My Impromptus today is a Salzburg journal — sights, sounds, observations. It is an ever interesting little burg, I find, and, of course, gapingly beautiful. Anyway, that journal is here. Maybe just a speck of mail today.
In a post earlier this month, I wrote,
“Law and order” can be a cheap phrase. It often is, in the mouths of demagogues. But law and order is vitally important. No society can survive without it. In a democracy, ordered liberty is the name of the game. Each is extremely important: the noun, “liberty,” and the adjective, “ordered.”
A note from David Churchill Barrow:
Howdy, Jay,
My dad was once in a tough political fight running for selectman in our little town. The result on Election Day was an exact tie. No one wanted to risk a recount, so everyone agreed to a special election. I was a political-science major in college at the time, and my dad asked my opinion on a flyer he wanted to hand out.
“I don’t like this ‘law and order’ stuff, Dad,” I said. “Sounds too much like Nixon.”
He answered, “This isn’t your college campus, Churchmouse” (his nickname for me). “In this town, it still means something.”
He was right and I was wrong. We dropped that flyer off at just about every house in town (which was not a monumental task), and he won in a landslide. He claimed the voter turnout — over 80 percent — might have been a state record.
I wrote a piece about my dad and me a while back: here.
By the way, isn’t “selectman” an interesting word and title? So New England . . .
Here is an item from a different post of mine, published about a week ago:
Last December, Trump sold off pieces of the suit and tie he was wearing when his mugshot was taken. “The most historically significant artifact in American history,” the ad pitch went. (To refresh your memory on this, consult this article.)
It occurred to me: The suit and tie he was wearing at the time of the assassination attempt? A collector would pay a lot for those items (and they would increase in value over time, I imagine).
A reader writes,
Good morning, sir —
If you’ve never been to the Museum of Military History in Vienna (the Hapsburgs fought with just about everybody at one time or another), it’s worth a visit. In one eerie room, there is the open Gräf & Stift car that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were riding in when they were murdered. In a case nearby, there is the full military uniform the archduke was wearing — with blood stains.
It was surprisingly moving, especially to the only visitor in the gallery that morning — the whispers of history were very loud there.
Let’s end on something light — a classic moment from a classic American sitcom. In my Impromptus last Friday, I had a couple of reminiscences of Chi Chi Rodriguez, the golfer, who has passed away at 88. Some readers have recalled the trouble that Les Nessman had pronouncing the golfer’s name. Les Nessman? Yes, the news-hawk on WKRP in Cincinnati. Relive it — or experience it for the first time — here.
My thanks to one and all readers and correspondents.