I’m still surprised that this essay didn’t explore the nature of the audience. I’m not disagreeing with your take about the dangers of straw men, but PG does seem very much in the vein of essays are for communicating interesting stuff, or fun stuff, or provocative stuff. To someone! And it seems like too long of an essay to discover by the end this serious omission. A timeless essay is one that retains meaning to a person, or maybe many people, over the course of time. PG spent a while trying to explore the message in this essay and no time on trying to understand the audience.