...What happens next is key. If the offending party continues to be rude, then I can appropriately disclaim to both parties that I am offended and can not continue to accept this kind of behavior, perhaps arranging a later time for our conversation, make any apologies, and then exit stage left.

More often than not, however, I am met with an apologetic surprise and a yielding of the floor for my next move. And if I'm rested enough to be wise, I'll query the intruder to see if their needs are more important than my wants, yielding back the floor as above. Or, if I'm feeling annoyed and sly, I may yield the floor, anyway, as a way of communicating to my conversational partner just how ludicrous the situation appears to me to be.

Am I being truthful? I think so. I think my non-verbal behavior is just as legitimate a source of communication as opening my mouth. The difference is that I've never regretted a thing I didn't say. And, yeah, I've said some regrettable things in my day, some of which I can never take back or amend.

The truth-telling, though, really takes place when I re-engage my original partner in a private discussion about what just happened. "hey, y'know, I understand everyone wants to talk with you, but we haven't talked in a while and I really need a hit." And if I need to drag it out to the nth degree, I will, depending on who I'm dealing with. But if the level of sharing I'm engaging in is not matched by the other person, that other person is SHOWING ME WHO THEY ARE. When people do that, I need to PAY ATTENTION. I need to believe them and cease making excuses for their behavior. I am responsible for my own peace and happiness. Unless I like making my problems unsolvable. And if that's the case, there's no more sure way of rendering myself miserable than to make my contentment dependent, or contingent, on the behavior of others.

God bless those people out there who never had to jump through hoops to get that last sentence inculcated into their behavior, those people who think, "that's really pretty basic stuff, Sherlock." Not for me, it wasn't.

Anyway, my point is that I don't have, and I refuse to see, any data that suggests that Eric Schaeffer is some sort of malignant narcissist. The malignant narcissists I recognize are the ones occupying the halls of our government at the present moment of attention. The work I've seen Eric do suggests nothing of the sort. And that's remarkable because the narcissism of our leaders filters down to our level much more quickly than those tax cuts they keep talking about. I get to see some of that narcissism play out in the corporate world and it continues to stun me. The way oil company people have treated their distributors for the past thirty years has been unconscienable, unethical and immoral. But it's considered all in a day's work for them and countless others.

The drivel that oozes out of the videodrome, particularly on Sunday mornings -- but now it's most of the time -- has been hideous. Can anyone actually HEAR the violence with which these babbling idiots are attacking the key sources of our connection to each other?

So any offenses which ES may be guilty are way down on my list of items for cultural critique. And I think that used to be true for Salon as a whole, too. Something has changed here, something has shifted, and I don't appreciate it. I saw the same thing happen to Rolling Stone when they started to go commercial. The whole counter-cultural movement became just another joke the capitalists played on us. As long as we had enough weed to toke on, we didn't really care.

We can't play this game anymore. We need to recognize the truly evil, the truly malevolent individuals running loose in our society, and bring them to justice. Forget about ES being a warped little lawn gnome long enough to recognize who the seer of the seen actually is.

It may well turn out to be the one who is seeing the scene.