Impromptus today leads off with an amazing story, out of Prague: The Iranian embassy there scheduled an event in a particular hotel. Then an embassy official noticed that, outside the hotel, an Israeli flag was flying, along with other flags. The official, of course, demanded that it be taken down. The hotel manager said, “Sorry, Charlie.” (I paraphrase.) “If you want to hold your event elsewhere, fine. But the flag’s staying.” The hotel manager was, is, an Arab Israeli from Nazareth.

After I wrote my column — which is why I want to sneak it in here — I remembered what Nathanael said to Philip: “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Oh, yes.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, or to the nasty: In today’s column, I quote Jesse Jackson, who hollered at the University of Havana, “Viva Fidel! Viva Che Guevara! Long live our cry of freedom!” That was in 1984, the year of the reverend’s first run for president. Fidel Castro returned the compliments, saying, “Jackson’s main characteristic is honesty. He is sincere, and there is not a single bit of demagoguery in his conversations.”

As I say in Impromptus, I know that you, too, feel that way about Jackson.

I’ll give you something else from 1984 — something that I’ve included in a piece for the next issue of National Review. Jackson said, “Unfortunately . . . sometimes the best of people lose their way.” And who were the “best of people” he happened to have in mind? Why, the Khmer Rouge, of course. As you know, they “lost their way” by murdering over 20 percent of the Cambodian population.

It is too little appreciated how radical Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, and others were. Are they less radical today, or just a little quieter?

Finally, let me say that I have a note in my column about Detroit, in whose orbit I grew up. We were always told that whites leaving the city for the suburbs were racist: They just couldn’t stand to live with black people. But black people, of course, have left the city for the suburbs as fast as they can: which is why Detroit’s population is down below 714,000, the lowest it has been since 1910.

An additional thought: 1910 was merely two years after the introduction of the Model T. It was four years before the introduction of the “five-dollar day” (that revolutionary way of life at Ford Motor). Will Detroit ever come back — not with automobiles, but with something? You never know: Cities rise and fall rather like hemlines.

Detroit’s mayor, by the way, is Dave Bing, the Piston legend. Bing, Bob Lanier — they were among the few who gave us something to cheer about, where basketball was concerned.