Will be reading fiction for the next several days, or as long as I can stand it. Did 30 pages of a Jake Page anthropological thriller this afternoon and had to reach for the oxygen. 70 pages into a Carl Sagan sci-fi thriller and am already spending more time watching the backs of my eyelids...

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The absence of humor is perhaps the most trying aspect. Humor is inseparable from sadism and the latter is a no-no in our post-Shelley age of compassion with its competing cults of victimhood and the tedious brainwashing that constitutes K-12 public education.

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Honesty is never popular. Today's model writer is sensitive, feels our pain, walks in our shoes. And is expected to emerge from congress with us informed, enlightened, and sympathetic. But you and I know he must look down on us if he is worth his salt. How can anybody study up and write on a subject and not emerge feeling uppity, particularly given the social mammal will-to-power that we're all born with? The short answer is he can't. Nor should he be expected to. He should be expected to cackle and guffaw from time to time. We should be ready to be on the receiving end, keeping a stiff upper lip and not devolving into bleats of that most ignoble of socialite defenses: "I'm offended."

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Surely it would be a sign of health were there to be more of this: Naipaul's reply to a reporter's query about the meaning of the Hindu red dot on the forehead, "It means, 'I have no brain.'" Surely this is a natural response, as is the laughter of the superior-minded Hindu at the world's simple-minded monotheists.

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There's little more snooze-inducing than a writer's submission to the belief that the only acceptable expression of superiority is piety: the politically correct profession that one is more equal than the rest.

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But better to honestly horse-laugh with the sinners than cry with the posturing saints. As a natural-born oppressor why fight my inner imperialist? And look who survives from the Victorian era when one thinks of the theatre: Oscar Wilde, Gilbert & Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw. All comedians. Famous American writers? Twain is surely the most famous of all. Another comedian. My preferred writer above all others, Mencken, is yet another comedian, yet another misanthrope snorting at the herd, stirring up the animals, and paying the bills through the guise of parody...

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My destiny as a writer, successful or failed, seems writ in the stars...

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But, first, just to be sure, back to the best selling platitudes and snoring pedestrian details of the lives unimaginatively lived and imagined and set down in print by a few more of homo blank's best-selling writers. What awful stuff!

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Biff Cappuccino