[a sequel to the parable posted earlier in this list]

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.

[To be continued]