Don't play coy with me. I can see your guilty look from here.

Fact is, I admire Ellison from a distance and don't know a thing about him beyond his copious interviews, anecdotes, and actual writings, from which I think I can surmise a thing or two:

Harlan Ellison is a profane, outspoken, vitriolic, short-tempered, crass, explosive, sometimes misinformed and presumptuous literary gorilla.

Is that a bad thing to be?

He's also full of Right. Proper noun, that. Right. Not "rightness" or "righteousness," but Right. The world needs a Harlan Ellison clinging tightly to its throat screaming "Throw up! Throw up!" while it grows fatter and fatter at the all-you-can-eat buffet of self-inflicted myopic stupidity. "Richard Nixon is the greatest American president of the twentieth century? Throw up! Throw the fuck up!"

Read this.

Then read this.

Have a brief one to finish up.

Folks, it doesn't get any more Right than that. It doesn't come any hotter off the grill. Without self-pity, without false nostalgia, without subrational dogma, Ellison gives the diagnosis and the prescription.

Feel like banning human cloning? The hell with that. I want 30,000 Harlan Ellisons as soon as possible. I want one in every grade-school library and every secondary-school writing class. I want to see at least $300 million set aside by congress in fiscal 2002 for the purpose of Ellison Cloning. If that proves unworkable, I want a back-up robot body prepared to receive his brain in the event of a medical emergency. Twelve feet tall or thereabouts, midnight black, reinforced steel exoskeleton. Nuclear powered, armed to the teeth. The Harlan-Bot. The Harlanator. The Harlek.

Better yet, it could even be part of a grand plan to get America back on a semi-sane track. Combine the two programs. Build 30,000 tireless Harlan-Bots and let them roam the streets with executive authority to step on complete fucking idiots. Clearly delineate the powers of the Harlan-Bots, precisely define the conditions under which they can do the two-step on someone's cranium. I guarantee the American idiot population will vanish inside of three years.

How?

The trick is, when we warn the population about the killer Harlan-Bots roaming the streets and mention how to avoid getting blasted by them, we do it in writing.