Cults and Warm Welcomes

I've been frequenting a French table in Bloomington for almost 4 years now and while I'm in Philadelphia for the summer I'm attending one here too. Being a regular at one, you see a lot of people come and go but starting with a new group has taught me some interesting things. The most impressive is how friendly people can be: all you need is to have one little thing in common and a group of people will be very welcoming. I wouldn't have imagined that learning a language was like joining a club where you could go along to group meetings in another city and have people accept you straight away; apparently French is much like the Scouts or Rotary in that way.

Noticing this club-like-nature made me realise that someone had in fact pointed this out before but I'd ignored the observation. For a semester or two one of my professors ate dinner with his wife and another philosophy professor at the Runcible Spoon on Tuesdays just before our French table met. We'd wave and he knew what we were doing because he'd make use of the information in class or at other times. Once he described it as a "cult", of course he was joking but the more I think about it, the more I realise that it is a type of club.

The other reason why the cult accusation is not too far off is because of the structure. Rather than using a site that charges money as the two Philly groups do, in Bloomington we just keep a list of addresses and send out a BCC email every week. I first got that job a couple of summers ago when the organiser was out of town for a few months and straight away I felt the power rush. It was immediately apparent why he had been so vain when it came to the French table -- attendees were not just group members but his friends! I'm fully aware of how few of those people I know personally so it doesn't have quite the same effect on me. But there are times when I feel somehow influential: I enjoy being able to help people by sending an announcement to a list of 130 readers, even if most of those will just ignore the message.

All this makes me see how smart it was for the Australian Greens to have "convenors" of local groups and even the state party etc. Dividing up the power so that the chief only decides when and where the meeting will be held is a very sensible way to keep the rest of the power for rank-and-file members. So far I've being using ridiculously grandiose titles for the French table, describing the former organiser as a king, myself as his steward and Cindy as my lieutenant. (Maybe I could think about appointing a dauphin!) If I run out of joke titles I'll have to take a leaf out of the Greens' book and call myself the "convocateur".