No joy in Maddenville, a parable

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Once up a time there was a man named Jimbo King who liked American football more then anything else in the world. He liked it so much that he created a town for him and anybody else who loved football. He named the town “Maddenville” and it was open to anybody who liked to play football, watch football, or even just talk about football.

So people started to move into the town and leagues and teams were formed for people of all ages. For playing the game, Jimbo set a few basic rules as “pillar rules” such as “the game will be played on a field of 100 yards with a regulation football, the games will be divided into 4 quarters of 15 minutes, 7 points for a touchdown, 3 points for a field goal, and a few others. Only the minimum needed to keep the game “football”. All the other rules were decided by consensus.

For the first few years everything worked fine. One league or another had games everyday and the townspeople set up websites, forums, and blogs for talking about the games and to agree upon the rules. Sometimes there were disagreements over rules like how many downs the offense had to move 10 yards or the definition of a forward pass but all these were eventually settled by consensus and there was joy in Maddenville.

One day a stranger named “Casey” moved into town who had some new ideas about how to play football. He thought it should be played on a diamond shaped field with teams of 9 players who would take turns hitting a little white ball with a wooden bat and try to run around the bases to score. He presented his ideas in the forums and the other townspeople politely told him that what he was proposing was not “football” and therefore would violate the pillar rules. However, Casey was a very stubborn man and wouldn't take “no” for an answer so he kept on proposing his ideas in the forums.

At first the townspeople remained civil about this and tried their best to convince Casey that his game wasn't “football” but he kept on insisting that the game should be played his way. He would claim that many other townspeople agreed with him and supported him in email but were afraid to speak up because they didn't want to be banished by the “footcabal” which he claimed was a group consisting of Jimbo King and a few of his “cronies”.

His next move was to create a “cardboard consensus”. He made cardboard figures of people and set them up at the fields during the games. They all had looping tape players that made them chant “BAT AND BALL” over and over again. He then created blogs and forum accounts for all his cardboard figures and had them all post support for his ideas. However, this all failed to convince the townspeople that he had a consensus and he eventually was banished after he was caught with a bulldozer trying to plow diamonds into the football fields.

However, the banishment only enraged Casey and he vowed revenge on the town. First he set up a website called “Maddenville Review” and he used this to attack Jimbo King and many other townspeople. Then other strangers started to show up with their own ideas on how to play football. One claimed that football should be played on an indoor court with teams of 5 trying to throw a big brown ball into a high netted hoop. Another claimed that football should be played by trying to kick a big white ball into a rectangular net because that's how the rest of the world plays it. All these strangers had their own “cardboard consensus” and bulldozers and it got to the point that the townspeople were spending more and more time arguing with the newcomers and their cardboard figures and repairing the damage done with their bulldozers and less time playing football. No longer was there joy in Maddenville.

Maddenville was in crisis. People with bizarre views of what constituted "football" were disrupting it. Some of the town's leaders decided that what was needed was to Get Tough on the trolls, vandals, and disrupters. A number of people were banned. Many of the banned people, along with others who were critical for some reason or other of the concept of Maddenville, the way Maddenville was being run, or the game of American football itself, started congregating on a hilltop near enough to Maddenville to get a good look at what was happening there, but across the county line so that the authorities of Maddenville had no jurisdiction over them. They named their new settlement "Maddenvile Review Village", and soon it grew into a thriving settlement, though still much smaller than Maddenville itself. From there, residents used telescopes and binoculars to monitor the goings-on at Maddenville, as well as getting reports by phone, paper mail, and in person by visitors from Maddenville, not to mention watching and listening to the TV and radio stations originating in Maddenville. Just like the obsession of Maddenville was football, the obsession of Maddenville Review Village was Maddenville.

For a while the two settlements coexisted without very much strife; many in Maddenville were glad that some of the more disruptive people had left (whether voluntarily or by being exiled forcibly), and chose simply to ignore the activities of the village of critics and go on with their own passion for football. However, there were a few in Maddenville whose feelings were hurt by the mean things Maddenville Review Village was saying about them. They would send banned people to sneak into Maddenville at night and post notices on the bulletin board in the town square, sometimes containing personal attacks on citizens of Maddenville, or revealing embarrassing personal information about them. Maddenville's constables would rip them down as soon as they saw them, but sometimes ill feelings resulted from their being seen at all. A growing sentiment developed among some of the leaders of Maddenville that more needed to be done than simply passively ignoring them.

