With all the material and intellectual challenges facing democratists, choosing one's opponents is still beneficial. From the parochialist backbench can be heard This is What You Get When You Pretend They Can Be Us, but that rebuke was learned by rote in a school of anthropology discredited sixty years ago. Peoples living today under the republican rule of law include those whose countries never flew a British flag, those who are dark-skinned and, indeed, those who are Muslim. There is ever a dislocation between what was — what "ought to be" — and what is, the principal service of Carol O'Connor's dramatized misanthropy to get him laughed at. It's best to leave the parochialists to their dangerous flirtation, then, and answer the conservatives.