In media res

I want to share with you a few of the tentative conclusions I've reached regarding Erin Palette's strictures. And I stress the word "tentative," because the subject of what motivates Palette is tricky and complex. Perhaps before going on, I should describe her to you. Palette is dastardly, brusque, and cocky. Furthermore, she yearns to distort the facts.

Palette is currently limited to shrieking and spitting when she's confronted with inconvenient facts. Within a short period of time, however, she is likely to switch to some sort of "replace discourse and open dialogue with unforgiving remonstrations and blatant ugliness" approach to draw our attention away from such facts. She holds onto power like the eunuch mandarins of the Forbidden City -- sterile obstacles to progress who nourish self-indulgent ideologies. I would like to put forth the possibility that I hate it when people get their facts absolutely wrong. For instance, whenever I hear some corporate fat cat make noises about how Palette is the ultimate authority on what's right and what's wrong, I can't help but think that Palette refuses to come to terms with reality. She prefers instead to live in a fantasy world of rationalization and hallucination. In other words, many people respond to her rummy conjectures in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we expose her malversation.

Though I don't doubt the depth of Palette's sentiments, it's rather the form of her expressions that I find both frowzy and wretched. We all need to be aware of each other's existence as intelligent, feeling, human beings, even if some of us are audacious vendors of Jacobinism. None but the homophobic can deny that if one dares to criticize even a single tenet of Palette's smears, one is promptly condemned as fatuous, lousy, feeble-minded, or whatever epithet she deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation. Parasitism can be deadly, but Palette's hastily mounted campaigns are much worse. Some critics have called her insipid. A handful insist she's disgusting. Palette's underlings, on the other hand, consider her to be one of the great minds of this century. That's all I'm going to say in this letter, because if I were to write everything I want to write, I'd be here all night.

(Props to Scott Pakin's automatic complaint generator whose randomness has described me with eerie veracity.)