I think you may enjoy this: In today’s Impromptus, I have occasion to use WFB’s quip, “Maybe so, but isn’t that on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas?” He was responding to Garry Wills, who called Lillian Hellman “the greatest American living woman playwright,” or something like that. Why did I have occasion to quote the quip? The Salzburg Festival, in its promotional literature, called Luigi Nono “certainly the most important Italian composer of the past century” (which is highly debatable anyway).

Anyway: A reader writes,

Not long after Buckley’s quip about my hometown of Wichita, at which time the tallest building was a Holiday Inn, one of the most right-wing entrepreneurial types, in a very right-wing/entrepreneurial town, planned and built a taller — 27 stories! — building, the Epic Center. I’ve always been convinced that it was because, after Buckley’s remark, he associated the Holiday Inn with Lillian Hellman and thus Communism, and felt duty-bound to outdo them.

A delightful musing, no matter what.