It's not a talking point if we stop talking about it!
At some point during the last few years, like a jury summons, all Philadelphia residents were ordered to appear at a municipal building and inform a city official of their opinion on Ryan Howard. These crude, in many cases barely coherent, thoughts were all logged, dated, and filed away before anyone could ask "Why are we doing this, again?"
And the answer was of course so that Howard would no longer have to be a topic of discussion. The main points of the arguments against him had been stated, whispered, and screamed across the region with such frequency that the squirrels were chittering about the slugger's inability to hit a breaking pitch from trash can to trash can.