I have now received dozens of infuriated e-mails from my two mordantly jokey posts of last night, the first in which I wondered why France didn’t just surrender the way it always does and the second about the assault by the French player on the Italian player and its animating cause perhaps being the Italian player saying something nice about Jews. So, to clarify: 1) I was not making fun of soccer. Evidently soccer fans are very sensitive if they think you are making fun of soccer. I was making fun of the French. 2) I don’t care that the U.S. didn’t do well in the World Cup. I don’t care about the World Cup and I don’t care who wins it and if the U.S. had won it I wouldn’t have cared. 3) When I wrote the posting about the French soccer player, I didn’t then know that he was the greatest French soccer player, or that he was of Algerian descent, or that he was a Muslim. I was making fun of the French. I stoutly defend my right to make fun of the French, especially when there are hundreds upon hundreds of anti-Semitic hate crimes being committed in France and the government practically has to be beaten into submission to recognize that there’s a problem. 4) It is true that I have never played in a World Cup and if I did play in a World Cup I would be an extremely bad player. This has nothing to do with making fun of the French. UPDATE: Someone points out that making fun of the French surrendering “is a joke so stale as to defy carbon dating.” Now that’s good writing, and a fair point, but the only thng I can say in my own defense is that given the hostility directed at me for saying it, maybe there’s life in the French-surrendering joke yet.