The ABC's of Hypocrisy

"Pogo" by Walt Kelly

Redundancy Alert:
This post ran last Friday when you were on the way to the beach.
Now that you're back, I'm gonna run it again. Just for you.

As we head away from Memorial Day weekend and slouch toward July 4th, what better way to celebrate America than to dwell for a moment on what even a dinky marsupial like Pogo knows is the greatest weapon in the national arsenal -- hypocrisy.

I haven't the time nor the brain cells to do an entire Hypocrisy Alphabet, so herewith an abbreviated version:

A is for American Civil Liberties Union

What better way to begin our alphabet than with those smacked ass defenders of liberty?

A special ACLU committee has recommended new standards for board members that would discourage them from publicly speaking out against other members or the policies of an organization that ostensibly advocates free speech.

B is for Boehner

The House majority leader from Ohio had no problem with constitutionally suspect initiatives like the NSA domestic spying program and secret CIA-run prisons, let alone giving away the congressional candy store to a power hungry president who thinks that the balance of powers is parity among pro football teams and not a foundation of government.

But Boehner is shocked just shocked! that the FBI would raid a congressman's inner sanctum and has declared it to be nothing less than a constitutional crisis.

C is for Cheney

This one is like shooting (pardon the term) fish in a barrel. While the secrecy obsessed Dick Cheney crows about upholding American values, the veep has been the chief architect of the steady erosion of them over the past six-plus years.

And you know what you say about civil liberties: Once you loose 'em you never get 'em back.

* * * * *

L is for Lay

Seven years after giving $1.1 million to his alma matter, the University of Missouri, to endow a chair in economics, the freshly convicted Enron founder wants a refund, something that the millions of little old ladies that he and fellow frog walker Ken Skilling ripped off will never get.

Ken Lay wants to reinvest the dough in the Houston area in an effort to garner sympathy and has threatened to sue Mizzou to get it back.

M is for Medical Malpractice

The American Medical Association continues to play Chicken Little by asserting that doctors are being driven from the profession because of out of control jury awards in medical malpractice cases. It wants Congress to clamp down on them forthwith.

The reality is very different: As study after study has shown, only a small minority of doctors are sued for malpractice, typically the butchers that state medical boards and the AMA itself go easy on.

N is for Neoconservativism

Cry not, America. It is sunset for the neocon movement and its interventionist foreign policy canon, which prescribes the use of force to cure virtually anything beyond our shores that is viewed as a threat.

It was neocons like Frances Fukayama and William Kristol who lit the interventionist fire under the Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes who committed the U.S. to the bloody fool's mission without end in Iraq. Franny and Billy have now jumped ship with the pathetically lame excuse that they never intended for their policies to be implemented in the manner that the Bush cabal has.

* * * * *

X Marks the Spot

And the spot is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ground Zero for a man whose horridly hubristic presidency (try saying that three times fast) has made him the poster boy for hypocrisy.

Dubya has broken virtually every campaign promise he made. He says he believes in family values, but his policies rape the middle class and poor. He condemns special interests but accepts millions in political contributions from them. He says he supports AIDS programs but undercuts them. He says he values personal freedom but secretly authorizes spying on Americans. He says he wants to control spending but has presided over runaway budget deficits. He says he believes in clean government but has supported a dizzying number of crooks. He says he takes responsibility for his policies but blames everyone but himself when they go awry, too often because he has filled important jobs with political hacks.

Y is for Yellow Bellies

Which is what a majority of Americans are because they support exclusionary immigration policies which, if in effect when their forebears tried to come to America, would have left them standing at the quay in Spotsylvania.

The U.S. has a regrettable habit of dealing with difficult issues by criminalizing the behavior of the core groups involved. Exhibit A is the so-called War on Drugs. Now come the yellow bellies in Congress who want to lock up illegal aliens and their employers, social workers and even priests instead of dealing with the underlying causes of a problem that they seem determined to make worse.

Z is for Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is the spirit which characterizes the feeling of an age. What then is the zeitgeist of 2006 America?

Shop 'til you drop. Get breast implants. Don't trust people who aren't the same color as you. Act rudely at your daughter's soccer game when the volunteer dad referee makes a bad call. Hide inappropriate items in your curbside recycling bin. Attend church on Sunday and sin the other six days of the week. Belt out "The Star Spangled Banner" at sporting events but fail to vote at election time. Watch "Queer Eye" on TV but diss gays to your friends. . . .

. . . I could go on and on, but the cat is rattling his food dish at me.

* * * * *

Got any suggestions for filling out the other letters of the alphabet? An Anonymoose reader responding to my initial post offered:

F is for Foreign Policy

Because acting like the biggest bully on the international playground really only works when you have the strategy to back it up. . . . Bush & Co. can rattle on about protecting the homeland as much as they want, but all they've managed to do is make people all over the world hate America while dragging us into a war that they don't know how to win.

Send us your alphabetical suggestions along with a few well chosen words.

Iraq II: Lessons Not Learned

I just finished reading "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle of America's War With Militant Islam," Mark Bowden's terrific new book on the American Embassy siege and 444-day hostage crisis in Iran.

I read "Guests" with especial care because Bowden is a former colleague and all-around nice guy, and most importantly because it was an opportunity to rexamine the events from the fall of the Shah through to the release of the hostages and election of Ronald Reagan from the perspective of whether any of the lessons learned from those agonizing events were remembered and applied by the Bush administration in Iraq.

The answer is a resounding "no."

