Has anyone noticed the degradation of political activism as reflected in the quality of e-mail forwards? During the election, when this country was in the grip of political passion, the internet hummed with outraged forwards explicating and excoriating the current snakepits and malevolence of public policy. Every citizen in possession of a computer (and that's every citizen! Some citizens have several, one in every color for every mood!) forwarded madly his or her opinions. These forwards, judging by volume and pitch, were not just opinions: they were expressions of the forwarder's innermost soul, as radical in their way as the...