EDITORIAL ASIDE

by James Lincoln Warren

Early Thursday morning, I caught a flight to San Francisco, to attend the Annual Communications of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of California — I’m an officer of my lodge, Santa Monica-Palisades #307 F&AM, and this year was entitled for the first time to vote in this year’s legislative agenda. I was very excited about it, I must say — I love Freemasonry for many reasons, but among the most powerful of them is that “Freemasonry unites men of every country, sect, and opinion, and causes true friendships to exist among those who might otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance.”

Masons do not not discuss religion or politics in the environs of the lodge; we studiously avoid touching upon such subjects as may lead to divisiveness or disregard for one another on the basis of opinions. We have much more in common than we have which separates us, principal among them a common belief that everybody is a member of the same human family, and that the bonds of conscience and decency are stronger than the divisions of sectarianism, cultural loyalty, and political ideology.

Criminal Brief is not generally a hotbed of controversy in the first place. I have always endeavored to tamp down particularly inflammatory topics, because the purpose of CB has always been to encourage reading rather than to champion any kind of ideological agenda, and in particular, to promote the reading of short crime fiction, whether on the left like Dennis Lynds or on the right like Randy Wayne White. Bad guys and good guys, right? Pretty safe, you’d probably think. That’s what I thought.

I should probably explain that I am the sole owner, operator, publisher, and editor of of Criminal Brief. I pay for it and I designed it (with a lot of help from WordPress templates, an open source web logging program), and that I am solely legally responsible for its contents — but I am by no means the only contributor. One of the few rules here is that all of the contributors can write whatever they want without interference from me as far as content goes — although I do edit for style, grammar, spelling, and so forth. I do not, however, try to change anybody’s opinion on anything. (I must admit that Leigh and I have gone roundy-round a few times when I thought he was being too incendiary, interesting because politically he and I are virtual clones, but I wound up backing off every time. Only a fool thinks he’s infallible, and I hope I’m not that.) But even if I did constrict content, it could not be considered censorship on my part, because I am not a government entity and CB itself is my personal property, although I do not and would never claim the rights to anybody else’s work published here. The point is that I can legally control what’s printed here, and can choose what goes in and what doesn’t if I so desire. But that is not an excuse — I’m an American and I have American values with regard to free speech, no matter who’s in charge.

As a full-time writer, I usually spend hours in front of the computer, and at least a couple hours a day are dedicated to CB, which, after all, is a labor of love. But when I’m in San Francisco, things might slide a little.

Usually when I’m out of town, I pass the reins to Leigh, who in case you were unaware of it, aside from being a literary genius is also a genius of another stripe, viz., a world-renowned software engineer. In fact, he’s the only CB contributor who posts directly to the web without going through me first. (All of the others have been offered this opportunity, but have chosen not to avail themselves of it. That’s fine with me because I truly enjoy playing Mr. Editor.) But this time, all I did was tell Steve and John that I’d be out of town, and ask them to send their columns to my webmail address so I’d be able to post them while I was away from my desk. John actually sent me his before I left, and I got Steve’s almost as soon as I arrived. I thought I was set. Wrong. I stupidly didn’t spend any time looking at the comment queue.

This was a mistake. The comment queue is filtered by anti-spam software and holds up comments that the filter isn’t sure about for approval. This only happens two or three times a week, if that. Usually I’m on it in a matter of hours. But of course, this time, it happened while I was in San Francisco and wasn’t checking my machine. It caused something of a flap, because the commentator assumed I had deliberately withheld the comment on the grounds that it contained something I personally found objectionable. Well, I didn’t. Or at least that’s what I think happened; I’m still in San Francisco, and apparently Margaret in L.A. and Leigh in Orlando spent a lot of time talking on the phone straightening the whole thing out. As far as I can tell, the author (who, like me, is comfortable expressing things a little more outrageously than perhaps they warrant) later found out that I was out of town and realized that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, so in the end, there was no harm, no foul.

But it made me realize that there was a point here that needed to be addressed — because frankly, there are some things I won’t print, and there are at least three or four comments over the past three years that I have bilged.

So it’s only fair to you, Gentle Reader, to give you some Editorial Guidelines. Here are the things that will cause me to step in and delete comments:

(1) Abusive language and ad hominem attacks. I respect all of our readers and contributors; contributors are family, and commentators are guests, every bit as much as if they were having dinner in my home. Everybody who wants to be part of the CB community is welcome as long as they are civil and respectful of one another. Disagreements and strong opinions are fine as long as they are expressed with decorum.

(2) Advertisement and blatant self-promotion disguised as comments. I don’t mind if commentators tell us about their work, or even if they give us a link to where we can order their books, but I don’t want to invite someone over for tea and have him pull out his Tupperware catalog over scones. On the other hand, the regular contributors are expected to plug their work — that’s a one of the few perquisites I can offer them for writing a weekly column without pay. So buy their books!

(3) There’s probably a third thing I won’t print, but I can’t think of it.

Criminal Brief is a big tent and I want every single reader to feel comfortable in expressing whatever that reader feels. Although I may not want to hear all about your operation. Not that I object in a moral sense, but I really am something of a wimp when it comes to surgery. Oh, well.