The Payroll

THE MISSING POST

Should I show the missing post? I suppose so. Then again, why should I? I guess I'm worried that if I start outing the spies et.al. who follow this blog, I'll lose the most loyal part of my audience. It's like the apocryphal story of the last meeting of the Utah (or Idaho) Communist Party, disbanded when it was realized that everyone there was working for the FBI!

At some point, the war of McSweeneyites vs ULA (or me) becomes a waste of time. It's a battle I can't possibly win. But it is aggravating to see what was an honorable and necessary project, the ULA, libeled across the literary realm. Whatever missteps we made, they were nothing compared to the scoundrels we were up against. Scoundrels those people remain.

But, the post. One of the more bizarre I've put up. 1.) There might be more to its premise than I thought. Otherwise, why would someone be so interested in reading it? (Or even know about it.) 2.) At the end of it-- or rather, end of the three comments attached-- an actual bitter enemy of myself, with no credible reason for his animus, possible member of the McS's payroll, makes a strange appearance.

I don't want anyone to think the post ranks with "The Day the Clown Cried" for absent strangeness. What it does, is point to the strangeness of those thrown out of joint by a low-rent noisemaking campaign from a tiny band of broke zinesters, to the extent that some of the most powerful figures in literature pulled out all stops in their eagerness to run us permanently out of town. At that, they've been quite successful.

(I hope the moles and spies involved have bilked the insecure mandarins-- Eggers, Handler, & Company-- for a substantial amount. Somehow, I think not.)

(The McSweeneys Gang may be a trifle bizarre, but not as bizarre as real life.)