There weren't many people in the Teheran embassy who had a clue about Iranian society, which was undergoing a seismic upheaval, let alone knew any Iranians or spoke Farsi. Those who did were deeply conflicted about American policy. This same dynamic (or lack off) has played out again in Iraq, and undoubtedly will in some future conflict that is only a gleam in a foreign policy wonk's eye.

Like maybe Iran? Again?

Iraq III: For Journos, The Deadliest War

The Iraq war has become the deadliest conflict in modern times for journalists, including two CBS News staffers who were killed this week in a roadside bombing.

According to the Freedom Forum, 71 journos have been killed in Iraq. Some 63 were killed in Vietnam, 17 killed in Korea, and 69 in World War II.

Allow me to go out on a limb -- or walk the plank -- regarding those 71 men and women.

The conservative news media natters ad nauseum about the supposed biases of the mainstream media, which they see as fawningly liberal, hopelessly antiwar and resolutely determined to not tell the whole story about the war. In other words, only the bad stuff.

An examination of the list of names of those 71 men and women reveals that:

Not one of the 71 represented a news organization that is identifiably conservative.

End of sermon.

Bringing It All Back Home in Photographs

Bob Dylan with Sonny and Cher (1965)

Michael Ochs has built the preeminent collection of musician photos in the universe.

When Martin Scorcese was putting together his recent PBS documentary on Bob Dylan, he went to Michael Ochs. When Andrew Solt was putting together the 10-part "History of Rock 'n' Roll," he went to Michael Ochs. When . . . you get the idea.

Although Ochs must do well from photo licensing fees, he says he's not in the biz for the dough and comes by his love honestly. He's the brother of the late Phil Ochs, whose songs like "I Ain't Marching Anymore" were a big part of the soundtrack of 1960s protest movements.

The New York Times has more here, while Ochs' website is here.

When Grandpa Herbie Gets Herpes

When a Miami TV station recently reported that there was an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases at a local retirement community, you coulda knocked me over with a condom. Slate's William Saletan explains here why America's seniors are getting STDs.

Pardon the term, but here's Saletan's nut graf:

One doctor there says she's treating more herpes and human papilloma virus than she treated in Miami . . . Explanations: 1.) Viagra. 2.) Your husband dies, and suddenly you're back in the singles market after all these decades. 3.) Old folks don't think about protection because they can't get pregnant. 4.) Old folks come from a generation that got no sex education as kids. Doctors' conclusion: It's time to start teaching old folks about safe sex, saying no, and how to talk to each other about this stuff.

Update on Little Jimmy & Big Frank

A Michigan congressman is questioning the cost of the FBI's search for the remains of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, a perennial endeavor that I commented on with appropriate disdain in a post last week.

Rep. Joel Knollenberg, whose district is near this year's search at a rural Michigan farm, suggests that:

The FBI might be better off establishing a budget and some kind of timeline, because what new information do they have now, 31 years later?

Indeed. As it is, the FBI called off the search on Tuesday after 13 days.

The Associated Press has more here.

County Living & Country Coincidences

Autumn 2006: Country leaves in Wairarapa, N.Z.

Herewith another dispatch (and photograph) from New Zealand by Country Bumpkin:

You've read before in these Chronicles that the Wairarapa valley is prospering, and despite recent signs that the New Zealand economy is slowing (though not as fast as has been predicted) the boom here unquestionably continues. This is especially true if you're running a railway company, because now that gasoline has reached around $NZ1.75 a litre [or $US4.12 a gallon], there is a visible reduction in the traffic and a widely reported increase in the number of commuters who have to stand all the way to Wellington in the train, on their way to work. It seems that such increases in demand, here and elsewhere, have caught public transport operators short, because it seems you can't buy fresh rolling stock and buses by simply dialling up eBay. One prays they will get their skates on, however, because it's difficult to see the price of gasoline coming down much, or for very long.

It seems inevitable to me that the point will come -- and may well have already arrived -- when the whole question of investment in infrastructure will have to change focus, and the institutions at our disposal are not well equipped for sudden shifts in direction. The new Wellington cross-town artery taking traffic from the north to the airport took 30 years to mature from an idea to the actual moving of soil, and such snail's-pace change has happened -- or rather, not happened -- almost everywhere in this fair land. New Zealand readers know exactly what I mean, and importing Chinese construction teams won't fix the problem.

Yet not everyone, it seems, is prospering. Or may be making bad choices. Seen recently on the back of a horse trailer, such a common sight in these parts, was the pathetic sign, "Poverty is owning a horse!" They won't think so when the oil runs out, I'll wager.

It's been a while since I wrote, having resolved right from the start of Country Life -- three and a half years ago -- that I won't write unless there's something to write about. You, of course, are the only judges of the worth of my resolve but in the absence of any complaints (well, I did have one once, actually) I'll spend some time in this edition on coincidences.

In recent years in our family coincidence has been a noticeable part of our lives. Lots of things have happened -- some of which I've written about -- which have very tiny mathematical probabilities. We have entirely failed to take advantage of this phenomenon by extending its reach to the winning of Lotto, but then I haven't heard that many of you have achieved that goal either. Which is no comfort at all.

Anyway, recently in the hour before the evening news, TVNZ were running back numbers of the British edition of "Antiques Road Show." Quite the best thing on TV, methinks, and one evening an item appeared about the documentary records kept by Britain's last hangman, a macabre but historically important and interesting collection. (Among those he hanged was William Joyce, whom you all remember as the British WWII traitor Lord Haw Haw.)

