Friends, in Friday’s Impromptus, I told a little story about the Bay Area (San Francisco). The parents of a friend of mine are Republicans — and, one day, they found out that friends they had known for years were Republicans too. It’s just that no one had ever opened his mouth.

The revelation had come about as follows: My friend’s father let slip that he and one of his children were attending a Sarah Palin rally. (This was in October.) And, whaddya know: The other families said, “We are too!”

As you might expect, this story provoked a fair amount of mail — including a letter from a Bay Area reader who said,

I also went to that Palin rally, and it was truly eye-opening to see people from my office and community who I never knew shared a Republican point of view. Interestingly, I know who all the Democrats are. They don’t hesitate to speak their minds here — loudly and often.
You get the feeling that, if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, you could be out of a friend, out of a job, or just subtly frozen out of opportunities to advance your career. So I try to keep things close to the vest, and I have even laughed along politely at more than a few Bush-as-idiot jokes.
And when I think I have it bad, I just have to listen to what my wife goes through as a public high school teacher. She has literally come home in tears on days when the vitriol from her fellow teachers has gone too far. All this in a part of the country that is supposedly the most tolerant of others’ viewpoints.

Would anyone suppose so, at this late date? Look, I hear tales in New York that would curl your hair. I know some people who, during the recent campaign, thought they would be fired if they revealed they were voting for McCain — and this was in offices that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. Maybe the saddest case I know is of a young woman who was afraid to tell her boyfriend she was a Republican.

I don’t give much romantic advice, but I will give this: If he’ll ditch you because you’re a Republican, ditch him first.

‐Also in that Friday column, I mentioned Chief Justice Roberts, saying that I like his style, quite a bit (along with his jurisprudence). A reader gave me a sample of Roberts, when he goes all Mickey Spillane:

North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.
Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.
That was not good enough for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which held in a divided decision that the police lacked probable cause to arrest the defendant.

For the opinion — dissent, more specifically — go here. And, yeah, I like his style, muchly.

‐A reader wrote me, “I’m about to turn sixty, Jay, and it may be a sign of age that I am now finding that I support people based on who hates them. And I am finding myself more and more attracted politically and otherwise to Sarah Palin.” I know the feeling: There’s positive motivation, so to speak, and negative . . .

‐The Spectator’s Ron Liddle went to see Oliver Stone’s movie W. and liked it, a lot. He wrote,

I think British film reviewers didn’t like W. precisely because it invested the appalling President with a degree of understanding, with a soupçon of humanity. Not that much understanding and humanity, mind — the film, a lot of the time, played it for laughs — but just enough to make the Brits uneasy.
It’s a peculiar thing, the visceral loathing with which Bush is regarded by the European chattering classes and the determination with which we refuse to countenance any attempt to invest the US regime with a purpose which is anything other than purely, unequivocally evil.

Liddle then talks about the desire of people to understand Islamofascist terrorists and other enemies. He writes,

I don’t disagree; we should attempt to understand them. Know thine enemy, as they say. And then shoot him. But it is bizarre that the same latitude is not extended to those who are, nominally at least, on our side. Any notion that Bush’s motives [in the Iraq War] might not have been wholly murderous or venal or duplicitous simply cannot be countenanced — even when, as in W., the whole business is dressed up with lots of humour at the expense of the President.

Interesting writer, Liddle. Very, actually.

‐In Friday’s column, I had occasion to mention Alma Mahler, and this prompted many readers to remember Tom Lehrer’s song about the lady (lyrics here). I also thought of something Jeff Hart once told me — something that deserves to be true. It was a couple of days after Franz Werfel’s funeral. (Alma had been married to Werfel, and before him Gropius and Mahler. She also had other lovers.) A woman met her on the street and said, “Alma, I didn’t see you at the funeral!” She replied matter-of-factly, “Oh, I never go to them.”

(Almost certainly the story is not true — for one thing, Gropius outlived Alma — but it’s still wonderful.)

‐On the general subject of music: I was looking up something not long ago about a soprano named Rose Pauly (1894-1975), who lived a very interesting and turbulent life. (How many Jews in the 20th century were forced to live “interesting and turbulent lives”? Rose Pauly died in Israel.) Here is an eye-catching excerpt from a Time magazine article, published in January 1938:

Before a recent appearance at the Venice Opera, a dinner was given in [Pauly’s] honor by Mussolini. During the festivities she remarked to a nearby stranger, “I think that we at least ought to see Mussolini here. I’m so disappointed because he won’t be present when I’m singing .” “I’m sorry too,” said the stranger, “but I have to go to Rome,” then added, “You must be almost the only woman who does not know Mussolini’s face.” Pauly apologized, said she didn’t know much about politicians. “Brava! Brava!” exclaimed II Duce. “That is a true woman. Women should not bother themselves with politics; their business is in the home.”

To adapt a feminist line, Rose Pauly’s business was more like in opera houses . . .

‐Would you like to have an interesting morsel about China? A reader contributes the following:

I had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend a few days ago. She is Chinese and we were talking about the government there and we got on the topic of Tiananmen Square. I asked if the picture of the lone guy standing in front of the tanks had made its way around China at the time or if the government had suppressed it. She said that, in fact, the government had spread the image far and wide — as proof of how much they cared about the Chinese people, because the tanks had not just run him over! She said that the people have been propagandized for so long that they pretty much saw it that way. She never realized that the West viewed the man as a symbol of bravery and defiance until she came here about 15 years ago. Amazing, the interpretation of images.

Yes.

By the way, there was a famous poet in England — since reformed, I believe — who said that the Khmer Rouge were obviously compassionate, because they were killing people with bullets, when bullets were scarce and costly. True brutes would have beaten them to death with shovels and the like.

Seriously.

‐Two brothers have done an excellent thing: built a website dedicated to the writer Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple. Is there a better writer to dedicate a website to? Is there a better writer? That website is here.

Now, if only someone would build a website gathering the lifelong writings of David Pryce-Jones, a website dedicated to Paul Johnson, and maybe a couple other websites, I’d be the happiest Ann Arborite (former) alive . . .

‐A while back, I had an item on — in brief — You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover, Political Division. A woman wrote in to say,

Jay,
My husband and I are quite conservative; we’re also former Peace Corps volunteers (1988-89). I’m even a longtime vegetarian. I wear granny-square scarves I crochet myself, and I compost in our back yard. I’m a Rush 24/7 member.
My husband has spent the last 18 years flying helicopters in the U.S. Coast Guard.
I see no contradiction in any of these choices we’ve made. However, if they learned just one of these things about us, I’m not sure what impressions other folks might have.

Nice!

‐Finally, a reader wrote,

Jay,
I think you’ll like this quite a lot. The following obit appeared in the Kansas City Star: “Arthur Byrnes Riordan, 81, of Kansas City, slipped away peacefully and unexpectedly while reading the Wall Street Journal in his favorite chair Sunday evening, November 9th. He had been in excellent health. Cause of death is thought to be the state of the economy and the recent election. Art was born . . .

Happy Monday, y’all! You too, Art!