This morning, Wylie H. Dallas began contributing to FrontBurner. Jason offered a brief explanation preceding Wylie’s first post, but I want to go a bit deeper on this because it’s an unusual situation.
Months ago, when someone here at the magazine first floated the idea of having Wylie contribute to the blog, the obvious hurdle presented itself: how do you bring someone under your umbrella when you don’t know who that person is? I think it was Wick who initially said that if this arrangement was going to work, Wylie would have to reveal himself to us. (I’m sticking with male pronouns for now.) We could keep his identity a secret, but we’d need to know who he was in order to guard against Wylie’s promoting a hidden agenda. I thought it wasn’t necessary — or even possible. Yes, there are one or two people in Dallas who know who Wylie is, but I argued that he wasn’t going to tell us because he wouldn’t want to assume the additional risk of having his cover blown. And, anyway, why do we need to know who he is? I thought we could simply tell our readers that we don’t know and let them decide whether Wylie’s posts are worth their time. Too, over the past couple of years of doing his work in the comments sections of various Dallas blogs (and on his own Facebook page), Wylie has shown himself to be a reasonable, thoughtful fellow whose agenda is promoting truth, justice, walkable urbanism, and the American way.
So there you have it. We really don’t know who he is. No joshing. And we’re tickled that he — or she — was up for the experiment.
Welcome aboard, Wylie.
