Snarkless

Tonight, I am anti-snark. Almost, though not quite, completely. I'm sick of snark. Snark's too easy. It takes guts to put your own stuff out there in the world, naked, for everyone to see. Even if you've thought ahead enough to buy nice Eddie Bauer cords for your ideas (and if you have, are they really *your* ideas anymore, or have they been subsumed by the man, the machine, or the man in the machine?), it's still tough to lie down, put your feet in the stirrups and give birth to an idea, feed it mashed gerunds and strained verbs so it grows big and strong, and wipe up it's dangling prepositions (and fend off propositions) until one day it strides off into the world. It doesn't make it any easy when some wingnut driving a blog while yapping on a cell phone comes careening arorund a corner and SPLAT there goes the idea. It's even worse when some intellectual cowboy-cum-sniper gets your poor idea in the sites of his or her keyboard. So what if my ideas suck, if my thoughts aren't fully formed? So what if you don't agree? That's what free and open society is based on. That's what could (if practiced more) could save the nation from John Kerry and George so-help-us-dog W. Bush. That's not what makes the Yankees a winning team. No, to win like that, you have to spend like that. Or be really, really, really good. And that lucky times two. But I digress. For the rest of the night, I'm declaring The Digital Beest an anti-snark zone. All snarkers will be blindfolded and shoved against the wall at dawn. I didn't say anything about being against firing squads.