DECLINE OF WESTERN CIV: LATEST UPDATE. Tim Blair makes a snotty comment about Gore Vidal, one of our last readable novelists. One of Blair's commentators is excited to learn that Buckley once called Vidal a queer on TV ("My opinion of, Buckley already pretty high....has now attained Stratospheric proportions...."). Another says, apparently with a straight face (no emoticon visible), "Insults are the last refuge of the loser. And Vidal is a loser, big time."

I do hope that, after we have finally returned to outright barbarism, and some future Brother of St. Liebowitz manages to rev up the Internet again, he may find on some long-slumbering server this cautionary tale of what happens when you replace the monkeys' typewriters with Movable Type 2.64. Next Renaissance, let's get this thing right, shall we?