This set me to thinking about old and possibly interesting documents lying around here, and I remembered that I have in the bottom of a cupboard a WWII Lancaster bomber navigator's tuition manual. It was given to me by an ex Lancaster navigator called Jack Banks, with whom I worked at Ford Motor Company in the late 50s.

My thoughts turned to him, wondering what had happened to him after all these years. He was a nice fellow, and not obviously scarred by his very frightening wartime employment. The following morning, the obituary column in the Dominion Post recorded the death of Jack Banks.

Creepy, ain't it?

And then there's Rudolf Vrba. He and and three or four others, no more, successfully escaped from Auschwitz and brought the news to the Allies about what was happening there. He appeared in the 1970s TV documentary "World At War", describing in excellent English -- he was Czech -- his experiences, and he also was seen in Claude Lanzmann's famous 8-hour film about the Holocaust, "Shoah." His story has been widely told, by historian Martin Gilbert among others.

Now, a few weeks ago the papers reported Vrba's death at the age of 81. A day or two after reading the report, I had a phone call from an acquaintance who offered to lend me a book called "My Two Lives," by Lotte Weiss. Did I know anything about this lady and her book? He thought it might interest me. Did I know about Lotte Weiss? Well, yes you could say that. She is a member of a Sydney family that has been the dearest friends of my family for three generations, with a fourth generation recently started! But no, as it happens, I hadn't read her book.

And so the deal was done.

Imagine then, if you will, my reaction when I read on page 79 of Lotte's memoir that after the war, back in (what was then) Czechoslovakia she, also a survivor of those horrors, had met Rudolf Vrba!

Straight down to the Lotto shop! Arghhhhh.....!

We are now heading into our third winter in the country, and it seems to be running late. Memory is an imperfect thing, especially when it's my memory, but I would have thought all the leaves would be down from the trees by now. But no, only some of them are and the result for our garden -- not to mention our roof gutters -- is a big mess. Some of the mess, though, is quite beautiful as the picture of fallen cherry leaves demonstrates.

Still, it's unseasonably warm which is great because I don't have to hump so much firewood. If it's global warming, just don't ask me to take the blame for it!

POSTSCRIPT:

After reading about the Jack Banks incident in this Country Living, he asked that I please don't think about him. It's hard to know what to say.

How the Cleaver Family Saved Iraq

One especially awful consequence of the botched U.S. occupation of Iraq is the exodus of Iraq's middle class, which has become a flood amidst continuing sectarian violence and the U.S.'s failure to uphold its myriad promises to rebuild the country's infrastructure.

As The New York Times reported, in the last 10 months the Iraqi government has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class. And since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004.

This would be disturbing under any circumstances, but a viable middle class is vital if Iraq is to regrow its own professional class and attain longterm stability. But unlike some of the other problems confronting Iraq, there is a ready-made solution to the exodus that the Bush administration should embrace forthwith:

Encourage middle class Americans who still support the war to emigrate to Iraq.

* * * * *

The Cleavers -- Ward, June, Wally and The Beaver -- arrived in Falluja in September 2006. They decided on Falluja because it is less than an hour's drive to Baghdad, has a storied history as a religious center and is located on the Euphrates, where Ward and the boys could go fishing.

Leaving their home in Mayfield was not an easy decision, but there is a lot about Iraq that mirrors the Cleaver family's conservative Republican values:

Iraqis are very religious and inject their faith into every aspect of government and society.

They honor the nuclear family and oppose abortion and homosexuality.

Women are treated as inferiors.

Carrying and using weapons is widely accepted as a way to uphold one's political views, religion or honor.

The Cleavers found a three-bedroom house on Dahri Drive in a middle-class neighborhood of Falluja that was nearly deserted because most of its residents had left the country. The street is named for Shaykh Dhari, who was killed leading a 1920 rebellion against the British occupation that took the lives of more than 10,000 Iraqis and 1,000 British.

There was some bomb damage to the carport from a bomb blast that had destroyed the neighborhood police station, but Ward and the boys made quick work of that while June spiffed up the kitchen.

It didn't make sense to ship over the Frigidaire, stove and washer and dryer, but through a special program underwritten by the Jack Abramoff Foundation, the Cleavers bought new appliances at a discount through the exchange at a U.S. Army base. As members of the Finding Unity Beyond America's Realm (FUBAR) program, they also qualified for income tax breaks normally only available to the wealthy.

Unfortunately, the power is on only a few hours each day, and June jokes that she seldom can do a load of laundry or prepare a meal without interruption. But her only real complaint is that she just can't get comfortable wearing the cumbersome burka that she has to put on whenever she leaves the house.

* * * * *

Ward works for Halliburton, a big U.S. contractor that had been paid tens of millions of dollars over the last three years to get Falluja's power grid up and running. His job is to writes lots of reports for the U.S. Provisional Authority.

June, of course, stays home, although she keeps busy homeschooling the boys, volunteering with The Beaver's Boy Scout troop and selling Avon products to her Iraqi neighbors.

Wally and The Beaver really miss their old friends, but are trying hard to assimilate. Their biggest disappointment has not being able to go fishing because the Euphrates is so polluted. The city's sewer system remains damaged from U.S. bombing and nothing can survive in the river.

One of Wally's first purchases was a jacket with الفلوجة, which is Arabic for Falluja, stitched across the back and The Fedayeens on the front. The Falluja Fedayeens are a baseball team that Ward and other Halliburton dads started. Wally is taking Arabic language classes and is hanging out with the rifle club at the local mosque.

