And I don’t think I changed the minds of the vast masses of America about Jerry Seinfeld with my Can’t Stand Seinfeld Society campaign. But I’d succeed in making the not inconsiderable number of individuals who shared my loathing for the smug, simpering, insipid New York Lite sitcom feel less lonely and isolated in their disaffection.

Nor have I–yet–succeeded in reversing the foolish, uncritical assent the media and mainstream publishers in America have given to the claimed "discovery" of an overlooked late work by Shakespeare, a wretched "Funeral Elegy" whose dubious claim to authenticity rests upon the shaky foundation of computerized word-frequency programs. But on a question that goes to the heart of who Shakespeare was as an artist, I have at least raised the flag of dissent here in America to a claim widely disparaged by serious Shakespeare scholars in Britain and elsewhere.

I haven’t stopped the Ford Motor Company from running repellent image ads for their raving, Jew-hating founder, but I have succeeded in raising awareness of Henry Ford’s long-forgotten shame.

And, no, repeated railings in this column have not punctured, even dented, the smug New Age corporate culture of Starbucks, although I have, after repeated and strenuous assaults, at least succeeded in winning from Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters a nationwide right-to-refill policy for their secret off-the-menu coffee-and-steamed-milk drink, the "misto."

And there have been larger victories. My columns here (and in Esquire) decrying the scandalous neglect of the novelist Charles Portis, whose brilliant, idiosyncratic last three novels (The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos) had gone out of print, were instrumental in getting all of them (and his first novel, Norwood) to be reissued by the Overlook Press beginning this spring with The Dog of the South. Buy this book and you will be eternally grateful to me for some of the purest reading pleasure–and one of the most memorable voices–to be found in contemporary fiction.

In addition, on a more arcane but even more urgent literary issue, I believe my columns on V. Botkin have convinced at least some Nabokovians of my critique of some recent lit-crit revisionist theories about the "true" narrator of Pale Fire.

And remember my plea to the new owners of the Chrysler Building? To keep the lights on the beautiful spire lit up all night long (instead of being shut off at 2 A.M., as the penny-pinching previous owners had). It resulted in this most luminous icon of the New York skyline now illuminating the dark nights of our souls all the way till dawn.

And, most recently, there was the triumphant vindication of Barney Greengrass’ chopped liver, a unique New York cultural asset, against all contenders and pretenders, a vindication sealed by a blind taste test conducted by America’s leading Jewish weekly, The Forward.

But nothing, no crusade, no feud was more satisfying than the war I waged two years ago to save Mystery Science Theater 3000, the smartest, funniest show on television (with the possible exception of The Simpsons), perhaps the funniest ongoing critique of American culture ever. You might recall that two years ago MST3K–as it’s known to the fanatic following it’s developed for its caustic revenge-of-the-spectator, talk-back-to-the-screen stream-of-consciousness cultural studies comedy–was threatened with extinction.

It would have been a tragedy: There is little doubt in my mind that, by the time the next millennium rolls around, those archeologists studying 20th-century American civilization will find close scrutiny of MST3K episodes far more valuable than all the cultural-studies monographs produced by all the jargon-addled academics in all the world, in decrypting, deciphering and recuperating the pitch and attitude of contemporary popular culture consciousness at its sharpest and most self-aware. MST3K is, I’ve suggested, in its endless fragmentary tapestry of comic cultural references projected upon the scrim of truly bad movies, nothing less than the Dead Sea Scrolls of American culture. In its encyclopedic, parodistic self-referentiality, in its elevation of commentary into a comic genre, it is a satiric Talmudic Anatomy of Melancholy. So funny, it’s the supreme antidote to melancholy.

But two years ago, after a long run on Comedy Central, a new regime there, headed by Doug Herzog (a name that will forever live in this column’s hall of infamy) decided that their money was better spent on buying more humorless Saturday Night Live reruns than on producing original episodes of this low-key masterpiece of comic irreverence. The fate of MST3K was then in the hands of the honchos at the Sci-Fi Channel who were considering picking it up when its Comedy Central contract ran out. At that decisive moment I ran a column focusing the spotlight on Sci-Fi Channel programming head Barry Schulman, naming him a potential Culture Hero–or potential Culture Villain–depending on his MST3K pickup decision. I was later told, by the then-head of USA Networks (which owns the Sci-Fi Channel) that my column had a real impact in, shall we say, "empowering" Mr. Schulman to do the right thing and save MST3K.

It was a splendid victory, for the fans, for the culture, for me. But eternal vigilance is the price of cultural victory, and I must admit I dropped my guard; I took MST3K’s continuing presence for granted for a while, and neglected the fact that the final year of the three-year contract with the Sci-Fi Channel was approaching. The show cruised along at a continuing high level of comic-genius consistency and it didn’t occur to me that anything could go wrong again. It didn’t occur to me until I got the shocking news (more than a week after the announcement) that the Sci-Fi Channel was not renewing MST3K after its upcoming third season there.

