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Dear Writers of Open Letters,

A trend has emerged in recent months of writing open letters for publication as a means of presenting arguments, salient and otherwise, on matters of public policy, societal ills and economic theory.

I know, in this age of social media postings to which trolls respond with hate-spewing comments, angry subtweets and outraged text-on-photo memes, one longs for the opportunity to make one's opinion known without the fear of reprisal, repercussion or disagreement. As discourse becomes less and less civil, it becomes increasingly tempting to find means of expressing oneself in a vacuum of sorts, avoiding the need for actual discourse of any sort.

By creating the false intimacy of an open letter to an individual (i.e., Donald Trump, Rahm Emanuel or Gallagher), one can address a troubling social or cultural issue without seeming to engage all those at whom one's comments are aimed, building an effective preemptive defense against claims of generalization. Conversely, by addressing such a missive openly to a general group (Pharmaceutical advertisers, 9-11 Truthers, People Who Wear Camouflage to Funerals, for instance) a modicum of anonymity may seem to be afforded the specific person(s) toward whom one aims the ire. Either approach, though, serves only as bare cover for a tactic that we can all clearly see lies somewhere between the subtly repressive and the outright fascist.

From behind the veil of the open letter one may comfortably launch ad hominem attacks (I know some of my mouth-breathing detractors will assume that this is an attack that sounds just like another attack but has a different meaning; if you're too stupid to use a dictionary, Google it.)

The one-sided nature of the open letter presents no opportunity for debate and thereby frees one of the need to obey the basic rules of debate. A writer of an open letter to aficionados of proper punctuation, for instance, might set up as a straw-man some militant user of the Oxford comma whose righteous insistence on clarity might then be mocked in absentia as pompous and hermeneutic despite his never having actually existed at all. Such a strategy might not hold up in a proper debate setting under examination and cross, but the ne'er-do-well who wrote this imagined open letter would serve the purpose of his or her opinion and face literally no consequences for the rhetorical crime. Can we as a people allow such grievous wrongs to stand? I think not.

This abandonment of the basic tenets of public debate sets a terrible precedent. Once we begin to allow straw men to go unchallenged, it will lead to the common acceptance of the casual tautology because that is what will come next and then, bam. We're down the rabbit hole into the slippery slope argument and there's no going back. No. Going. Back.

I ask you, therefore, to stop. All of you. The age of the open letter must come to an end and I urge you all to accept this and move on.

The comments section has been disabled, because frankly, I don't need the hassle.

Sincerely,

Dylan Brody

- Dylan Brody

Author and humorist Dylan Brody calls himself a "purveyor of fine words and phrases" and specializes in smart, humane storytelling. He has performed in venues all over the world, regularly opens for David Sedaris and has written for dozens of comedians, including Jay Leno. He wrote the satirical self-help book, The Modern Depression Guidebook, and the novel, Laughs Last. He is a thrice-published author of fiction for the young adult market with one of his books, A Tale of a Hero and the Song of Her Sword, finding a place in the curriculum at several public schools in the U.S. In 2005, Dylan won the Stanley Drama Award for playwriting.