The Beaver is the most homesick member of the family and spends hours in his room instant messaging his old friends on the computer when the power is on.

The Cleavers have been disappointed that not more middle class Americans have heeded their president's call to start new lives in Iraq, but there have been glimmers of success. Eddie Haskell has promised to visit them next summer. And the Fedayeens finished first in their league. Unfortunately, they were unable to play in the regional championships because of a local curfew.

The Cleavers recently did get some truly exciting news. Another American family will be moving into their neighborhood: The Simpsons.

Dear Mother Sheehan: Your 15 Minutes Are Up

Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, garnered much deserved publicity for the antiwar movement last summer when she camped on the road to President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the Mess in Mesopotamia. But now Mother Sheehan has jumped the shark. (*)

In going from sympathetic pest to drivel spouter, she has become the latest but certainly not the first overnight celebrity to become an unwitting mouthpiece for others.

It's time for Cindy Sheehan's 15 minutes of fame to be over before she does even more damage to some of the worthy causes that she espouses.

While I don't agree with everything she says, Catherine Seipp takes Mother Sheehan down a few well deserved notches in a National Review Online commentary.

(*) Jumping the shark is a marvelous American pop cultural term originally applied to a TV series that has passed its peak and declined in quality. The phrase was first popularized by a TV critic when Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli literally jumps a shark on water skis on "Happy Days." Mother Sheehan has jumped the shark because she has strayed far from her original premise.

Australia's Arc of Instability

An Australian soldier stands guard in Dili (J. Samad/AFP-Getty)

Australia finds itself in the unusual position of currently having more of its troops in East Timor than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Some 1,400 diggers (as well as troops from Malaysia and New Zealand) have joined 150 Aussie soldiers already in East Timor, which has been wracked by days of rioting in the capital city of Dili. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles to the east in the Solomon Islands, 400 Aussie troops were deployed after disputed prime ministerial elections last month resulted in riots.

Writes David Flicking of The Guardian:

It's understandable at a time like this that fears in Canberra turn towards the emergence of an "arc of instability" off Australia's northern coasts.

Even Fiji, the tourist capital of the region, has been looking sickly. There has been no repeat of the coups that result whenever the Indo-Fijian minority gets a taste of power, and fears of unrest were averted this month when generak elections returned a Melanesian-dominated government . . .

The nightmare scenario is that one of these countries could become a failed state and a breeding ground for either terrorism, or transnational crime, or both.

For the latest from East Timor, go here. For a report on the whole mess by the International Institute for Sustainable Development entitled "Aiding or Abetting: Dilemmas of Foreign Aid and Political Instability in the Melanesian Pacific," go here (pdf format).

WHEN STUPID QUESTIONS GET HONEST ANSWERS

An Aussie military commander in Dili wanted to make sure that truth did not become a casualty of war, but embarrassed a TV network in the process.

Brigadier Michael Slater faced Australia's Channel 9 "Today" show cameras with heavily armed soldiers standing behind him.

He was pressed by "Today" news hen Jessica Rowe about whether Dili really was as safe as the Australian military claimed given the presence of the soldiers.

Slater replied:

Jessica I feel quite safe, yes, but not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good.

I don't need these guys here.

It is not safe on the streets as it is back home in Sydney or Brisbane – no it's not, if it was we wouldn't be here. But things are getting better every day.

(Hat tip to The Mudville Gazette.)

Mind Bloggling

Matt Bai puts the liberal political blog in perspective in a New York Times Magazine commentary.

Bai's money quote:

. . . for all the philosophizing about the meaning of online campaigns and the passing of the 20th-century political model, this next iteration of American politics won't really look so dissimilar from the ones that came before. . . . This is as it should be. Technologies change and movements flourish, but the essential process of American politics endures. And those who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party's insider establishment. They simply take its place.

And mine:

With rare exceptions, most partisan political blogs become predictable -- which is to say boring -- very quickly. That's why I stopped reading Daily Kos a couple of years ago. That's why I try to keep things fresh here at Kiko's House. That means that no one gets a free pass. And that while I am left leaning, I'll be spilling more ink on the feckless Democratic Party than Republicans as we head toward the November elections.

Just Ice For the Swift Boat Veterans?

"I'm moving on," John Kerry tells people in explaining that he does not want to dwell on his 2004 presidential campaign.

Which in my view was the biggest debacle since Michael Dukakis stuck his head out of that Army tank and lobbed whiffle balls at Bush the Elder in 1988. (Al Gore's 2000 disaster is a close second, and it never ceases to amaze me that six years later people still ignore the fact that he created the conditions for the Florida smackdown by running such an inept campaign.)

Anyhow . . . in one area Kerry is looking back and rightfully so:

He is belatedly but aggressively going after the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth scumbags who claimed that he fabricated stories that he went into Cambodia while serving in Vietnam and was dishonest and unpatriotic.

The Swift Boat Veterans are still slinging mud and raising money for various right-wing causes and, according to The New York Times, gave $100,000 to a group that has sued Kerry for allegedly interfering with the release of a film that was critical of him. Kerry denies the charge.

Meanwhile, Kerry's supporters are quietly gathering evidence about his war record to counter the Swift Board Vets. They say that has less to do with Kerry possibly running again (please say it ain't so, John; ditto for Al) than an effort to correct the public record.

Kerry has authorized the Navy to release his service records, something that he stupidly refused to do during his campaign against a chicken hawk president who goofed off in an Air National Guard unit -- when he wasn't dusting his nose -- and never went to war.

