Posted by Bo S on March 10, 19102 at 12:54:41:
In Reply to: 4th edition text changes? posted by Carrie B. on March 05, 19102 at 12:55:52:
Dear Carrie B.,
From the inception of WSO growth, a strange antipathy set
in between volunteer service workers and the WSO staff persons.
There was an attitude that made the discovery of a typo in the printing
of the Basic Text a matter of merit among WSO workers. Like, "Freddy found
another typo in the book!" It was real cool. What they had no one to tell them
was that the Office printed the book and the volunteer service workers had no
opportunity at all ever to proof their typesetting. Plus, no one would have
minded if a mispelled word were corrected or a really rotten phrase smoothed. It
was the idea that they knew better.
This came to a head in the first instance when a motion was floored at the 1985 WSC
to make benign corrections to the Text. So, matters of person, tense, spelling and verb agreement were to be corrected. Most importantly, the word 'grammar' was removed from the motion lest it be interpreted as a liscense for wholesale change of a sentence.
Over a three year period a selection of someone to edit was made. Many - perhaps fifteen or more - interviews were held.
This was done with unmost care and civility. There was no animosity in the air among world service contingents.
Finally a man, a student, from Texas was chosen. He was a member, loved NA and was good with words. In his zeal, he submitted
without being requested to do so, two edits: a light, superficial edit that dealt with the matters the Fellowship wanted and a deep edit.
A deep edit is where the editor addresses every single conceivable, possible need for change or consideration by a publisher.
Remember, three years had passed since the '85 motion was carried. We had a different WSC Chair, WLC Chair, WSB Chair. It was a very different setting.
Someone had the bright idea that hey, we have a deep edit, we might as well take a look at it, right? I mean it's already paid for and we would be poor servants to ignore looking into it as a group.
The WSC Literature Committee was spread out over fifteen persons who were regarded as formal members of the committee. So, they had to get together in conference calls. Maybe they had an original get together at the WSO in Los Angeles. Surely there were periodic meetings of the WLC while this process was going on.
They distributed copies of the material, the edited material, to these twelve or fifteen people and got together for a two hour conference call several times a month. They would read a sentence, discuss it, someone would say, well let's keep it the way it is. Someone else would propose a change. Whichever way it went was noted and the group moved on. They had no one to tell them this was not what the Conference or the Fellowship asked them to do.
The leadership at the time kept this very quiet if they knew at all. I know because I was serving a five year term on the World Sevice Board of Trustees and we never heard a peep. So, after a long, long time, the review of the edit was done and sent to a printer. I believe the Office even took a quarter of a million advance from Hazelden to handle the printing - and typesetting - costs. The Fellowship was kept in the dark about all this. As a member of the World Service Board, I repeatedly asked Bob Stone, the Office manager, "We are going to see the proof before it goes to the printer, right Bob?" He would say, "Oh yeah, sure. Just as soon as it is ready."
So, the NA Basic Text was printed without anyone except for a few key WSO personel and a part of the World Lit Committee seeing it. I later asked someone who had served on this committee, "Look, how did you double check the changes? At one of the WLC meeting, or did they send out a copy of the new draft?" The man just cocked his head and said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, that's how you would keep someone from making a change after the conference call, after the voting on each line. How else would you know that what you approved made it into the final draft?" He said, "Well, the chairperson felt that would breed animosity and created dissention." Huh.
When I went to Charleston, West Virginia one weekend, I was laying down to sleep when Grateful Dave came into the bunkroom - it was a camp out - and said, "Hey, I got someone to drive us in a copy of the 4th Edition, wanta see it?" I felt this tiredness come over me and said, "Nope, I'll see it in the morning." I wondered that I didn't want to see it. I realized that if there were no problems, I'd say, "Whew, that's great." If there were problems, all the people who had written the Basic Text a few years earlier would be decimated. Their surrender, love, gratitude, devotion and sacrifice would be damaged or destroyed.
The next day, we sat at a table and began to read each sentence in turn, first from the 3rd Revised, then from the 4th. There were a few initial changes that no one liked but they didn't seem injurous to the material. Then there was a bad one. Then another. In places, whole paragraph order had been changed. Sentences rewritten as if from scratch. New typos had been made. It was most clearly and definitely not what the Conference, the Office or the Fellowship had wanted in 1985 when the motion was carried at Conference. We were devastated. I called the WSO in LA as a Trustee and asked, "What have you done?" Their response was, "Why what do you mean?"
The Fellowship was devasted and never got over this. Betrayal on such a scale was thought to be impossible. As a Trustee working on policy, we had tried to insitute some checks and balances to preclude this kind of miscommunication and self-will run riot.
At the WSC that year, I think all if not most of the Regional Representatives came with a vote to go back to the 3rd Revised. It was floored with great turmoil. I was attacked for working on the NA Way of Life - which I have always done openly - and the motion to approve the 5th Edition with three changes proposed by the Lit Chair without revealing to the WSC what those changes were going to be, carried and that is where the 4th and 5th editions came from. Some one of you should do the labor of comparing the 3rd Revised with the 5th. I will cheerfully put the result up on a website. I believe group conscience can only work well where members have full access to the facts.
In Loving Service,
Bo S.
Please allow me to acknowledge that my information on all this may be incorrect of flawed in some way but the system doesn't invite correction. So, if I am in any respect in error, someone please tell me.