FAME

Two good friends were comforting me a few weeks ago after their fondness for political street theater earned them a mention on the Somerville Divestment Project Web site. "Why can't I ever get their attention?" I complained like a jilted schoolgirl. After all, my site has been taking apart their arguments for years, and I have written a fair number of articles and letters (especially during this campaign) demonstrating how the SDP failure in Somerville helped crash the divestment movement nationwide. Isn't that at least worth a snide comment or condemnation as a "Zionist scribbler?"

My friends comforted me by pointing out that due to my general wussiness with regard to street-level confrontation, all the divestment folks had to react to was my writing. Thus, in order to get their attention, the other side would first have to learn to read. This should not be construed as a crack regarding the general literacy level of most SDP members, most of whom I'm sure are reading well above their grade levels. It's just that their unwillingness to read any fact or opinion that does not jibe with their worldview - even in an effort to perform opposition research - continues to leave them at a disadvantage, and continued to make me an invisible man to their little organization.

Until last weekend, that is.

While my oldest boy was finishing up his karate lesson and changing from his gi to street clothes, I returned a call that had come to my home phone from someone named John Grebe who said he was doing a radio show on the divestment and refugee ballot questions in Somerville. Given the hectic conditions of a juvenile karate studio transitioning between classes, I was only able to answer a few questions, most of which seemed fixated on the Somerville Coalition for Middle East Peace (www.somervillepeace.org), a group of volunteers that has been working against Questions #5 and #6 (a group to which I am a member).

When I got home and Googled Mr. Grebe, I knew my prayers were finally answered. For he turns out to be the host of a show called "Sounds of Dissent," a program dedicated to tearing the lid off the stories the "mainstream media" wont tell you, probing deeply into the issues of the day with an inquiring mind that, by some strange coincidence, keeps discovering that the truth is actually what was just published in the latest book by Noam Chomsky.

Sure enough, less than an hour after our conversation, this intrepid journalist was on the air, talking with the leader of the Somerville Divestment Project (a plan that, for some reason, never came up during our phone call). And much of their discussion had to do with that mysterious high-tech, Jewish millionaire (yours truly) who is secretly bankrolling the Somerville Coalition from his non-Somervillian dwelling in Lexington (home, it should be mentioned, also to the aforementioned Noam Chomsky).

And how did these two local equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein uncover my dark, hidden secrets? Well to begin with, they first visited the Somerville Coalition Web site (www.somervillepeace.org) and used the "secret" View à Reveal Source command from the browser menu to discover my name in the site's HTML header. While this was actually a remnant from the original source code for the site (to create the coalition site, I repurposed another site created to discuss divestment within the Presbyterian Church which can still be seen at www.bearing-witness.org), it certainly was a means to discover my involvement with the current coalition fighting against #5 and #6. Of course, the fact that my name has also appeared (uncoded) at the bottom of multiple letters to the editor in the Somerville papers, as well as the bottom of every page on this site could have also given them a clue as to my involvement with the divestment issue.

Next, high-tech investigative techniques were used to discover my secret location, in this case by looking me up in the phone book. Again, these data diggers could have saved themselves some time if they actually read my writing, including this piece in which I discuss my recent move from Somerville to Lexington (did I mention Noam Chomsky is a neighbor, as is Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for State Secretary?).

Finally, an obscure, investigative tool named "Google" was used to discover that, in my spare time, I also run a small high-tech company that was recently sold, thus giving the anti-divestment forces their source of limitless wealth.

Leave it to a seasoned media skeptic to connect three dots and come up with a rectangle (or, in this case, perhaps a six-pointed star). As much as I've longed to get onto the SDP radar, it was somewhat disappointing (although quite hilarious) that even when trying to dig up their dirt they refused to actually read anything I've ever written. And thus they have attributed to me the one thing I have yet to contribute to the divestment fight: money.

Not that I wouldn't make a contribution if it was needed, but in all honestly this year's campaign was done pretty cheaply. Sure we did a couple of direct mail pieces to voters in the district, but those cost no more than the 15,000 color fliers SDP claimed they had printed to distribute as part of their campaign efforts. For the most part, the rest of our campaign was built around letter writing, organizing volunteers to cover polling places on Primary and Election Day, whatever visibility we could pull off before the election, and keeping our fingers crossed that Somerville voters would do the right thing. Pretty inexpensive stuff.

But then it dawned on me that the purpose of this interview was not to discover any hidden truth but to manufacture a little bit of consent (at least among divestment supporters) that if they lose on Election Day it will not be because Somerville voters (like everyone else who has been given the chance to vote on divestment) have rejected their message. It will be because a secretive Jewish financier has buried them with dollars from a vault buried deep under his Lexington compound. The fact that Mr. Grebe (as well as the leader of SDP who I ran into on several occasions during Election Day) never bothered to ask any clarifying questions before disseminating this fiction demonstrates that it is more a tale to salve the wounds of expected failure, rather than an unearthing of fact.

As an aside, if my radio friend had read a few links down during his Google search, he would have discovered that I am also involved with K-12 technology education, notably the means to assess student and teacher Digital Literacy in order to inform technology education programs. And many of the techniques used to unearth my background (Reveal Source, phone book, Googling) are intimately linked with Digital Literacy research methods, methods which help students probe online information sources to determine their validity, bias and general value. Most educators in this field agree that students should be competent in these techniques by the time they reach the 8th grade.

My own Internet research has revealed that Mr. Grebe is in his 40s.