Kerry now says that his campaign should have put more money into counteracting the Swift Boat Vets' claims:

I take responsibility for it; it was my mistake. They spent something like $30 million, and we didn't. That's just a terrible imbalance when somebody's lying about you.

Better late than never.

Greatest Political Rock Songs

John J. Miller got the ball rolling with a National Review story on the 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs.

Then Will Bunch provided an antidote at Attytood with his own Greatest Liberal Rock Songs. He also solicited requests for more.

Meanwhile, Dan Rubin at Blinq was kind of sort of affronted by the whole concept of using music for one's own political ends. Me too, but that didn't keep the Dear Friend & Conscience, the kitties and I from whipping up our own list and sending it off to Attytood:

"Morning Dew"

This song about life after a nuclear apocalypse was written and originally performed by Bonnie Dobson, a Canadian folkie, but was picked up by the Grateful Dead and used as a powerful show closer.

"Big Yellow Taxi"

In which Joni Mitchell famously bemoans the greedy developers who have "paved over paradise."

"Revolution"

It had been a while, so we put this Beatles classic on the CD changer for a listen and had plum forgotten that while the Fab Four call for a revolution, they want it to be nonviolent. Oh, yeah.

"Rocket Launcher"

Musicians don't come any more political that Bruce Cockburn and his songs any more angry than this epistle against brutal Central American dictatorships.

"Peace Train"

Timeless sentimements from the former Cat Stevens in this song covered by Dolly Parton and 10,000 Maniacs, among others.

"Herbman"

Olu Dara has had a second career as a a singer of blues, funk and reggae and deserves to be better known. (His first career was as a jazz trumpeter.) This song is exactly what you think it's about.

"Israelites"

This anthem to Jamaica's downtrodden is timely since Desmond Dekker, the man who co-wrote and had a huge international reggae hit with it in 1969, went to his mortal coil on May 25. (My Kiko's House remembrance is here.)

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

Don't believe what anyone says, Gil Scott Heron was the progenitor of rap. He's at his most lethal in this biting commentary on late 60s-early 70s political and social turmoil. The song title has, of course, become an American idiom.

"Compared to What"

Our top pick. This scathing take on American society in general and Vietnam War in particular was originally performed by Les McCann. It has been oft covered by other groups and artists ranging from Oblivion Express to Mya.

In any event, it's only rock 'n' roll. And yes, we like it.

Meeting Soon: The Kiko's House Book Club

We're almost ready for the June meeting of the Kiko's House Book Club and would love for you to join us with your favorite books.

Go here to see the books we've reviewed at previous meetings and our exacting membership requirements. Not.

Memorial Day 2006: Whine and Roses

It is Memorial Day today in the U.S.

The holiday originally was called Decoration Day and was a day of remembrance for Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War. After World War I, it was expanded to include soldiers who died in any war.

As always, I've hung an American flag outside of Kiko's House this Memorial Day.

As always, I will keep the day as uncluttered as possible. I'll probably watch some baseball, but there will be no shopping or surfing the Net.

As always, I will remember that freedom of speech is not protected by journalists like myself but by the men and women who gave their lives to defend American values.

As always, I will feel a sadness over loved ones and friends who will not be celebrating this Memorial Day because of their sacrifices. Nick Tuke. Chuck Callanan. Jim Mullen. Mike Tames. Bob Layton.

But this Memorial Day is different. Besides being sad, I also am angry -- a slow boil, if you will -- over the mess that we've made of our great country.

I say we because this has been too big a job for even King George and his court, although they've tried hard.

As my cousin County Bumpkin is fond of saying, dissent and bickering are the soundtrack of a democracy. But this should be a golden age for America and it is anything but. I cannot recall a time when so few have so much and so many are struggling. When we are so incapable of a national consensus on anything beyond the view that our government and too many of our institutions have failed us. That things will get worse before they get better, if they do get better.

Such pessimism is uncharacteristic of me, let alone Americans in general, and I feel a twinge of shame that I don't feel more upbeat this Memorial Day. But my glass is well below half empty, especially when it comes to the sacrifices today's men and women at arms are being asked to make.

Sacrifices for what? A hypocritical, ill focused and foundering war on Islamic terrorism? The mess in Mesopotamia? The underresourced and unfinished war in Afghanistran? Preparing for a future war against Iran? You tell me.

-- Love and Peace, SHAUN

'Oh, Death, Was Never Enemy of Ours!'

THE NEXT WAR
By Wilfred Owen

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death,
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

'A War to Be Proud Of'

When it comes to Iraq and the war against Islamic terrorists, Victor Davis Hanson's glass is always full and problems are brushed aside like crumbs on a table.

Nevertheless, in the interest of balance, I offer Hanson's thoughts on this Memorial Day for those of you who also wear rose-colored corrective lenses. First, one caveat:

Hanson equates the fact that there has not been a terror attack on the American homeland since 9/11 to the Bush administration. Alas, there is only a coincidental connection.

Please, Victor. Knock it off before you rue your words. It's just plain old dumb luck.

Gratuitous Kitty Shot of the Week

You wouldn’t think that my lifelong friend Rochelle, who was a world-class feminist, had much in common with Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, who was a world-class misogynist. She didn’t, but they both did love cats.

I took this photo of Rochelle in 1978 not long after The Roaring Fork Rope Bridge Adventure, which you can read here. She is holding Terrapin, who was born at the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West, Fla., and lived a storied existence on a farm in Chester County, Pennslyvania.

