Perhaps this highly inconvenient recession, which is souring everyone's stock holdings and causing me to contemplate halving the amount of canned ham I toss in the direction of the house staff this Christmas, is also to blame for The Stranger's embarrassingly tedious essay this week by GRANT COGSWELL, who, according to my files, was recently forced by a combination of abject failure and financial ruin to flee the state of Washington for Mexico. I would bet the farm there isn't a cheaper freelance writer currently in practice on the West Coast. His fulsome typing about the incoming mayor and how he "broke the Seattle machine" is so prolix, dreamy, and self-serving you almost can't help but wonder which job in the McGinn administration Mr. Cogswell is gunning for—one hopes it isn't the same job three or four other Stranger scribes are actively, obviously pursuing with their recent PR disguised as political "journalism."

That Mr. Cogswell views the cadre of sandal-wearing marimba players the mayor-elect duped into working for him gratis all those months as the epitome of an idealized state of democracy, which is itself the idealized state of civilization, merely proves how shopworn and trite Mr. Cogswell's mind is. To be clear: Just because Mr. Cogswell and Mr. McGinn are environmentalists of the most extreme stripe doesn't mean they will go down as compatriots in history books, no matter how far Mr. Cogswell reaches to scratch his own back in ostentatious self-congratulation. And the mere fact that Mr. Cogswell was surprised by Mr. McGinn's "grassroots" victory doesn't make it meaningful; if it means anything, it means that Seattle voters were had. With, as we all know, a generous assist from The Stranger. In a just world, marimba players play marimba and the people with executive experience are the executives—and the people with the credentials to put out newspapers are the ones putting out newspapers.

In such a world, of course, The Stranger would not exist. Let us ask ourselves: What would we be missing? We would have to do without reading about BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT taking part in some sort of drunken golf tournament (call me old-fashioned, but any golf course that allows women on its premises is not a real golf course). We would have to do without DAVID SCHMADER blathering about a book on cartoons. And we would be spared beleaguered former intern KAIA CHESSEN suffering (and, by extension, forcing the reader to suffer) through not one but two plays in the theater section this week—no doubt because foppish theater "expert" Brendan Kiley went into hiding after the disastrously vainglorious Genius Awards on Friday night, which turned out to be no more than an elaborate excuse to let Paul Constant, Jen Graves, Charles Mudede, and Lindy West listen to their own voices in a microphone, and to allow a seedy young couple to copulate in the back row of the upper mezzanine. It is no surprise given the meretricious, noxiously sexualized character of this newspaper that no one seemed to mind.