Integrity, Imagination and Forgiveness, Part 1 The Ellen Show: Bullies Gonna Bully

Look at this tweet!

Ellen knows things about me that I don’t understand. How does she know this? She knows it based on a tweet. Ironically, the tweet she appears to believe I should have posted appeared elsewhere, much earlier in the day. I had never engaged with Ellen in any way before she tagged me with this content.

What aroused her ire was my mention of “radical forgiveness” in the context of the case of predator Oxford Bible scholar Jan Joosten on whose computer had been found 27,000 child pornography files. Despite that I had not been following this particular case very closely, I took an interest because I have been chronicling (writing a book about) child sex trafficking within the institutional Catholic Church for 12–15 years. This pertains because one of the forceful implications driving Ellen’s tantrum was that I was somehow soft on male predators. I was some kind of “Jesus is my personal savior” himpathy numbskull.

I had made clear, elsewhere that I believed that Joosten should never teach again, publish again or have access to a computer while imprisoned. I have been clear about feeling he should receive a harsh prison sentence; this despite that I tend to be an opponent of harsh sentences in general.

I have written maybe a hundred pages — publicly — about “child sexual abuse” (euphemism for “sex crimes involving children”) with emphasis on the need to adopt a zero tolerance approach, which, appallingly so, remains controversial in Catholic circles! (Many people, not without justification, hate Catholics, and I don’t know — because I do not know Ellen —maybe Ellen is one of them?) This has not always been easy. My family and I have been threatened with violence more than once as a result of my Catholic muckraking on this topic.

My twitter comment on the topic of “radical forgiveness” was pointing to the way others on twitter who had been using tweets to insist that the predator scholar should continue to work. Ellen and I agreed that this was preposterous but Ellen was too disregulated, possibly, to see that in the moment; so much so she was willing. to “die on the hill” of insisting that 280 characters was sufficient space to conduct an exhaustive discussion of the topic of forgiveness.

The question of “forgiveness” arises all the time in the context of Catholic priest predators. They should be removed from ministry. They should be tried as perpetrators of sex crimes in secular courts. Their accessories should be removed and prosecuted as well. Should they lose medical care, communal housing in their old age, pension money for food? These questions arise continually in Catholic circles. Although I don’t know the exact answers to these questions, I believe they have to be discussed.

That is the point. I don’t know the exact answers.

I don’t know Ellen, so I can’t say with any definitiveness, what might have motivated her to send so vicious a message to someone about whom she knew nothing. In reporting the harassment, I noticed what seems like a manic tagging problem. There was a vibe of imbalance. Sometimes people lash out at what’s near.

Then this dawned on me: Actually, it really is very simple. Fewer than 280 characters: Bullies just gotta bully.

She seems like an idiot in this tweet, but I promise you, she is not. She’s an intelligent person with a doctorate and a big job at University of Michigan. Her undergrad lecture I am told, is considered an easy A. Students who contributed to Rate My Teachers said she was very smart and prepared and and lauded her for learning all of the students’ names.

Ellen is smart. She sat in the front of the class. She stroked the right sponsors. She learned how use a university library. She mastered the various formulae of jockeying into position and has even given at least one interview on how to do it. She’s written a few expensive academic books a handful of people in her field will read or fail to read.

In two years of studying Religion at Harvard (where I, personally, rarely encountered the kind of “Ivory Tower” elitism — though others I know did!) I had never heard of Ellen. Nor had I ever been assigned anything authored by Ellen. It seems important to say, I came to this exchange knowing as little about her as she knew about me before excoriating me publicly. I’ll say more, later about the problem of elitism among academics who live little life beyond their academies. Many (not all, not even most!) exit academe bitter, and lacking the philosophical breadth and maturity to recognize that twitter is not a seminar they are leading.

Ellen’s remark is as idiotic as it is mean, but what an extraordinary mind Ellen must have, which allows for the gleaning of intimate knowledge of people she has never before encountered!

Should not even a thinker of Ellen’s (self-advertised) magnitude, having spent a decade or two in academia know how to begin a challenge to an argument using reason — and not a vicious, personal an ad hominem attack?

Ellen may be able to boil a thorough discussion of “forgiveness” into 280 characters, but this lowly semi-autodidact poet can not! In subsequent installments of this essay in-progress, “Integrity and Forgiveness,” I will merely scratch the surface on the subject of forgiveness. Stay tuned.

Bottom line. This was a mean girls moment. Ellen was angry. I was within range. She raged.

No I have never “imagined” myself as “an arbiter” of anything.

Re: “Hubris”: if all human beings have it, then so do I. More often I am accused of excess modesty.

If telling a person you have never met, or communicated with in any regard, that you know things about her she herself does not understand is not “breathtaking hubris,” then, really, what is?

Bullies are usually more careful than Ellen was. She pissed on the wrong tree.

“Integrity and Forgiveness,” is an essay in progress. This is Part 1. Part 2 — Coming soon!

MMS

June 25, 2020

This essay in stallments is/will be cross- posted on Indie Theology.

Read Part 1 of “Integrity and Forgiveness”

Read Part 2 of “Integrity and Forgiveness”

Read Part 3, of “Integrity and Forgiveness”

Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of the recently released GLAMOUROUS LIFE (Poems).