What do you think about what George Santayana had to say, way back in 1915? He wrote to his sister explaining that, "I'm too old to be influenced by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper, but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed?"

If he read the New York Times today, he would need only to read one front page political piece and one op-ed piece in the Times, for the other op-ed pieces are dreadfully predictable.

The New York Times does not change my opinion, but I confess that I do often read the NYT-Online, like a preacher peeks at a copy of Playboy to see what the devil's up to, and if only to see if their op-ed writers have come up with more clever ways to state their opposition to about everything the normal American believes.

I also read the editorials, despite what the colorful journalist, and former TV commentator, Jack Germond, once observed. Germond once compared the writing of a newspaper editorial to wetting oneself while wearing a dark-blue serge suit: "It gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody notices."

One takes a glance at the NYT letters to the editor, but with no real expectation of enjoyment, or evenhandedness. The gloomy left-wing assessment of America's "failings" is dismally routine.

Anyway, if one misses some left-wing, antireligious, anti-American slant by not reading the Times, all one has to do is watch the same day's early morning ("Aren't we New Yorkers wonderful?") propaganda-news-like shows. Without fail CBS, NBC, and ABC follow the NYT leads, with nothing new added by them.

Those three programs actually lead most often with nearly the same words describing the same event? It's lambs to the news slaughter, with the NYT being the Judas goat. No wonder the NYT has fired more than 500 people, you don't need a news staff to report "no news." After the great Watergate reporting, it's been a downward slide into political sliming for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Today, the "great" national journalists have become "strivers for political stardom" who routinely fall back on "an unnamed source, close to the . . . " When in fact, too many national "scoops" are made by unaccountable reporters, some of whom at the Times were out and out authors of hoaxes.

Jason Blair, a first class liar in print, comes to mind. Remember him? He was a prize winning fabricator of the "news." It took a long time to fire him, long after his editors at the NYT knew he was a liar?

There was a time when the Arts section of the Times was really about art, but now it's about artless non-music, peephole television, and a type of celebrity once reserved for the hardworking girls in the upstairs rooms of cow town saloons. The "girls," better described with words that describe their actions than their looks, are still in the hotel bars, but their daddies own the hotels.

How did Shakespeare (I think) put it? "A rose by any other name is still a rose?" You can name a spoiled, socially useless, young woman after a street or after a city, "Paris," or a hunk of English real estate, "Brittany," but a rose is still a rose.

Why would The Times Arts page slant its coverage toward those cultural dribblers, whose fans don't read well in the first place? Surely, someone at the newspaper understands that fans of such low culture don't read the NYT? Thus, the Arts page has lost much of its readership, except in the columns about the "visual" arts, a sort of chronicle of the most tasteless, and often the most disgusting, phony "art."

The New York Times Arts page recently hailed Matthew Barney as the "most important American artist of his generation." Mr. Barney's latest "art work" is entitled, "Cremaster Cycle." It is really a sick, seven-and-a-half-hour video, which gets its name from a muscle in the male erogenous zone!

That's the kind of stuff they praise in print. Long gone are the reviews about real artists. You know, the painters and sculptors who labor alone for lifetimes, without the "in crowd" noticing them. They are the real artists, the ones who struggle to give expression to their personal feelings, whose beautiful, or tormented, honest, noncommercial, expressions of their conception of life and their place in the world, go unnoticed by the New York Times.

However, I confess that I do read the NYT's Book Review pages, usually at Books- A -Million in Jonesboro, free of charge, while sitting in one of their comfortable leather chairs, which leads me to the NYT columnist and author, and sexy-legged comic, Miss Maureen Dowd, the aging (by her very standards) queen of junior high school one-liners? Her latest book is a rehash of columns entitled, "Are Men Necessary?"

Miss Dowd, also the queen of politicized journalists, is the typical NYT writer. Such propaganda technicians are typically more often from left-wing journalism schools (Columbia University in New York comes to mind), or they enter journalism with degrees in humanities or social "sciences." They believe that they're "doing good in the world," and delude themselves, if they are supposed to be objective reporters, that they are telling the truth, with only the slightest political tilt to their stories.

By the way, I'm not a qualified journalist, but I did make my living, for the most part, discovering "who, what, where, and when." One also confesses to a university education.

I write a column, and have written two (unpublished) books, because after a lifetime of international traveling and "living," and poking around in the lives of others, and after having read hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of books, it's fated that one writes? It's like a farmer who has listened to jokes and stories for forty years at the early morning cafe, sooner or later, he'll feel the need to tell a joke himself.

I admire real journalists, and usually the ones I admire most have no college degrees, and have "learned by doing." They are like the reporters H. L. Mencken talks about in "Newspaper Days, 1890-1906." [Copyright 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf].

Mencken, one of the greatest newspapermen that ever wrote a line, says, " . . . in 1898 at the age of eighteen, I had a choice of going to college, there to be taught by German professors and on weekends to sit in a raccoon coat watching football games, or of getting a job on a newspaper, which would allow me to zip off to fires, whorehouse raids, executions, and other such festivities." For him, it was no contest. For me, it's a great privilege to associate with honest journalists.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.