Last weekend, I fell prey to the kind of morbid curiosity to which the violent demise of cats is usually attributed in popular allegory. That is to say: I had the misfortune of riding the light rail. I found it stunning that there was no first-class cabin, and in fact there was no way to buffer myself from Mr. John Q. Drugdealer or Miss Sally W. Prostitute. (Luckily, I had tucked my derringer away in my sock garter in case any rail-jumping hobos were to accost me.)

Further, the train did not go anywhere of worth or value—we went nowhere near Magnolia, for instance, or Bellevue. Instead, the doors flapped open, willy-nilly, in cultural voids and abandoned combat zones with names like "Mount Baker" or "Othello." But here is my point: As my back was being irreparably jarred by the battering side-to-side motion of the cable car, as my nostrils filled with the malfeasant odor of human effluvia, I kept thinking to myself: "This is the kind of nightmarish Seattle that The Stranger wishes to promote." It reminded me of the importance of my position here at the paper and inspired me to redouble my efforts against the flimflammery these sodomites are attempting to force on my city.

Case in point: JEN GRAVES, in an essay about visual art, wastes valuable column inches blathering about shameless pro-Communist propaganda. Her tireless promotion of the "art" and "culture" of the Orientals is at best anti-American and at worst treasonous. Speaking of anti-Americanism, former film editor SEAN NELSON makes an unwelcome return to these pages to mutter incoherently about a socialist British film that seeks to ridicule the American military industrial complex. I never thought that I would miss Lindy West's babbling about children's cartoons and other indignities of popular culture, but Mr. Nelson's dithering about a film that, at best, six unfortunate human beings will view reminds me that things could be much worse in the film section than Ms. West's borderline-retarded babbling about pretty bright lights on a wall.

But the ringmaster in this carnival of shame is ELI SANDERS, who infects a neighborhood south of Seattle that is blessedly free from the perils of public transit. His sensationalistic scribbling—in a bloated "think piece" that serves as the most recent attempt by The Stranger to corrupt the good-hearted citizens of small-town America—crosses the line into utter fabrication. Like Jayson Blair and other Great Men of Journalism, he perches himself at a bar and then files a story that is blissfully free of unexciting elements such as "facts." If The Stranger were ever to employ a fact-checker—permit me this flight of fancy for a moment—surely he would commit suicide upon reading Mr. Sanders's drunken foray into short fiction. Perhaps this hypothetical, beleaguered fact-checker would do so by leaping in front of a light-rail train; then, at least, the damnable thing would finally have a use other than as a socialist system of transporting criminals from one part of Seattle to another.