Ironically, I got the news on the day I was supposed to participate in the literary equivalent of the Experiment that is the premise of MST3K. You know the MST3K premise, don’t you? Well, you should. The show airs now at 10 A.M. on Saturdays and 10 P.M. on Sundays, so start watching as if your life depends on it, because it might not last forever (although back episodes from the Comedy Central years can be ordered from Rhino Home Video, 800-432-0020)

But for those who have missed it somehow, the premise of MST3K is a diabolical experiment conducted by Mad Scientists in which a shlubby guy (originally MST3K’s whimsical genius creator Joel Hodgson, now the terrific deadpan persona of Mike Nelson) is shot into space on a rocket ship and there, in isolation, compelled to watch the worst schlocky movies (mainly really bad sci-fi flicks) produced by man, ostensibly so the mad scientists could "monitor his mind," but really so they can enjoy the infliction of cultural pain.

The MST3K Experiment subject’s response in this tongue-in-cheek framing device is to build a couple of makeshift robots with whom he watches the bad movies, and most of the two-hour show consists of us, the TV viewers, watching them watch the awful flicks and interpolate a stream of brilliant wisecracks over the soundtrack. It is, you could say, a meta-cultural parable, a revenge comedy, in which the spectator victim of pop culture uses the weapons of pop culture itself to deconstruct its idiocies while mapping its contours with visionary accuracy. The Experiment is a metaphor as well, a meta-metaphor for the human condition: for the way we are all, in effect, forced to watch the bad horror movie that is History with no weapon but wit to console ourselves.

Anyway, I’ll never forget the day I got the bad news about the new peril this endangered cultural resource faces. (In a funny way it’s a resource not unlike Books & Company, a site that’s more than a show but a showcase of sensibility, a meeting place of minds.) I got the news from Deborah Wardwell, a witty fellow MST3K aficionado who was cutting my hair in her salon on West 80th Street as I was on my way to participate in a literary analogue to the MST3K experiment.

The premise for this experiment was to bring together four writers who’d never met each other (Meg Wolitzer, Dale Peck, Kathryn Harrison and me) who (as it turned out) had little or no book-group experience, to assign them to read two novels they might not have read otherwise (Sue Miller’s While I Was Gone and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy) and to put them on a stage at the New School before a paying audience and ask us to act as if we were an ongoing book group.

It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t, thanks mainly to the other three writers, all of whom proved to be smart, funny and spontaneous on stage, and managed to make up for my mostly wooden observations (I hate trying to be spontaneous). It could have been a disaster because even real book groups are encountering disasters these days. In fact, according to an article PEN’s event-organizer Michael Roberts showed us in the green room before our experiment began, there are so many outbreaks of bitterness, divisiveness and psychodrama in the mushrooming nationwide book-group movement that a new subspecialty of the helping profession has emerged: Book-group therapists who are summoned to help deal with divisive interpersonal issues spreading dysfunction in book groups across the land.

This resulted in some apprehensive laughter among us four subjects of the PEN experiment (where was our book group therapist?) and it was in a moment of nervous conversation before stepping onto the stage that I found myself comparing our experiment to MST3K’s–and was gratified to learn that the supremely witty Meg Wolitzer was almost as much of an enthusiast as I was. And that she agreed with me when I called MST3K "the smartest thing in American culture."

This reaffirmed my secret, somewhat snobby belief that MST3K is a kind of test, that an affinity for it often betokens a more sophisticated sensibility than is found in those who don’t watch it, or worse, in those who’ve watched it and don’t get it.

And so, after a brief plunge into despair about the future of American culture, and despair over the bleakness of my own future without fresh infusions of new MST3K episodes and the champagne-like, effervescent effect they have on my spirit, I decided it was time to mobilize, time to take action, time to mount another quixotic crusade, to try to save MST3K once again. I even decided it was time to do something I almost never do, which was to go on line to see what the official and unofficial MST3K sites had to say about this incipient tragedy.

I’d known that the Web was a hotbed of MST3K fandom but I was surprised to find nearly 60 unofficial MST3K sites (download a listing of them from Umbilicus at mst3kinfo.com), many of them personal "shrines" to MST3K episodes and characters akin in a way to Elvis shrines, if you’ve ever seen them, a true measure of pop culture devotion.

It was clear that a Save MST3K campaign had just gotten under way, but not all the sites were up to speed on the tragedy, and not all of them agreed on tactics. Nonetheless, spending some time with them suggested to me a strategy and a focus for the crusade: a focus on Barry Diller, owner of the USA Network and thus the boss of the bosses at the Sci-Fi Channel who made the terrible decision not to renew MST3K. The buck stops with Barry Diller.