Papa Hemingway had stipulated in his will that his cats and their progeny were to be cared for in perpetuity. Terrapin was polydactyl because of generations of inbreeding, which means he had more than the normal number of toes, in his case seven each on his front paws and six each on his rear paws.

Terrapin disappeared in the spring of 1979, and while I could never prove it, I'm pretty sure he hopped into a United Parcel truck making a delivery and went off to see the world.

* * * * *

Want your cat to be more famous than you are?  Just attach a JPG of him or her -- or them -- to an email and send it along with a few choice words to kikokimba@gmail.com

Science Saturday I: Chicken or Egg Answered?

An expert panel made up of a British philosopher, geneticist and chicken farmer has finally answered which came first, the chicken or the egg.

They say that it's the egg.

Explains philosopher David Papineau at King's College in London:

I would argue it's a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg. By this reasoning, the first chicken did indeed come from a chicken egg, even though that egg didn't come from chickens.

The Guardian has more here.

Science Saturday II: Fly Me to the Moon (or Not)

NASA's plans to return to the moon appear to be in trouble. Again. Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and former astronaut with four Space Shuttle missions under his belt, has the inside dope here.

Science Saturday III: Medical Marijuana Update

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shat all over the well proven fact that medical marijuana is beneficial under certain circumstances in a shabbily resourced report last month, it claimed that pot smoking caused lung cancer.

Not that it matters to the feckless F.D.A., but now comes a study that debunks that notion.

Researchers at UCLA had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.

Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers, while it did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

Why no cancers?

Dr. Donald Tashkin, senior researcher and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, theorized that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical in marijuana smoke that produces its psychotropic effect, may encourage aging, damaged cells to die off before they become cancerous.

For my take on medical marijuana and a photo of my medical marijuana-smoking felonious father and aiding and abetting mother, check out this earlier Kiko's House post.

Science Saturday IV: Wither the Ivory Billed?

The debate over whether the ivory-billed woodpecker has indeed been rediscovered is getting a bit tetchy.

A search of the swamps of eastern Arkansas over the winter failed to turn up new confirmed sightings or new clues as to the magnificent bird's existence following an apparent sighting in February 2004. Researchers claimed they later made videotape and audio recordings of the bird, one of six North American bird species thought to have become extinct since 1880.

Some experts have challenged whether the bird was actually spotted.

David A. Sibley, the famous bird illustrator, wrote earlier this year the video is not good enough to see the white stripes on the bird's back that would prove it is ivory-billed.

CNN has more here.

The ABC's of Hypocrisy

Stolen from Outland © 2004 Berkeley Breathed

As we slouch into the Memorial Day weekend here in the U.S., what better way to celebrate America than to pause on our way to the shore to dwell briefly on what even a dumb penguin like Opus knows has become the greatest weapon in the national arsenal -- hypocrisy.

I haven't the time nor the brain cells to do an entire Hypocrisy Alphabet, so herewith an abbreviated version:

A is for American Civil Liberties Union

What better way to begin our alphabet than with those smacked ass defenders of liberty?

A special ACLU committee this week recommended new standards for board members that would discourage them from publicly speaking out against other members or the policies of an organization that ostensibly advocates free speech.

B is for Boehner

The House majority leader from Ohio had no problem with constitutionally suspect initiatives like the NSA domestic spying program and secret CIA-run prisons, let alone giving away the congressional candy store to a power hungry president who thinks that the balance of powers is parity among pro football teams and not a foundation of government.

But Boehner is shocked just shocked! that the FBI would raid a congressman's inner sanctum and has declared it to be nothing less than a constitutional crisis.

C is for Cheney

This one is like shooting (pardon the term) fish in a barrel. While the secrecy obsessed Dick Cheney crows about upholding American values, the veep has been the chief architect of the steady erosion of them over the past six-plus years.

And you know what you say about civil liberties: Once you loose 'em you never get 'em back.

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L is for Lay

Seven years after giving $1.1 million to his alma matter, the University of Missouri, to endow a chair in economics, the freshly convicted Enron founder wants a refund, something that the millions of little old ladies that he and fellow frog walker Ken Skilling ripped off will never get.

Ken Lay wants to reinvest the dough in the Houston area in an effort to garner sympathy and has threatened to sue Mizzou to get it back.

M is for Medical Malpractice

The American Medical Association continues to play Chicken Little by asserting that doctors are being driven from the profession because of out of control jury awards in medical malpractice cases. It wants Congress to clamp down on them forthwith.

The reality is very different: As study after study has shown, only a small minority of doctors are sued for malpractice, typically the butchers that state medical boards and the AMA itself go easy on.

N is for Neoconservativism

Cry not, America. It is sunset for the neocon movement and its interventionist foreign policy canon, which prescribes the use of force to cure virtually anything beyond our shores that is viewed as a threat.

It was neocons like Frances Fukayama and William Kristol who lit the interventionist fire under the Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes who committed the U.S. to the bloody fool's mission without end in Iraq. Franny and Billy have now jumped ship with the pathetically lame excuse that they never intended for their policies to be implemented in the manner that the Bush cabal has.

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X Marks the Spot

And the spot is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ground Zero for a man whose horridly hubristic presidency (try saying that three times fast) has made him the poster boy for hypocrisy.

Dubya has broken virtually every campaign promise he made. He says he believes in family values, but his policies rape the middle class and poor. He condemns special interests but accepts millions in political contributions from them. He says he supports AIDS programs but undercuts them. He says he values personal freedom but secretly authorizes spying on Americans. He says he wants to control spending but has presided over runaway budget deficits. He says he believes in clean government but has supported a dizzying number of crooks. He says he takes responsibility for his policies but blames everyone but himself when they go awry, too often because he has filled important jobs with political hacks.

