Lock up the night-soil men who prowl our secret alleys and cart away our ripest fruit. Kleptomaniacs all, they do their dirty work on our dime. They eavesdrop on confidences exchanged with our BFFs. They sell us offal, call it Ovaltine, then assure us it’s a small world after all. Bored with larceny, they muster their botnets to engineer ping-of-death attacks that cram our very synapses with digital jetsam. Stupefied, dreams debased, we drag our broken bicycles along the rutted country lane, the one bordering a fetid meadow decorated with tightly stretched canvases depicting cows staged in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew. There we chance upon the novelist Paul West, last of the Mohicans, who cautions us we will soon be surrounded by so much electronic mediocrity we’ll go blind. We lament. We are FUBAR. We discompose. Have we already gone blind? Perhaps not quite. We still have access to a few who can show us a way to pick the scales from our eyes and truly see.