The AP story was headlined, “Ahmadinejad calls for US leaders to be ‘buried.’” I naturally thought of Khrushchev: pounding his shoe on the lectern, hollering, “We will bury you!” (It did not happen quite this way, but that’s the way it has come down in the popular imagination, I think.) A-jad noted that America has not yet taken the “military option” “off the table.” And he said, “May the undertaker bury you, your table, and your body, which has soiled the world.” The AP pointed out that this language is “deeply offensive” in Iran, reserved for “hated enemies.”

Okie-dokie. By the way, we were always told that, when K-chev said, “We will bury you,” all he meant was, “We will outlive you. We — we Communists — will attend your funeral.” I’m not sure that the Iranian leader was being so polite. I wonder whether he was that rude when he spoke to the kids at Yale. I understand he got a very warm reception: no prickly questions or anything. Nothing like, “Stoned any girls for the crime of having been gang-raped lately?”

The West is a very peculiar place, especially at the elite levels. Hope we can buck up, as the years creep, or race, on . . .