A few weeks back I posted a reader's e-mail letter to the editor, which objected to the "political invective" in Straight Up. That posting, "Thou Shalt Not," prompted several more e-mails from the reader, this time to me.

He explained he "did not object to [my] writing about the mixture of art and politics." He objected to "nakedly political comments disguised as arts comments, with only a thin veneer of material to disguise" them. He felt that posting the costs of war in Iraq was uncalled for because it was irrelevant to the arts. It was "partisan" rather than merely "political."

I believed the root of his objection was itself partisan. "I don't think you would have been upset had I criticized Bill Clinton," I wrote him. "Am I wrong?" He replied, "I might hate Clinton, but I hate insults more." And he admitted: "Upon further reflection ... it wasn't that you were being political or not political. ... The straw that broke the camel's back was your comment about recalling GW Bush [from office]. I thought it was a pretty unfair thing to say ..."

So why am I going over all this now? Because I promised him I would air his correspondence. He pointed out, among other things, that he's "a highly educated and cultured person" and "a little tired of hearing all the people in [his] educational class sneer at everything. Conservatives condescend, and leftists sneer."

He no more appreciated "reading the condescension in The New Criterion or The City Journal" than "reading the sneering everywhere else." He considered himself "a centrist and a utilitarian" with "a severe dislike for ideology of all kinds." He also pointed me toward "an art show that's not only political, but explicitly so." Regettably, the show — a group exhibit called "Politics as Usual" at the Aaron Packer Gallery in Chicago — has closed. But here it is online and very much worth seeing.

Finally, with all due respect, I feel compelled to say that no card-carrying centrist utilitarian would admit to knowing of, much less reading, The New Criterion or The City Journal . OK, I read The New Criterion myself sometimes. But I'd bet he is really a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with centrist utilitarian sympathies, possibly even a registered Republican, who despite being "a highly educated and cultured person," as he so modestly put it, somehow managed to vote for Gee Dubya Shrub and is miraculously not yet disillusioned by Shrub's distorted Christian ideology of spare the rich and soak the poor.