My Dear Wormwood:

The most alarming thing in your last report was that you reacted clumsily to an excellent beginning. When will you realize that you have much to learn? It is rare that a junior Tempter is given more than one patient, and our father below may view with extreme displeasure my decision to entrust the demoralization of the Michigan Wolverine faithful to an amateur. Please try and justify my faith in your skills. And also know that if our father below punishes me for your failures, that you shall have a generous portion of those agonies. A most generous portion.

Your judgment that the Michigan faithful are plagued by doubts is insightful. Play on those doubts! Despair awaits them on the other side of all those doubts piled high like corpses. As I mentioned, you had made an excellent beginning lurking online at mgoblog, assuming anonymous personas to plant corrosive seeds. When I was a Tempter, we did not have computers and blogs or the means to poison so many souls so easily. Do not squander this new advantage!

I wonder if you have wasted the excellent start you made as the Barking Sphincter by creating the incredible BlueFront95 persona. Your choice to attack their leader’s use of language was skillful, for the Michigan faithful pride themselves on being a cultured lot. You should have played on that pride without letting your scorn show through. How pathetic was the use of the word “hick”?! Stay focused, Tempter! Always choose subtlety over boorishness. A more factual, somewhat concerned report of their leader’s language would have eaten at them like termites in moist wood. But you misplayed the whole affair. Your clumsy engagement of them again and again caused them to rally, to look deep down, to realize that salty language from a football coach is as unusual as deceptive language from a politician. This BlueFront95 persona has now become a cliché for weak troll hatchet work and the issue of the language has logically faded, which is not to our advantage.

Remember, fear is ignorant. Do not shine light on their doubts. In the broad daylight of the rational mind, they will realize the potential for unlimited greatness that is simmering just below the surface. Let our Tempters assigned to individual players work on those unable or unwilling to rise to their leader’s exacting standards of excellence. Some will leave having rationalized their demise as being “unfair” or, to the everlasting credit of Tempter Vilegob, lacking “family values.” What a delicious and valuable innovation! Our media Tempters will ensure the public knows that it was not excellence that determined their fate, but the tyrannical hand of an uncultured despot with little understanding of “family values.”

As the Barking Sphincter, your work was more impressive, though not without flaw. You began with what appeared to be a rational critique of their leader’s extensive failings over the last year. You leveraged the brilliant work of Tempter Slugfoul, whose Project Fumble had greater than expected results, by using months of failure to swallow up years of success. It is our delight and everlasting advantage that these patients are temporal creatures. A stubbed toe today will cause them to forget years of robust health. You should have kept them focused on that throbbing toe, the split nail, the painful limp. Instead, you allowed a lack of discipline to drive you to respond to their barbs, and, in the end, you exposed the weakness of your case.

Remember out goal, Wormwood. It is not, this time, to gather souls for our father below.  This is a new mission, one that surprised even me, a senior administrative official. Who could have known that our father below was an aficionado of the Ohio State Buckeyes?  That our ageless struggle for souls had a parallel in a mere game? Well, so he believes and he sees the danger in the leader of the Wolverines, a drive for excellence that ignores the protests of the weak and threatens his Saturday pleasures. He has discerned that this leader must be "run out of town" or it will be too late. Do I need remind you of the consequences of failure?

Your Affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape