Thought you might enjoy a couple of e-mails, in response to my column today. One reader said,

You write about how so many liberals and progressives idolize the crude and odious Hugo Chávez, and then ask, “Is this the way many good people thought about Mussolini, before his colors were unmistakable?” Well, in Chicago, we still have Balbo Drive as well as a lakefront monument to Italo Balbo, the Minister of the Italian Air Force under Mussolini.

Yes, and Il Duce’s heir apparent, until Balbo bit it in North Africa. All right, the second e-mail, from an Italian-American reader — and this relates to a different subject:

Twenty or so years ago, I had a group of guys working for me who could speak English but spoke mostly in Spanish. I asked them to speak English on the job and they ignored me. The following week when payday came, I gave them their pay envelopes filled with pesos. When they complained, I responded to their objections in Italian. To their credit they got the joke and from then on tried English.