Posted by pancho from pool0048.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.48) on Sunday, January 12, 2003 at 8:29AM :
In Reply to: Re: Jackie e-mails... posted by pancho from pool0410.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.251.155) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 at 11:06PM :
When Jackie sent her letters to Jeff, I'd known her longer than Jeff knew me. At the time she sent them I was raising funds for the Hammurabi monument and CARE...the group Jeff was a member of that was considering becoming actively involved in raising funds for the project. Martin Manna, their president, was the first Chaldean to buy a maquette and he was instrumental in getting several more donors who felt reassured by his willingness to committ.
The letter to Jeff...filled with Jackie's personal resentment and frustration at not being able to make my hay while her orbs were shining, could have been far more damaging than it was if Jeff hadn't been troubled enough, and honest enough, to share the contents with me...give me a chance at least to make what defense I could. He could have believed everything she wrote to him as she was cooing and blowing in his ear at the time.
Think of it from his perspective. Here's a woman he's never met, calling him all those wet names...telling him she is his sister, that he's welcome to stay at her home anytime he goes to California, dripping ooze all over him in her capacity as the president of her club, a serious businesswoman, mother of two etc etc...and she tells him these things, these secret things she just found out about me. He had every reason to be alarmed...to warn Martin Manna that he and their organization had better not get involved with me cause I was a land swindling, starving, feed-his-family-at-her-door kind of guy...and I never would have known why they dropped away...never had a chance to tell my side.
Something must have tipped him off...or just made him feel I should at least have the chance to explain my side of it. And who knows what letters she sent to others. Martin Manna DID back off later on, and the Detroit community is so tight knit that any doubt raised in one person spreads quickly, especially if that person, like Martin, is such a pillar of the community.
If people slime Jackie in her capacity as a volunteer, so what? She loses no business as a result, doesn't suffer economically...her company doesn't go belly-up, her ability to care for her children isn't damaged any...and one more dance party, or less...isn't going to break Assyria...or get Assyria anywhere. Why all the fuss and indignation?
But what she did, the lying letters she sent, had the potential to do great harm and damage to someone's CAREER. You know, the thing you train and study for...the thing you risk your economic well-being on...the thing your children and family depend upon you doing well enough so they can have food and shelter. And, in my case specifically, the only damn time in 2500 years we've managed to do anything lasting for this Heritage EXCEPT gather in a hotel and dance our asses off, which may be fun but is hardly an exercize in the higher functions of culture and heritage.
Jackie promotes herself incessantly...the hours she devotes to volunteering are very important to her reputation. It is her hobby, it is her "thing", for which she receives a kind of pay very important to her. You will never find her doing anything significant because she isn't about to risk failure. I always said I'd rather fail at something meaningful than succeed at some small thing that meant little in the larger picture. Jackie takes the smallest, safest, surest thing she can find and works it, and works it and works it some more. Because it takes her fifteen meetings to determine something, she therefore believes, and wants you all to believe, that the thing was "real hard" to do...that you have a tireless champion in Jackie, when all you have is someone just competant enough to get little things done....and make a GREAT BIG DEAL out of them. Ask Lincoln.
-- pancho
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