Times they’re a changin’

Alas, we see that aside from losing the talents and inbound links of some of the greatest bloggers ever to… blog (Berube and Billmon, in recent weeks alone), we see from our new friend, Jon Swift, that the Mighty Atrios has taken to de-linking some of us less-kewl kidz…
In lieu of actually thinking, let me just re-post, taken from my comment at Jon’s site (and corrected for, you know, grammar and s**t):

Bless you, Jon Swift, for pointing this out. I see that the great Duncan has seen fit to jettison m’self (which given my recent traffic trends amounts to bayonetting the body; but so it goes).
The blogosphere was a great deviation from the human (or at least American) reality known as “perpetual high school.”
The nerds and the geeks were as welcome at the table as the kewl kidz, the football players and the cheerleaders. Indeed, my own blogroll includes a number of right wingers, many one or two of whom link back to me, from those heady, ecumenical days before the Iraq War and the total partisanship all the time thing kicked in.
But there you are. While Kos (like Kaus for that matter) could never be bothered to link to mere mortals… Atrios was always very good about that.
I guess even he is just getting too big for the rest of us. It’s a free country, and a free blogtopia (y.i.k. skippy, etc.) This elitism thing is just so darned… Republican, is all.

I see (naturally, after I posted my comment!) that Duncan is considering adding blogs back to his mighty blogroll… One day maybe Fred will win the fight Atrios (or one of the other blog behemoths) will see fit to link here, either permanently, or to one of my (brilliant and sui generis) interviews, or to one of my other fountains of wit… or not. In the end, only this is my blog: I really have no right to demand anything of anyone else on their blog. Still, this does feel like the end of what had been a different, and more pleasant, era.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.