Dr. Krstic’s Craziest Hour

The Wine Rules name is an homage to John Irving’s Cider House Rules. Irving explored the written and unwritten “rules” of life and morality across races and castes in all its ironic and hypocritical splendour. How these themes play out in the Australian wine industry are always a source of fascination for me.

So, when good friends suggested the tone of my last post; “Dr. Longbottom’s Young Frankenstein (without the funny bits)”, was a bit over the top, others even considered themselves “outraged,” it gave me pause to reconsider. In short, they said, “you could have written it differently, more nicely.” Maybe they are right, maybe they aren’t. Before you consider that question, please consider these:

  1. Where was your outrage when Dr. Santiago-Brown was being privately smeared and defamed in 2014 and 2015 having done absolutely nothing worthy of either? Did you speak up then?
  2. Where was the outrage when Dr. Krstic decided to send a letter to AWRI’s mailing list saying that instead of investigating Dr. ISB’s very serious allegations made in private conversation then in correspondence and then publicly in this blog? Having made the Board and MD of AWRI so aware without any investigation being undertaken, our avenues to address this matter were exhausted barring taking a wealthy public institution to court.
  3. Where was the outrage when Dr. ISB’s academic work was plagiarised by a national research institution?  Don’t their employees “sign a paper” saying that plagiarism – in any of its forms – is not ok when they start working for the AWRI? 
  4. How can you read an extremely detailed description of the process of exactly how institutional / systemic bullying occurs effectively and without sanction in academia and research and then arrive at the conclusion that the person exposing that process is a bully knowing that the person in charge of that institution was begged to investigate the matter privately and did not do so?

The fact is that no one will speak up against these institutions or these people for fear of negative personal and career impacts. This is the essence of institutional bullying. In our case, they lack such leverage and obviously think that we will go away. As the saying goes, ignorance is free but education is expensive.

What makes this such ripe content for The Wine Rules is Dr. Krstic’s reaction to the last post. He started a private / not-public Facebook post accusing me of being a “cyber bully” and the rest. Various voices including the head of Wine Victoria chimed in with their support, others with their unfavourable opinions of me and the blog. (My personal favourite was the one who suggested that I didn’t “get” the internet because the piece was so long. D’oh. Having met or represented three of the six founders of the internet, many of the first and second generation internet companies (from 3com to Netscape, Broadcom, etc) in my life (oh, and my friend who was the sys admin on node 3 at UCLA that made it an “inter”net, I can only laugh.) But, it was a good laugh.

Defensive people are rarely ironic on purpose but this may be Dr. Krstic’s craziest hour. He was clearly upset that his employees’ conduct was exposed to some sunlight and that he was personally exposed for having chosen to not investigate allegations about the cloistered world of bullying in the wine industry research field. Ingeniously, he struck back by name calling in a private Facebook post where the only people supposedly able to see it are mostly from the cloistered world of wine industry research! You can’t make this self-validating nutbaggery up. This mob has lived in a truth and accountability free zone for so long that the sometimes harsh light of reality must be blinding. 

For the rest of you, I strongly suggest reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson to understand that the reactions expressed by him and his are utterly typical reactions to a situation where the expectations of the dominant caste, race and status are upended by people who don’t fit their worldview. If that seems too serious, read The Cider House Rules. Both are magnificent.

How the AWRI Board can handle the cognitive dissonance of this situation and these behaviours without taking decisive action is beyond comprehension. 

We press on.