In the issue before the current NR, I had a piece about Franco, “Franco in Full.” The piece is a book review: a review of a new biography by Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios. To read the review, go here.
I wanted to share a letter with you, which tickled me, and may well do the same for you. It is so very typical (what the letter relates, I mean). A reader writes,
Your piece on Franco reminds me of a couple I knew years ago in Denver. He was an artist, she was artsy. They had lived for a few years on Ibiza, and never tired of talking about how wonderful it was. They were both extremely liberal/progressive. In the fall of 1964, she said to me very earnestly: “If that fascist Barry Goldwater wins, we’re moving back to Spain.”
Go figure.
Yup.
P.S. While I have you on the line, so to speak, let me link to a music piece: “The concert hall as warzone.” I talk about a concert featuring Maxim Vengerov, the Russian violinist, and Yu Long, a Chinese conductor.
P.P.S. About a month after the 1964 election, MLK gave his Nobel lecture. “The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right,” he said. “They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.” In my history of the peace prize, I write, “An older King might well have been ashamed of that rhetoric, or at least regretted it. For one thing, Goldwater’s view of government and economics was the opposite of fascist: was the classical-liberal view.”