After wading my way through the interview, I jumped over to Gary Kamiya's January column on Salon letter writers (it was supposed to be about the revolution in publishing, but that was a side note), which I hadn't seen before. His comment that most of the really nasty critical letters were directed at women writers brought me up for a second.

Could it be -- misogyny? (He thought so.) Or could it be the kind of woman writer Salon has been fond of publishing in the last few years? Smug, self-satisfied, without any kind of real difficulty except their sad inability to make the rest of the world understand, and so appreciate, them for who they are. If only it were possible! We'd all be so much better.

Just about every awful writer, except perhaps Dickerson and Paglia (I read fast -- with this kind of stuff it's better), was mentioned in one of the two articles. Anne Lamott, Ayelet Waldman, Nora Ephron (I have to say it -- I'm sorry about her neck too, that someone hasn't wrung it; along with Andrea Dworkin, who declined so pathetically that even I became embarrassed for her, the founding princess of good, wonderful, women-in-a-world-of-evil-men lit), Rebecca Traister (the worst but far from the only offender of the Broadsheet crew; give it due, there is some worthwhile journalism there, but it has to struggle against the overall tone of the page) and, of course, P, D and Walsh herself. Quite a crew, and I wish them all the understanding they crave. But it could be they already have it.

All this stuff dates back to Sylvia Plath; Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf, to name two, weren't so passive/aggressively self-glorifying and pitying, and they could write, too.

After Plath, this sort of sludge took over English Departments around the country and has never let go. Compare writing up to the mid-Seventies with what we've had to endure since, and you get my point.

It's my generation (I'm dogged, probably to the death, with the epithet "Baby Boomer;" I always preferred "Love Generation," but that's politically incorrect) who's had to suffer this slop, with the guilty knowledge that we enabled it. After the first couple hundred, I lost count of the number of times I was told that, although I supported equal rights for everyone, I was really the problem (that would take me up to, let's see, about 1975). Affirmative action was meant to empower those who were nonwhite, and the poor of every race, not those who have benefited the most from it: white women, upper middle-class and above, and of course Deborah Dickerson, who seems to me far less black and more a part of this other class, than Obama.

I keep coming back to Michael Moore in "Roger and Me" and his comment about the city where everyone seemed to have a good job but nobody ever worked. That seems to be the atmosphere of Salon -- the only ones who actually work are the tireless crew of The War Room and some (but not all) of the political freelancers. Aside from Laura Miller, good cultural writing, which I treasure, is just about dead on this site.

So why do I continue to read it? Apart from those cited above, it's for the letter writers. When I see a P, D or W column, I go straight to the letters. I know they're going to be more intelligent, better expressed and vastly more pleasurable than the original story. And I'm always right.

Some have asked about the signature at the bottom. It refers to the long, slow deathswoop of Salon from a publication that was a real credit to the declining culture of this country, to its present state, which is apparently going to be celebrated by Joan Walsh every week. Apparently the advertising, catering to the Sex In the City demographic, is up, so I guess it can't last much longer than the incipient end of the world. Whether there'll be anything to it but content-as-advertising by then is another question.

I just got my renewal notice -- Salon is offering me Joe Conason's book if I sign up again. Perfect -- bribing me with something I want so I'll tolerate something that interferes with my digestion. Then they can tell their advertisers they're retaining subscribers. I've said this before, but one more time: it's past time Walsh, Broadsheet and their self-absorbed set hive off, and we can restart the cultural section of Salon from scratch.

PC is dead, affirmative action is faltering, and every day Salon gives us more reasons why. I hope this has been literate enough for you. Wouldn't want to be classified with Eli Wallach, who, by the way, was a far better actor than any of these people are writers.

David and Jonathan, David and Jonathan -- haven't I read about this somewhere?

Glad to hear it. Something we can agree on.

All the members of NAMBLA, which existed for about half an hour, were jailed long ago for steep terms. It exists now only as a John Stewart joke.

Salyer, like so many others, debases the name Eric.

if we can find a prosecutor.