Lee Siegel: I'm, an insane lunatic

I wear this nearly every day, Siegel.

SIEGEL V. BASEBALL CAPS:

There are few places on earth, as far as I'm concerned, where the light, especially in late afternoon, in summer, is more beautiful than on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's a river light, soft and gently diffused. It gets delicately soaked into the sides of buildings, splashes the windshields of the yellow cabs coasting down Broadway, washes up against the green wall of the park that runs along the Hudson.

Come evening, everyone pours into Riverside Park from the Upper West Side's hybrid neighborhoods: older couples from the squat elegant buildings on West End Avenue, students from Columbia's carefully patrolled Morningside Heights, Hispanic kids and young couples from Amsterdam Avenue's brightly awned streets, young professionals recently moved into the new luxury high-rises that have sprouted up along the Upper West Side's left-liberal alley--the glassy new buildings like lost guests who've wandered into a noisy party meeting instead of the stiff, reserved dinner party they were headed to. And everyone covered in golden light in the green park. You feel the possibility of naturalness in humanity, and of humanity in nature. You feel at ease.

And then you go to a nice restaurant and sit down next to some troglodyte wearing... A BASEBALL CAP.

Oh how I hate these things. I didn't mind them when a few people wore them. Then it served as the rudimentary expression of taste, or as the vague outline of identity. But soon everyone began putting them on their heads. It's gotten so black kids from the ghetto have to wear them with the bill pulled down over their eyes just so they won't be mistaken for yuppie bankers

Frank,

What are you doing? Why is this in your magazine? I know you run fake e-mails and all, but come on, no editor should have let this lunacy see the light of day. I mean, attributing words to me I didn't write and then offering up a churlish apology is one thing, but this?

I mean this reflects rather poorly on your editorial judgment. This is nonsense, drivel, the kind of thing us proto-fascists are laughing at, turning your magazine into an online laughing stock.

Come on, didn't some editor ever tell you not to jerk off in print? Now, we have to mock this insane column because it is insane. It didn't need to see the light of day. But it did.

Baseball caps. Fake e-mails. What's next, naked women, the hottest babes of the hill?