The Sci-Fi Channel’s official Web site tries too hard to make the cancellation seem like a beautiful moment, a consensual kill. "A Fond Farewell" proclaims its Web-page posting of the news. "As the series ends its remarkable 10-year run, the network is proud to accompany Mystery Science Theater to this television milestone," they say, announcing a special April 11 final season kick-off show which features the return of MST3K creator Joel Hodgson to the set.

But don’t you just love the Orwellian language: Terminating the series and kicking it out the door becomes "accompanying it to this television milestone." Milestone as in gravestone. MST3K’s "Actors get a break" after 10 years, the Sci-Fi Channel release actually proclaims. Yeah, like Dr. Kevorkian’s patients get "a break."

But if you turn to the latest posting on MST3K’s own site, the one sponsored by Best Brains Inc., its production company (www.mst3kinfo.com), you get a somewhat different story. Their page headlines the rescue campaign: Fan Efforts to Save "MST3K." They report that Best Brains honcho Jim Mallon "has stated that they would indeed be interested in working on an 11th season." That they’re encouraging fans to write "polite" letters and faxes to the Sci-Fi Channel asking them to reconsider, while at the same time they’re raising the possibility of moving to another cable or broadcast outlet.

Things get less polite when you move to the unofficial Save MST3K sites. The official MST3K site discourages fans from making the Sci-Fi Channel the villain; they say they have a good relationship with the channel and that the best thing to do to advance the cause of the show’s survival is to promote viewership and thus ratings for the final 13 episodes of the last season.

But the unofficial sites are less inhibited: They encourage letters of support and protest to the Sci-Fi Channel (address: Bonnie Hammer, Vice President of Programming for the Sci-Fi Channel, USA Networks, 1230 Sixth Avenue, 20th floor, New York, N.Y. 10020; fax 413-6532; e-mail program@scifi.com). But they’re also not averse to pointing the finger higher up the corporate food chain–at Barry Diller.

In somewhat melodramatic terms whose urgency I can nonetheless sympathize with, another Web site describes the situation thusly: "Once again Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been given the heave-ho by evil corporate overlords. The overlords in question this time are the ones controlling the Sci-Fi Channel and USA networks. Barry Diller and his goons have run off the good Barry, Barry Schulman and the new folks are more interested in buying Lycos than producing quality programming."

As I said, it’s a bitterness born of understandable desperation, but there’s some truth to it. The buck stops with Barry Diller. Does anyone doubt that if he were to intervene with the small-minded number crunchers who made this shortsighted decision, he could get it reversed? If this cultural crime in progress was committed without his knowledge, he can step in and stop it. And if it was done with his knowledge, even at his instigation, he can show what a large soul he is by reconsidering and countermanding the order.

In many ways this can be a defining moment for Barry Diller. A moment in which he decides whether he represents anything more than the sum of his recent corporate manipulations and takeover games in which a famous but (relatively) cash-poor mogul keeps trying to leverage his way to ownership of a major media empire. Once Barry Diller was someone who brought some promise, some vision to television sterility. He was, after all, head of the Fox TV network when it green-lighted The Simpsons, which continues to be one of the few great irreverent triumphs in recent television history.

But ever since he left Fox and failed to take over Paramount Communications and CBS Corporation, Mr. Diller’s been wandering in a wilderness of deal-making, refinancings, initial public offering fantasies, home shopping network buyouts and UHF networks without producing anything worthy of note as actual creative content. Yes, his recent Universal Television deal makes him a certified mogul again, but several times more removed from the creative process. He looks to be a creative executive who’s lost his creative touch in endless, exhausting deal-making. A powerful but empty suit, no longer relevant to the culture he was once a vital part of.

Unless … unless he makes a bold gesture, steps in and saves MST3K, shows us where his heart is, shows us he has one.

It would be a signal, a defining gesture–and not nearly a charitable one: I have a feeling that if Barry Diller told the Sci-Fi Channel he wanted MST3K to succeed they would promote it intensely enough to make it succeed, even in number-crunching Nielsen terms. It’s a gesture than would do more than allow Barry Diller to escape the opprobrium of villainy in MST3K Web-site culture, it would insure him a place in the pantheon of those who encouraged the vitality rather than the sterility of American popular culture. It would make him an instant culture hero to some of the best and brightest pop culture (and high culture) enthusiasts in America.

He may be cash-poor for a mogul, but let’s face it, he’s got more money than he’ll ever really need (how many homes, how many cars, does any one individual need?). Still, there’s something no amount of money, no concatenation of corporate reshufflings and buyouts can buy Barry Diller: genuine respect for his creative sensibility. Here with one masterstroke, with one red-tape-cutting intervention, he can recoup his creative cachet, his reputation for programming vision–or refuse to act and condemn it forever to death when MST3K dies.

Write Barry Diller at USA Networks Inc., 152 West 57th Street, 42nd floor, New York, N.Y. 10019, and send him the column, send copies of your letters to me at The Observer. It’s time to see who Barry Diller really is. As they say on the Emergency Broadcast Network: This is a test.