In a season heavy with politics, my Impromptus today is heavy with politics. But I also have a dose of policy (“adjacent” to politics, to be sure) and a reflection on James Earl Jones, the late actor. Let’s get to a little mail.
In a column earlier this month, I had a comment on college football. Whole new world. What’s a “transfer portal”? Who’s in what conference? How much are the players makin’, through “NIL”?
An alumnus of Michigan State University — an athlete — writes,
It was in the fall of 1975 that I was first on the MSU campus. While I was walking to Jenison Field House, a very prominent football player came driving by in a brand new Buick Riviera. Gorgeous ride.
That spring, MSU got hit with serious NCAA sanctions.
Now everyone gets paid and has a nice car — not a Yugo.
True! (I think of the 1987 movie Dragnet, in which Dan Ackroyd, as Sergeant Joe Friday, says, “After losing the two previous vehicles we had been issued, the only car the department was willing to release to us at this point was an unmarked 1987 Yugo, a Yugoslavian import donated to the department as a test vehicle by the government of that country and reflecting the cutting edge of Serbo-Croatian technology.”)
In another column, I remarked on “evolution,” of the political sort. A reader writes,
So you think political parties evolve?
When I was 14 I asked my dad what party we belonged to. He said, “We’re Al Smith Democrats, which means we vote Republican a lot.”
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964, including three consecutive votes for Mitt Romney in ’12, ’16, and ’20.
Because the Harris-Walz campaign displays a “Happy Warrior” attitude, I will cast my first Democratic presidential vote this year.
Do the parties evolve, or revolve?
Responding to another column, a reader writes,
I noticed you led off a paragraph with “Tense times, ours.” To my ear, that’s a charming and idiomatic British formulation, which I’ve always liked. In the Harry Potter movies, there are quite a few examples of it: e.g., “Great man, Dumbledore.” Your writings regularly contain little asides about language. Perhaps you’d write about this question?
Well, our English language is beautifully flexible. “Ours are tense times”; “Tense times, ours.” Your ear will guide you.
In a different column, I wrote about an amusing mistake. There was a concert that included Rachmaninoff’s tone poem Isle of the Dead. The piece was advertised as Aisle of the Dead. A reader in the music biz now cites another mistake:
Once, we had “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from Carousel. It got listed in the program as “You’ll Never Walk Again”!
My thanks to one and all readers and correspondents. (By the way, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was the favorite song of Senator Bob Dole. It helped sustain him during arduous recovery from war wounds.)