Y is for Yellow Bellies

Which is what a majority of Americans are because they support exclusionary immigration policies which, if in effect when their forebears tried to come to America, would have left them standing at the quay in Spotsylvania.

The U.S. has a regrettable habit of dealing with difficult issues by criminalizing the behavior of the core groups involved. Exhibit A is the so-called War on Drugs. Now come the yellow bellies in Congress who want to lock up illegal aliens and their employers, social workers and even priests instead of dealing with the underlying causes of a problem that they seem determined to make worse.

Z is for Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is the spirit which characterizes the feeling of an age. What then is the zeitgeist of 2006 America?

Shop 'til you drop. Get breast implants. Don't trust people who aren't the same color as you. Act rudely at your daughter's soccer game when the volunteer dad referee makes a bad call. Hide inappropriate items in your curbside recycling bin. Attend church on Sunday and sin the other six days of the week. Belt out "The Star Spangled Banner" at sporting events but fail to vote at election time. Watch "Queer Eye" on TV but diss gays to your friends. . . .

. . . I could go on and on, but the penguin is rattling his empty food dish at me.

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Got any suggestions for filling out the other 17 letters of the alphabet? Send 'em along with a few well chosen words to kikokimba@gmail.com

Desmond Dekker (1941-2006)

Word comes that Desmond Dekker died of a heart attack at his home in Surrey, England on Thursday. This is uncannily eerie, because I had recently been feeding my roots reggae habit by listening to a couple of Dekker disks.

"Israelites," an anthem to the downtrodden co-written by Dekker and Leslie Kong and recorded in 1968 by Desmond Dekker and The Aces, was the first international hit by a Jamaican and introduced the world to reggae, a soulfully rhythmic musical form that grew out of ska.

Said Dekker of the song in a 2005 interview:

It's about how hard things were for a lot of people in Jamaica -- downtrodden, like the Israelites that led Moses to the Promised Land. I was really saying, don't give up, things will get better if you just hold out long enough.

Born Desmond Adolphus Dacres and orphaned in his early teens, Dekker's most prolific period was the 1960s when he recorded one hit after another in Jamaica, including "Honour Your Father and Mother," "Sinners Come Home" and "Labour for Learning."

Dekker's songs were polite and conveyed respectable mainstream messages until 1967 when his songs became edgier and began glamorizing the violent rude boy culture then popular in Jamaica. "007 (Shantytown)" typified the change and the song was a hit in the U.K.

He moved to the U.K. in the 1970s and recorded relatively little over the next 20 years, although his career briefly revived in 1990 when Maxell used "Israelites" as the soundtrack for a TV commercial for its cassette tapes.

He remained popular in Europe and still toured occasionally. His last show was at Leeds University earlier this month and he was scheduled to perform in Prague next week.

While Dekker never attained the fame of Bob Marley or Peter Tosh, he was an equally bright light in the reggae firmament and a trailblazer for both of those international stars. He was 64.

Sentiment du Jour

Wanna t-shirt or other stuff with this drop-dead sentiment?
The folks at cafepress.com will oblige you here.

Enron: Verdict on an Era

Kurt Eichenwald of The New York Times broke the Enron story and rode it hard for years. His take on the just-completed trial:

Regardless of whether the jury verdict against Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling is upheld, testimony from 56 days of trial has sealed what is sure to be history's judgment — one that is unlikely to be vulnerable to appeal.

The Enron case will forever stand as the ultimate reflection of an era of near madness in finance, a time in the late 1990's when self-certitude and spin became a substitute for financial analysis and coherent business models. Controls broke down and management deteriorated as arrogance overrode careful judgment, allowing senior executives to blithely push aside their critics.

Indeed, it could be argued that the most significant lesson from the trial had nothing to do with whether the defendants, both former Enron chief executives, committed the crimes charged in their indictments. Instead, the testimony and the documents admitted during the case painted a broad and disturbing portrait of a corporate culture poisoned by hubris, leading ultimately to a recklessness that placed the business's survival at risk.

CIA Leak Probe: Interestinger and Interestinger

The National Journal's Murray Waas, who has been ahead of the competition on the Wilson-Plame leak probe investigation since Day One, reports that Karl Rove, Robert Novak's source for learning CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, may have collaborated with the columnist to cover up his leak.

The Shadow of Your Smile . . . er, Marriage

The blogosphere has been afire this week with posts about a New York Times story on the state of the Bill and Hillary Clinton marriage.

The placement of the story (at the top of the front page) and it's length (really long) was the Times' way of saying that their marriage will be a hot topic if the Missus runs for president.

David Broder puts it all in perspective in a Washington Post op-ed column, although Jack Shafer over at Slate had the best line:

I'm sure that after 97 editors red-penciled all the direct meaning out of his story, the copy desk stonewashed it soft so nobody would break a tooth while reading individual paragraphs. But read as a whole, the piece has a way of gumming up your mind.

Iraq: A Small Moment Worth Savoring

In an effort to continue bringing Kiko's House visitors stories about real Iraqis, especially those who have not been blown to smithereens, I'd like to share this moving reminiscence by an American GI. It's a reminder that no matter how screwed up the war is, small moments like these are worth savoring.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish.)

Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

When Scotland regained a parliament (and a flag) of its own in 1999 there were both hopes and fears that it would break all ties with the rest of the U.K.

