Jerry:

The Mudcat was much different only a short time ago. The tenor of its dialogues has been dragged downward by a small handful of specialists whose primary art is upsetting others. Gargoyle was one. Everyone knows who the others have been.

There's another factor that has dragged the tone down, a sort of dedicated irrelvance, a campaign for non-communication, sometimes disguised as a different sense of humor but actually designed to disperse and fracture communications. It uses banality and disassociated fragments as ammunition against ordinary dialogue.

A third factor is the macrocosm in the United States, which is itself going through quite a divisive period; we have been significantly jerked around by terrorists, Republicans, PR jocks, spinmasters, and criminal financiers and executives and managers in almost every sphere of life, to the point where just ordinary living seems twice as hard as it needs to be.

So this is a passage, I guess, and what I greatly appreciate is the Oil on Troubled Waters feeling that you and those like you bring to the table here. It makes a difference.

But even so, I wish Spaw would post more.


A