Unmoved by Rick Brookhiser’s threats to take action if he should ever diss us again, unembarrassed by John Derbyshire’s pointing out that one carries rather than wears a parasol, and unmoved by my efforts to bring him to his senses with proof after proof that even manly men like poetry, John Podhoretz replies to us all:

“My suggestion, to you and all your panty-waist troops there, is that

you immediately a) take up whist, b) have parties where you spend hours

forming tableaux, c) and conduct endless debates over the moral

propriety landscaping of your country estate. Oh, and of course, d)

have a quote-Horace-in-Latin contest. Just think of that poor boy in

Yeats, taken away by the faeries, because the world’s more full of

weeping than you can ever understand….Is that really what you all

want to be? A sodden, whist-playing, tableaux-forming bunch of

Anglophilic backward-in-the-mirror lookers?”

John and Rick, I like suggestion a), don’t you? But since we’ll need a fourth hand to play whist, could one of you prevail on Rich or Jonah?