person interviews
with both of these women by Luke Ford, a former pornographer and a
gossip columnist for the porn industry. Gafni’s version of these events
is supported by two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gordon Barland,
one of the world’s leading experts in the field.
The stories on the website make no attempt to distinguish fact from
rumor, distorted memory, or skewed interpretation of events. Polin and
Ford painted a teenage romance between 19-year-old Gafni and his
14-year-old girlfriend as “child molestation,” and among other things,
accused him of changing his name to avoid his past. (In fact, Gafni had
followed the common custom of hebraicizing his name when he moved to
Israel, and always referred to his family name in his books and other
publications.) All of this forms the complex background for what
happened next.
On an evening in May 2006, Gafni landed in Tel Aviv after a 10-hour
flight returning from a teaching trip to the United States. He expected
to be met at the plane by his girlfriend.
As his plane touched down, he dialed the number of his program director
to discuss logistics of a workshop scheduled for the next day. Instead
he heard an unidentified feminine voice screeching, “You are finished!
Go to [a certain lawyer’s office in Tel Aviv] at midnight, or go to
jail.” Gafni thought he had the wrong number. He called again. The same
message. He began to tremble as he realized that something terrible was
going on. Over the next several hours, he began to piece things
together. A former personal assistant, who had been threatening the
organization with legal action over back pay, and who over the previous
year had sent him dozens of abusive emails, had gotten together with
another woman to discuss Gafni. They discovered that Gafni had been
intimately involved with both of them. We can’t know what exactly
motivated them from there. We do know what they did: They went to the
Tel Aviv police and filed a complaint.
Sexual harassment laws have given women much-needed legal protection
and gone a long way to support civil treatment of women everywhere. But
when a woman tells the story of a sexual encounter and claims
harassment, the man—guilty or innocent—will likely be in deep
trouble if he does not have physical proof to the contrary. The woman
doesn’t even have to seek legal redress—the complaint alone can
sometimes be enough to get a professor or executive reprimanded or even
fired. To complicate matters for the man, in Israel, unlike anywhere
else, sexual harassment is a criminal offense.
The women told the police that Gafni had, in one case, used his
authority as an employer, and in the other, promised marriage to
persuade her to have sex with him. They convinced other women, whom
they discovered had been involved with Gafni over the years, to sign
their affadavit. In fact, none of the women had been either employees
or students of Gafni at the time the relationships began.
By the time Gafni arrived in Israel that night, the women had convinced
his co-teacher, as well as key members of his staff, that they needed
protection, and cited others as possible victims. Members of the
community were prevented from speaking to Gafni by the women, who
claimed that he was a danger to the community.
Gafni says no one asked for his side of the story or checked any facts
with him. “It was like a weird dream. I had never sexually harassed
anyone. I had proof. I went to my computer for the emails I’d exchanged
with these women—there were tons of them.”
To his shock, a key batch of relevant emails and other correspondence
between himself and one of the complainants—his former
assistant—were gone. They had been erased from his computer.
Worse than a weird dream, it was now a nightmare. He had no way of
refuting the complaints. By this time, the story had been leaked to the
Jewish press. Though many people in his community felt that Gafni was
being railroaded, hysteria prevailed. Without consulting Rabbi Gafni,
without cross-questioning the complainants or checking into their
motives, a chain reaction was set in motion which resulted in the
dissolution of Gafni’s movement. Several newspapers published
sensational articles chronicling Gafni’s “downfall.” One reported
(falsely) that he had been accused of rape. Another (again, falsely)
claimed that he had made promises to marry five women. Within a few
days, Gafni’s teaching work and the organization to which he had
dedicated his life had been discredited and destroyed.
A group of Salt Lake attorneys helped Gafni recover the deleted data
from his computer and then carefully review his correspondence with the
women. “There is not a credible basis for legal action against
[Gafni],” writes attorney Fredrick Thaler of Ray, Quinney Nebeker, a
Salt Lake law firm, in a letter posted on Gafni’s website. “The
complaints have no merit,” writes Charlotte Miller, who also served as
Gafni’s legal council.
However, like the many commentators who assumed that the accusations
against the Duke lacrosse team were true, people moved to distance
themselves from him immediately.
According to feminist writers such as Dafna Pattai, Cathy Young, Laura
Kipnis and Bell Hooks, the key reason for this distancing is fear. In a
culture where truth is less important than perception, people are
afraid to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct, even
when they know the accusations are untrue. Associates fear liability,
or being perceived as not protecting the ostensible victims—two
consequences of defending the accused in a culture that assumes that
women or groups of women always tell the truth about sexual harassment.
