Occupation of Independence

A commenter pointed out that another category was needed for the list in the previous post: the One-Upper. I invite you to read his comment in the previous post. And I overlooked the most ubiquitous of all conversational rogues: the Interrupter. At least these people are pretty easy to forgive. They are a bit like a dog who barks when nervous, but not at other times. Let the Interrupter calm down after a minute, or let them see the look on the face of their victim, and they will soon correct themselves. There is a marvelous bit of acting by John Goodman in the Coen Brothers' "Barton Fink", showing him to be the victim of an over-eager, know-it-all, intellectual playwright, who won't listen to the John Goodman character tell his story. But I'll bet you too have run into Interrupters who don't calm down and back off, but rather, keep interrupting forever. I simply don't know how to explain that. Are they insisting on being the dominant one? Their prob

When thousands of campers are congregated in a town like Quartzsite, and have the opportunity for campfires and conversation, it would be nice to believe that it leads to better conversations than usual. But maybe that is just primal-ism and romanticism. The retrogrouch in me yearns for conversations in olden times, when there was more formality and a tighter consensus about the rules of proper behavior. Come on now, admit it, don't you feel a little of that when you watch the polite rituals in the movies called historical 'costume dramas?' But the standards of yore haven't survived a couple hundred years of democratic leveling. But maybe this presents an opportunity to reconstruct rules of conversation from a blank piece of paper. And this time, we will do it right. Shouldn't the aim of conversation be good will, a bit of entertainment, and subtle education? If we get good at this, we can enjoy full-bodied conversation about non-trivial subjects. Imagine conver