I have been informed by my inferiors that more “diversity” is
desired in this column. What this means, apparently, is that some of
the people whose drivel is reliably beneath comment have taken my
silence as a slight (which, indeed, it is). Worse, I understand the
slighted recently gathered in the basement of some wretched
communal-living arrangement over on Beacon Hill and—after a
meeting that was presumably two parts feminist séance and one
part opportunist’s manifesto—determined that because a majority
of the whiners present were women and/or arts writers (unfortunately
not, in these post-brassiere-burning days, mutually exclusive
categories), my column is both sexist and anti-art.

Of course, these bleats of self-diagnosed victimhood are simply
being used as a shield from the truth by a clutch of spineless wimps
who, as my old boxing pupil Jack Nicholson has said many a time, can’t
handle the truth. Fine then: I will show them what happens when I
abandon all mercy and turn my pitiless monocle toward their work. First
we find JEN GRAVES quivering like a child at the sight of a puppet
show. Need I remind you that she is the paper’s art critic, a position
that requires at least a modicum of courage? And yet puppets are enough
to send her spiraling into lines of frightened babble meant to buttress
her contention that “the entire political situation of the 20th
century” has been called into question. By puppets? My newborn
great-granddaughter Ainsley has shown more fortitude in less than a
fortnight on this grim planet—and in the face of teddy bears and
dancing mobiles no less.

Next we find the silken-haired ERICA GRANDY staring once again into
the abyss that is her vocabulary and responding by inventing a whole
new language with which to discuss her latest pets, the “Animal
Collective.” I honestly do not want to know what Ms. Grandy thinks is
being communicated with the phrase “dirty MP3 trunk-rattle,” nor would
I ever want to purchase a phonographic recording that “combines jammy
psychedelia and tasteful obscurantism”—especially not if that
string of six words means what I think it means, in which case she
should have been arrested the moment she tapped it out with her index
fingers.

Finally, we come to a bloated monstrosity of a section apparently
devoted to the natterings of one LINDY WEST, who has already
disappointed me on many occasions. When I saw that she was charged with
directing this year’s guide to the Seattle International Film Festival,
I assumed—correctly, it turns out—that even more subversive
foreign movies than ever before would be dangerously summarized in the
incomprehensible tongue of Ms. West and her brood, thus sowing even
more un-American sentiment in our fair city than ever before. In a
word: treason.

Ladies and/or arts writers, I have, as requested, given you my full
attention. If we’re lucky, it was as painful an experience for you as
it was for me and we shall never have to repeat it again.