This belief persists despite data to the contrary, including the recent
collapse of the case against the Duke lacrosse players, not to mention
the historic experience of black men lynched because a white woman
interpreted a casual glance as sexual harassment.
Feminist writers such as Laura Kipnis and Cristina Hoff Summers have
written extensively to expose this kind of “victim feminism”: a stance
which assumes that in situations of this sort, the woman is always a
helpless victim of male desire.
“His best friends basically left him for dead,” says Gershon Winkler.
Gafni felt he had no choice but to return to the United States to think
through what he should do. In the pain and sorrow of those first few
days, he decided that as the creator of the organization which had
turned on him, he should take on himself responsibility for the
dysfunctions that had led to the situation. He wrote a public letter
claiming all spiritual responsibility for what had happened. Accepting
the advice of a friend and mentor, he took personal responsibility for
the “sickness” behind what had happened and volunteered to seek
treatment. This seemed, at the time of trauma and confusion, to be the
only way to defuse the growing frenzy. Without the missing emails, he
had no proof of his innocence, and at that time he had no idea the
disappeared computer files would be restored.
Gafni refused any interviews and for the next two years maintained
public silence, allowing the stories that were circulating to stand as
“truth.” In the meantime, he began an intensive formal process of
self-examination and inner work.
It was about this time that Gafni came to Salt Lake City at the
invitation of a friend and teaching colleague, mediator and Zen teacher
Diane Hamilton and her husband, former Utah chief justice Michael
Zimmerman. Gafni was living quietly in a small home in Sugar House.
Soon after we met, he told us about a pivotal event that had shown him
both the depths of his fall, and the painful but spiritually profound
path to turning the pain into compassion.
He had gone several times to Sabbath dinners at the house of a local
family, mainly for the sake of experiencing community. One night, the
host took him aside. “One of our guests read the Internet and says she
can’t sit at the table with you. I know it’s not true, but she thinks
you are a child molester,” he told Gafni. “I have to ask you to leave
and not come back. I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”
Gafni realized that he—who just six months before would have been an
honored guest at such a gathering—was in essence a pariah. “I was
stunned at first to realize that people were looking at me through the
lens of a hate site, and couldn’t see who I am,” he said. “That night,
I was up all night, meditating about it, awash in agonized tears.
Suddenly, in the midst of my grief, this profound feeling of joy came
over me. In Hebrew wisdom, we speak of how the divine feminine, the
Shekhinah, has been exiled by God, and lives as hidden sparks inside
human souls. I realized that I was participating in the pain of the
exiled Shekhinah, the sorrow of the divine feminine thrown out of the
kingdom. I, like her, was wrongly exiled and sat in dust and ashes. We
were together. As I realized this, my heart became so ecstatic that I
began to dance.
“Then I remembered the hidden teaching about the old Hassidic masters.
These famous rabbis would sometimes discard their robes and wander as
beggars through the villages of Western Europe, knocking on the doors
of wealthy devotees. Invariably, they would be thrown out by people
who, if they had seen them in full regalia, would have honored them.
“It all fit together for me then.
“I had spent my life seeking after the goddess, trying to return the
feminine to her place…and that in some extreme sense the Shekhinah was
testing my love, and she had hurt me because in some sense I hadn’t
seen something about her. These relationships had hurt women I loved.
Even while she was hurting me, she was embracing me. And I was here on
the back roads of Utah to discover something about the divine feminine
so that I might speak of her in new ways. I danced in real ecstasy for
hours on end.”
Gafni later shared the incident with his friend, Brother David
Stendl-Rast, who was reminded of an anecdote about Saint Francis: A
disciple once asked, “What would be for you the most perfect joy?”
Francis replied that for him, perfect joy would be to seek shelter in a
house, be rejected and thrown out, and left to lie in the mud with the
dogs.
Gafni says this teaching, which might have seemed wildly extreme and
weird to him previously, actually described the profound spiritual
opportunity that he had begun to see in this moment of his life. So
along with examining his part in what he called the “contribution
system” that had created this situation, and the qualities in himself
that needed to change, Gafni also began a powerful inner journey into
the subtleties of the masculine-feminine relationship.
“Sexuality creates wounds—sometimes mortal ones,” he writes in an
unpublished essay called “The Wounds of Love.” “But if we learn to live
wide open even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its
own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are
desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness even when you
are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.”
Along with his inner work, Gafni began collecting documentary evidence
to prove the falsity of the claims against him. He took polygraph tests
with internationally recognized polygraph expert Gordon Barland which
fully supported his assertion that the relationships with these women
had been mutual, and had not resulted from any deception or
inappropriate deployment of power on Gafni’s part.
