CALL ME SNAKE

Last summer, this blog went through its high point and low point, all at the same time. The high point involved getting caught, quite accidentally, in the center of a maelstrom, which led to my being contacted by journalists from the New Yorker and a prominent New England newspaper for information I became privy to as a result of what I thought was just an idle post here at Call Me Snake. The low point was the fact that this same series of posts had, without my intending to, enraged several people from my college, who claimed I was needlessly harrassing a fellow alumnus (which had been the farthest thing from my mind). I was called an exemplar of the “gutter press,” and my writings were labeled “contemptible.” When I heard that I had inadvertently upset someone from my college whose opinion I valued, I took the unusual step (for me) of deleting all seven posts on the subject–a move I have since come to question, if not regret. (More than a few observers have told me that, on this score at least, I “wimped out.”) At the time, I promised not to mention the name of the person accused of malfeasance–a pledge I have stuck to.

A few weeks ago, an article in the New York Times that discussed the legal proceedings against this person showed, at a minimum, that I was not too far out of line when I used the term “shady” to describe him. Indeed, as reported in the Times, the individual in question has since admitted in federal court to having stolen, over the course of seven-and-a-half years, 97 items worth more than $3 million from libraries in Boston, Cambridge, New Haven, New York, Chicago, and London. This is not to say “I told you so,” which would, in fact, be “contemptible.” It’s just a matter of setting the record straight, putting a few facts out there, which is, in the end, what it’s all about. Or at least ought to be.