By Bryant Walker Smith, staff columnist

Not too many years ago, virtually all newspapers required that letters to the editor bear the writer’s name, address and signature. The principle was that public dialogue was closely tied to public responsibility, and the result was some degree of deliberate, if restrained, debate.

Today, this newspaper celebrates the most caustic web postings by printing them as “your best feedback” and attributing them to names that are far more likely to appear in a dictionary than in a phone book. Thoughtful commentary must compete with thoughtless trash that is long on profanity and short on punctuation.

Letters to the editor are now a rarity in this paper, so much so that they are not even reliably archived online. Conflict of personality often overshadows conflict of ideas.

This dearth of civil vigor extends to the repugnant gubernatorial campaign rhetoric that will culminate, if not conclude, tomorrow. Gripped by political desperation, one of the candidates has abandoned any regard for respectable conduct. He has implied that his primary opponent is a felon-in-waiting; one of his commercials even showed a picture of this opponent superimposed over prison bars.

Mudslinging is not an appropriate term for such conduct. It smells far too offensive to be mud.

I am saddened by this degradation of dialogue. I do not, however, intend to evoke unqualified nostalgia. After all, negativity has a much longer history than the Internet, the television or even the printing press. Likewise, the attraction of anonymity is hardly a modern day anomaly.

In the years before the American Revolution, some of the most persuasive propaganda was written under pseudonyms, and tar and feathers were just as powerful as pen and paper.

In fact, our Declaration of Independence was this country’s very first attack ad.

After eloquently articulating the rights of man, the authors of the Declaration launched into an attack on one particular man: They “let facts be submitted to a candid world” to prove that “the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations.”

The reader learns, for example, that crazy King George III “is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

And the last of the 27 charges notes that “he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

The Declaration finally ends with a message urging its readers to “call King George and tell him to stop exciting our domestic insurrections.”

Well, not really. Actually, the authors conclude by pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Then they signed their names.

It is honor that is absent from too much of today’s discourse. The 56 signatories to our Declaration of Independence committed themselves and their reputations to advancing a higher ideal. They offered their public commitment with a full understanding of its significance and its risks.

It was a deliberate political strategy, but it was one that for many of the signatories marked the pinnacle of a life of public service. It was momentous. It was honorable.

When personal destruction is treated as an expedient, public and political discourse suffer. It is a sad commentary that those who would be our public servants try to defame one another in the eyes of the public they would serve and that those who would be our classmates and friends eagerly degrade fellow members of the university community.

Last week, one of my classes completed midterm evaluations. In the interest of candor, we were told to write these evaluations anonymously, but one of my classmates promptly added his name to the top of his sheet.

He explained: “If I write something, I’m going to put my name by it.”

Bryant Walker Smith (bsmith@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.