He underwent an extensive psychological evaluation with three
independent evaluators. Their conclusions and his own were summarized
by by Paul J. Goodberg, M.A.: “I am convinced that Rabbi Gafni never
abusively hurt or exploited anyone. He is completely reputable.”
Ray, Quinney Nebeker turned his computer over to PeakSpan, LLC, a Salt
Lake data recovery firm, which recovered valuable information and
proved data had been intentionally removed.
“Of course, I regret with all my heart that anyone experienced hurt
through their relationship with me. And, remember what Bono sings? ‘We
hurt each other and we do it again.’ The key is what we do with our
hurt,” Gafni says. “But what I most deeply regret is that I allowed
myself to jeopardize the work we were doing by engaging in these
relationships. I believed that what we were doing was sharing love, and
that therefore there was nothing ethically, and certainly not legally,
wrong. I still believe that. But I also recognize that a spiritual
teacher has to hold strong boundaries around his personal life. Even
mutual relationships with powerful and autonomous women are a problem
for a public teacher. Moreover, in retrospect, our relationship did not
serve the highest growth of these women; it endangered our movement and
let down my supporters, friends and partners. In that sense—although
I was unconscious of it at the time—they were unethical relationships
and I regret that deeply.”
But even by Israel’s strict standard, in no way did he break the law.
Gafni has contracts for several new books and is beginning to teach
again. He has been invited to create and host a documentary movie that
uses the frame of his story to look into contemporary sexual and
spiritual politics, and how rumor, innuendo and hysteria can destroy a
life. And to show how a life can be rebuilt in love without bitterness.
Most of all, he seems committed to helping foster a social justice
movement that works to end genocide, human trafficking and sexual
slavery in the world. Gafni seems determined not to attack his
accusers, unless they leave him with no choice, but rather to
facilitate healing.
“It is the challenge of the spiritual practitioner,” says Diane Musho
Hamilton, “and especially that of a teacher, to become intimate with
the processes of life and death, of destruction and of transformation.
In this way, everything that arises, whether it appears as good or bad,
right or wrong, fair or unjust, is regarded as the path. To walk it
requires great fearlessness, an abundance of compassion, a willingness
to accept blame, and the offering of forgiveness.”
Sally Kempton, a former journalist, leading spiritual teacher and
second wave feminist was asked what good might come from this story.
She responded, “Marc has gone through a deep evolution. He will be an
even deeper, better teacher in the second half of his life than he was
in the first. The question is, can the people involved move from
victimhood to power and responsibility? If they can, then Marc, the
women, and all the shadowy players behind the scenes, will offer us
great hope for healing in our world.”
The third act of this drama has yet to be written. Can this spiritual
teacher come back from the dead? The answer is most likely “yes,” due
to Gafni’s unflagging persistence. Did the obloquy and ignominy of the
last two years break his spirit? No, though it has left some scars.
Yet, throughout the whole of this nightmare, in circumstances that
could easily, and forgivably, break the spirit of nearly any other
person, Gafni has managed to hold onto his chronic optimism and genuine
love for humanity.
Jeff Bell is a writer, part-time indie filmmaker, musician, wonk and
political consultant. He is the former Democratic National Committee
communications director for Utah and former president of the Children’s
Justice Corps. Greta deJong is editor and publisher of CATALYST. For
more about Marc Gafni, visit www.marcgafni.com
Sidebar to this article.
On the ’net: Lies Live Forever by Jeff Bell
The nexus of the Gafni story would appear to be women falsely claiming
victim status, bent on exacting some form of retribution which, in
their view, matched the suffering at having not obtained exclusivity to
Gafni and his affections. That is the center and the catalyst of
Gafni’s current nightmare. But it is, by no means, the whole of the
problem.
Without the women who filed complaints against Marc Gafni, there would
certainly be no story, at least not a story of this depth and
magnitude. But without the Internet, and a few “move ahead at any cost”
bloggers, the story would have faded away.
What has both haunted and hunted Gafni is the relative ease at which
rumors and lies have been mixed with more accurate information to paint
a picture of Gafni as evil and predatory. Blogs index on the search
engines far faster than then traditional websites do. Repeat a phrase
or a name, over and over again, link it to other blogs, stories and
other articles, and it jumps to the top of the search results in a
short amount of time.
Take a moment and think about search engine results. The majority of
Internet users look no deeper than the first couple of pages of their
search results. Top searches have a false weight of authority that can
easily lead a reader to unconsciously lend credibility where none
should exist.
