I have been running into people lately. Last week, I had a chance breakfast encounter with “independent” Missouri Senate candidate John Wood, a meeting that I believe led to his withdrawal on Tuesday 
from the race. On Wednesday of this week, I had a chance encounter with a fellow from the public defender’s office in Mayville, New York, the county seat of Chautauqua County. I was behind the fellow in the checkout line at the Tops supermarket in Mayville, a town of about 1,500 good souls as quaint and peaceful as Andy’s Mayberry.
The fellow and the checkout clerk were discussing the most notorious resident of the county jail in the jail’s history. I finessed my way into the conversation, working around the fact that, to my embarrassment, I did not know the man’s name. It is Hadi Matar. Two weeks earlier, the 24-year-old Matar stunned the world with his brutal attack on Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution, a historically Christian and painfully liberal summer community about five miles down the road from Mayville.
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