An Unlovely Realization

For a goodly amount of time, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have prided ourselves on the highbrow audience devoted to our learned musings. Sure, we may not have a particularly large passel of followers, but we have long figured that this was because our recondite animadversions were too highfalutin for the Great Unwashed. We thought that, whereas hoi polloi enjoy gorging themselves on hotdogs and light beer, those of far more subtle tastes prefer this humble “weblog,” along with the occasional cruller.

Naturally, dear reader, this greatly aided our collective night’s sleep. After all, our “weblog” has proved about as popular as Sandra Bernhardt in Saudi Arabia. Pretty much the only thing that keeps us going is the notion that, like the folks at Commentary, we write for the few, the powerful, the obstinately literate.

Unfortunately, a few recent perusals of our “hit counter” have demonstrated that we may be incorrect in our prior suppositions. As devotees of Al Gore’s World-Wide Web may well know, dutiful “webloggers” have the ability to check the search words used by those connecting to their “websites.” And, to our great surprise, a couple of quick checks of this information have left us dismayed.

We naturally figured that aspiring readers of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” would search for us with such keywords as “problems with historicist thought,” or “Nietzsche and fascism,” or “chiaroscuro and pointillism.” And we were very, very wrong. We mean like Howard Dean wrong.

It appears as if particularly popular searches leading to our humble “website” are more like the following: “naked midgets,” “men with ponytails,” “list of carpenters with contacts in Albania + 2005.” Even the more learned “links” are much like the following: “trivial facts about muffins.”

A bit depressing, is it not? Here we are waxing grandiloquent in order to enthrall the supremely educated, and our “website” has become most popular among the “naked midget” crowd. And, given our multiple use of the phrase “naked midget” in this very “post,” this sordid crowd is liable to grow and grow, much like fungus on a naked midget. (Let’s see if that pulls in any more halfwits.)

In fact, dear reader, the sundry references to sexual matters employed by searchers who traveled to “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” have led us to this shocking revelation: Al Gore’s Internet is a bastion of pornography. Who would have guessed? Surely not Tipper.

As Dan Quayle once said: O tempora! O mores!