The strange union of self-proclaimed advocate for The Awareness Center,
Vicki Polin, and porn industry gossip blogger Luke Ford and their
mutual effort to assail the reputation of Rabbi Gafni, and to continue
those attacks despite the lack of anything new to write about, is
bizarre at best and nefarious at worst.
A vocal member of the Memory Recovery Movement, which ruined thousands
of lives in the 1980s, Vicki Polin has wrapped a skein of
respectability around herself that, when viewed through the prism of
her attacks on Gafni, seems patently false and hypocritical.
Polin maintains that she is the child of Satanic Jews who raped her on
a regular basis and made her eat her own babies. She now claims to be a
victim’s advocate; but her advocacy seems to have taken all the aspects
of vigilante misanthrope, and the power of the blog is her weapon.
Polin has a singular focus to not only expose, but to destroy the life
and reputation of whatever person that falls into her sights,
regardless of facts. Any Google search on her name serves up a fairly
even return of Polin’s attacks on rabbinical leaders, and pages written
by victims of Polin’s tactics.
Luke Ford has made a living as one of the world’s foremost porn
industry gossip columnists and, over the years, has owned and operated
several different sites full of lewd pictures, stories and first person
familiarity with the adult film industry. Ford also has an alter ego in
which he calls himself “Luke Ford: your moral leader,” and represents
himself as a beacon of decency and Jewish activism.
Somehow, Ford and Polin have become compatriots and often work together
in boosting their ratings. The cross-indexing between these two and
their blogs has, most especially in the area of posts about Gafni and
other Jewish leaders, helped push them further and further upward
until, for the last two years, they’ve had ownership of the first page
of most engines when their targets’ names were searched.
What emerges on the Internet is a false image, based on rumor,
presented as fact; all in opposition of the axiom “innocent until
proven guilty.”
What makes Gafni’s story so interesting to me is not so much that, with
hundreds of pages of evidence that exonerate him from these false
allegations, he can clear his name in a fair-minded setting, but, on
the Internet, it will take him years of exhaustive effort and money to
balance his innocence against the two-year head start of those who
claim he’s guilty.
Despite the potential to harm, blogging is the quintessential and
idyllic evolution of American and international freedom of expression.
The growing influence of blogs and bloggers over the last handful of
years speaks volumes about dissatisfaction with the media and generic
culture. There also seems to be a need, sometimes nearing addiction,
for mass distribution of self-expression held by these exhibitionists
of the written word. The acceptance as “meaningful” granted to them by
their own ever-expanding membership roster fuels the rapid growth of
this amateur medium.
I wrote my first blog post in 1996; long before, in time measured by
Internet standards, the word “weblog” or “blog” was universally known
and accepted into the mainstream lexicon. At the time, some were
calling the very public self-publishing of one’s own opinions,
criticisms, thoughts and life stories to the Internet a “vanity page,”
an “online journal.”
My early posts were mostly lengthy, often ranting missives about
politics with a lot of time, effort and kilobytes dumped into the 1996
Presidential race. It wasn’t long before I received calls, during
political primary season, from two different Republican campaigns
asking who I was, who I worked for and what my website was about. They
didn’t like my analysis and they wanted me to stop.
These two different campaign representatives could not wrap their heads
around the idea that I was just a guy, sitting in his Denver basement,
self-publishing his opinions and analysis on the field of Republican
candidates fighting for the GOP nomination. While the number of readers
I had at the time would be laughable by today’s standards, in 1996 it
was enough to garner the attention of two presidential nomination
campaigns.
There is power in the written word and that power is intensified when
any person, from any background, can release those words, unfettered
and unregulated, into the world for anyone to digest.
Telling the truth, no matter how partisan your opinion, is an awesome
responsibility, if you choose to view it that way. As the community of
bloggers and online journalists continues to grow, so, too, do the
numbers of the nefarious, the deluded and the predatory. For every
handful of personal, political, entertainment or technology blogs
online, whatever their motivation may be, there are always some who use
their writing for some form of gain at the expense of others. That
would appear to be the case regarding Gafni.
Reputation has always been a fragile thing, but the future of
reputation is uncertain. Blogs have emerged as a quick, cheap and
anonymous means of mass communication that can be used to further an
agenda, talk about politics, share pictures of your family picnic or a
weapon to destroy someone else’s life. Things on the Internet never go
away. Once you’ve been dragged through the mud, no matter how innocent
you may be, somewhere, on the Internet, you’re guilty forever.
Jeff Bell is the author of JMBell.org, one of the highest rated political blogs in Utah.
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