Matters soon came to a head when a leader who had been the subject of particularly nasty attacks from the Review Village noticed the distressing fact that Maddenville Review Village was listed in the atlas and gazetteer in the Maddenville Public Library. This atlas was the pride and joy of the town librarian and the centerpiece of the library's collection, as the librarian supplemented her love of football with a love of geography nearly as great. The atlas was kept in a set of three-ring binders so that pages could be updated as needed, in order to keep it accurate up to the minute. In a recent update, MRV had been added, as the publishers of the atlas decided that it was sufficiently notable for inclusion along with the many other cities, towns, villages, and hamlets included there.

This would simply not do, according to the town leader. MRV was a group of evil, banned trolls, and should not be given the recognition of inclusion in any reference work in Maddenville, in his opinion. Since Maddenville had a tradition to "Be Bold", he went into the library with a tube of White-Out and obliterated MRV from the map. The librarian wasn't very happy with this, but didn't vocally object because she didn't much like MRV anyway, and didn't want to be seen by the townspeople as supporting that group of trolls and harassers.

From then on, people looking in the atlas at the library couldn't help notice that something had been censored from it, and this actually increased the attention paid to MRV, including by people who hadn't even heard of the place before this. Once their curiosity had been piqued, it wasn't very hard for them to find it, since it was in other sources such as Google Maps which were outside the control of the town leaders. At any rate, many of the town's leading citizens, including the ones most fervently opposed to MRV, spent much time looking up at its hilltop with their own telescopes and binoculars in order to keep an eye on what those evil trolls were up to. However, they still didn't want anybody else finding the place; they could be trusted to look at it themselves, for good motives of helping to protect Maddenville from it, but if others find it they might be manipulated by the evil trolls, which wouldn't be good.

While debate was breaking out over whether the blanking of the atlas entry was justified, a citizen wrote an essay called "BADTOWNS" and posted it to the bulletin board in the town square. It called for a ban on referring, pointing, or giving directions to any town, village, or hamlet that was engaged in personal attacks on any citizen of Maddenville. It was originally designated as merely an essay, but some people attempted to move it from the bulletin board into the law books in the town courthouse so it could be enforced as law, despite it not actually having been voted into effect by the legislature or by a referendum of the citizens. Others tried to move it to the historical archives along with other failed proposals. Somebody even grabbed it and fed it into a paper shredder, but another person painstakingly taped it back together so that it remained on the bulletin board. Despite not being made into law, some tried to enforce it nevertheless, including on people who were trying to discuss the proposal itself and feeling the need to refer to specific things about MRV and other towns that might be covered by the proposal. Some people trying to make such mentions in their speeches and bulletin board postings about the proposal were given warnings, and one who persisted after such a warning was forced to spend the night in the town jail. This tended to chill discussion afterward.

Proponents of the BADTOWNS policy claimed that it was actually already law, regardless of the status of the current proposal, due to an earlier decision of the Maddenville Superior Court. This decision was regarding another town called SportsDramaVille, which was settled by comedians with a very tasteless sense of humor. Their main product was a set of trading cards with grotesque caricatures of various figures in sports including players, coaches, team and league officials, and even some prominent fans. The cards also had scurrilous gossip about the people on them, including false and defamatory information, true and privacy-invading information, and nasty personal attacks. Some prominent Maddenville citizens were included, but some people from Maddenville Review Village also were, as well as people from other places and other sports of little interest here. The court decision ultimately banned those trading cards, and anything else connected with SportsDramaVille. Some felt this was an overreaching decision going beyond the proper jurisdiction of the court, and was possibly unconstitutional, but few wanted to object very strongly because of the overwhelming view that SDV and its cards were vile things of no use to the serious pursuit of football. Some thought that the actions of a Maddenville constable soon after the decision, to go and rummage through the drawers of the local sports card shop to find and destroy all of the offending cards even in the dusty, musty backstock that was seldom even looked at, were unnecessary, however. This decision was now being used as a precedent to support larger bans on references to BADTOWNS.

