I COME TO YOU TODAY to ask a blunt yet necessary question.

How prejudiced are you?

No, I don’t mean the person next to you.

I don’t mean your parents.

And I don’t mean All Those People supposedly out there in Bad Old Mainstream America.

When I say You, I really do mean You.

It’s something that’s been running around in the background-processing cache of my brain for some time now.

It came to the foreground when a kind reader, who’d noted an older page here in which I’d talked about that deconstructionist buzzword “The Other,” slipped me a copy of a long academic essay which used the term profusely. The piece was ostensibly about men’s stereotypes about women, but ultimately turned out to exemplify certain women’s stereotypes about men’s stereotypes about women.

Only the piece’s authors didn’t realize that was what they were really writing. They were too caught up in the fashionable notion that Dehumanizing The Other is something done only by Those People Who Aren’t Like Us.

But it’s not just sexist “anti-sexists” who practice this eternal double standard. It’s darn near everybody. Even people who listen to NPR. Even people who sort their recyclables.

Even people who read ‘hip’ websites.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.

MONDAY: If the Religious Right collapses, who will liberals complain about?

ELSEWHERE: Cereals of the Apocalypse; plus The Trouble with Tang…