I will tell you all my faults frankly beforehand. I am very vain, for I cultivate my vanity on a principle, and cannot understand why we should neglect such a source of gratification.

Kilpatrick expresses some alarm at the fact that the Buckleyesque vocabulary shows signs of being contagious, citing the celebrification of the Columbia Journalism Review, and, worse yet, a piece on Patty Hearst composed by George Will (a columnist and conservative in his own right) to the effect that "Patty's arrest provided a coda to a decade of political infantilism, the exegesis of which could be comprehended as a manifestation of bourgeois Weltanschauung.

What had been his hypothetical singular solutions? Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball, nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts, chess or backgammon): […]

That's what attracts you people, if you don't mind my saying so. You people doesn't sound very polite, but I have lived for years out here in the back of beyond, where I have watched you people come in search of answers.