The next controversy came when a scandal broke out that some of the football players in Maddenville were using illegal performance enhancing substances, and were lying about it and cheating on their drug tests. This got extensively written up in the national press, and resulted in some players being suspended or expelled from their teams. Embarrassingly, the scandal had been uncovered and publicized by the people at Maddenville Review Village, as part of their ongoing attempt to cast disrepute on Maddenville. When the local newspaper, the Maddenville Goalpost, wrote about the scandal, they included a line mentioning the involvement of MRV in it. This upset a town leader so much that he went around town early in the morning gathering up all the papers before anybody else woke up and read them, burning those papers, and printing a new edition without the offending mention. The paper's reporter and editor didn't much care for this, just like the librarian earlier, but also didn't want to be seen as MRV sympathizers.

After much infighting, and several further attempts to enforce the BADTOWNS proposal (such as against a town of movie makers and a town of science fiction writers and editors which happened to be the originating places of critiques of somebody in Maddenville that injured the target's tender sensibilities), the proposal was universally regarded as having been defeated, and even its most fervent proponents stopped pushing for it (but only after floating some more failed proposals such as one to send a traveling circus to invade towns they disliked and flood their streets with clowns). However, all was still not peaceful in Maddenville.

The people at Maddenville Review Village continued to attempt to disrupt Maddenville. Most of them spent most of their time at harmless pursuits, just sitting around their own village blowing off steam by spouting about how Maddenville is evil and must be destroyed, and that somebody is very soon going to sue it into oblivion, or Congress will ban American football in favor of more civilized sports like soccer, or other preposterous theories. However, some of them continued to attempt to impose themselves on Maddenville, going into disguise and sneaking into the town to post their manifestos on the bulletin boards and other annoyances. So, once again the officials decided it was time to Get Tough.

Soon, a group of highly-ranked citizens started devoting most of their efforts to seeking out and eliminating all traces of the banned former citizens. Soon, anybody posting anything to the bulletin board that bore any resemblance to the ideas of any of the banned people was likely to get in trouble himself. For instance, somebody once suggested that other sports had some good ideas about how to organize their playoff system and how to break ties in the league standings, and they might stand consideration for Maddenville football leagues; this was roundly shouted down as an idea that had been raised by a banned user as part of his insidious proposal to transform football into something entirely different, and the person making the current proposal was insinuated as being a likely confederate of this banned user and barely escaped being banned himself. He remains distrusted by the town leadership to this day, and so are the other citizens who spoke up in his behalf and prevented his banning.

More bannings followed, and "newbies" entering the town were likely to get bitten if they transgressed any of a number of codes of behavior designed to avoid all taint of the banned people. The overall attitude of the people gradually deteriorated, and somebody even posted a humorous statement to the bulletin board to the effect that "Floggings will continue until morale improves", but it was swiftly removed by constables who disliked anything humorous as detracting from the seriousness of the situation. Anybody who objected to the atmosphere was informed that it was all the fault of the evil MRV trolls, and if they tried to claim that the Maddenville constables bore any responsibility, they were roundly attacked, referred to as likely to be in league with the trolls themselves, and told to quit wasting time on politics and go play football. Ironically, the people who said this usually had not played any football themselves in a long time, and weren't even watching very much football as they were devoting all their time and energy to pursuing banned people, banning more people, warning the rest of the public to keep them in line, and writing essays defending their attitude. The only reason any football continued to be played was that there was some influx of newcomers who were actually interested in the sport, although this influx was much smaller than it had been in days gone by.

Some people became concerned that there was a double standard. Certain well-connected people like the star quarterback and a well- liked sportswriter had a blank check to insult anybody else they wanted (calling them a "MRV troll" was a popular insult, even if the person targeted had no actual connection with the other village), while less-well-connected folks were held strictly to a policy against saying anything nasty. In a debate about whether it was desirable to go for it on fourth down at the 50 yard line or punt, the advocate of punting was found to be in league with a banned former player and was banned himself, and thus it was decreed that all teams must go for it on fourth down in such a situation or else be judged as also in league with the banned user. This cramped the strategy of games, but nobody dared to object.

What will become of Maddenville? It's up to its citizens now!