Instead, something unexpected happened, according to The Economist, which notes in a review of the last seven years that:

Scotland has regressed into an inward-looking, slightly chip-on-shoulder, slightly Anglophobic country with no clear sense of direction. Instead of gaining a new self-confidence, it has gained self-doubt, while clinging to an old dependency on the state, which still means, at least in part, England.

So much for it's motto, Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, or No One Provokes Me With Impunity.

The Disappeared I: Little Jimmy & Big Frank

Unless you've been hiding out in a cave with Judge Crater, then you probably know that Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of a suburban Detroit restaurant in 1975 never to be seen again. And that reports of his whereabouts arrive each spring with the regularity of the sparrows returning to Capistrano.

This year's tip comes from an FBI informant (as the tips usually do) who wants to knock a few years off his sentence (in this case 10 years for marijuana smuggling), involves a field somewhere (as it usually does) and is considered "credible" by the FBI (which always says that).

In this instance, informant Donovan Wells, who is moldering away in a Kentucky prison at the ripe old age of 75, says he saw Hoffa rolled up in a rug and buried with a stolen backhoe behind a barn at a farm about 30 miles from Detroit where he lived at the time.

This has been a boon for hardware stores (shovel sales) and restaurants (notably the breakfast crowd) in the nearby hamlet of Milford, which has rolled out the red carpet for the attendant media frenzy, which will run its course any day now since the latest tip appears to be yet another dry well.

For those of you who have been in that cave, the diminutive Hoffa was a powerful labor leader with ties to the Mafia. The high school dropout took over the Teamsters Union in 1957 after his predecessor, Dave Beck, was imprisoned on bribery charges and led the union to new heights of corruption.

Hoffa himself was supposed to go up the river on bribery charges in 1971, but his sentence was commuted by a president who would himself become well versed on criminal activity -- Richard Milhous Nixon -- after Hoffa promised to stay away from the union for 10 years. He violated his promise and the Justice Department was in the process of uncommuting his sentence, or whatever it's called, when he disappeared.

HOW CAN I KILL THEE? LET US COUNT THE WAYS

Among the myriad tips about where Hoffa is buried, my favorites are beneath the end zones of Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands. No, they didn't bury part of him in one end zone and part of him in the other. The tips simply vary from end zone to end zone.

Among other sites are:

In the backyard of his Bloomfield, Michigan, home.

In an abandoned coal mine shaft near Pittston, Pennsylvania.

In the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York.

In an unmarked grave on West Sister Island in Lake Erie. (Do you really think they would have put in a tombstone that read "Here Lies Jimmy Hoffa"? Flowers maybe, but not a tombstone.)

Former Mafioso Bill Bonanno claimed in his aptly mistitled book, "Bound by Honor," that Hoffa was shot and placed in the trunk of a car that was then run through a car compactor, while mob hitman Richard Kuklinski claimed that Hoffa became a bumper, one would presume on a car driven by a Teamster.

ENTER BIG FRANK

If I seem a bit jaundiced about the perennial Hoffa sightings, it is because I knew Frank "Big Frank" Sheeran, a physically imposing World War II hero turned Delaware Teamster official with close ties to Hoffa and the Mafia.

Sheeran and I were not poise-unel friends, as they say in Philadelphia, but we became acquainted through my newspaper work. As I noted in a previous Kiko's House post about our fascination with the Mafia, Sheeran was one of those tough guys who loved seeing his name in print, even if it was a story about him going up the river, which he also did from time to time.

Big Frank called me "Irish." I called him "Mr. Sheeran." He once suggested that I write his biography. I was sort of flattered until I found out that he said that to practically every journalist he met.

Anyhow, Sheeran was the headliner of the 2003 edition of the annual Hoffa sighting.

Big Frank claimed that he had been on such poise-unel terms with the labor leader that he had poise-unelly lured him to a supposed meeting with two Mafia worthies with whom he was feuding, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey.

Sheeran claimed that he posie-unelly dispatched Hoffa with two shots from a revolver and his body was buried in the backyard of a house he frequented in Munger Township, Michigan.

Local hardware stores sold out of shovels. There were long lines at local restaurants for breakfast. But of course nothing was found.

EXIT BIG FRANK

Big Frank's tip was the result of a guilty conscience over all of the houses he had "painted" for the Mafia. This is a euphemism for the splattered blood on walls after mob hits.

Sheeran turned to Charlie Brandt, a former Delaware prosecutor, with his tip and ended up having several long conversations with him that were deathbed confessions of a sort since he was terminally ill.

No fool he, Brandt taped the conversations and turned them into "I Heard You Paint Houses," a bestselling book that Big Frank did not live to read.

I always felt a little put out that Sheeran hadn't called me, but I would never have told him so.

If you know where Hoffa is buried, hold off until next spring, okay? Better still, let's hope that the mystery will never be solved. It'll be murder for the shovel industry.

The Disappeared II: Judge Crater

The Judge Crater alluded to in the first paragraph of the Hoffa post was Judge Joseph Force Crater, who along with the labor leader are the hand's down winners of who the greatest disappeared Americans are.

Crater, a municipal judge in New York City, was the source of a national manhunt and butt of countless jokes and New Yorker cartoons in the years after he vanished. When our loopy Irish setter would disappear, which he did often when I was a child, my mother would inevitably say:

Oh, Treeve is off looking for Judge Crater.

In the summer of 1930. Crater and his wife were vacationing at their summer cabin in Maine. She unexpectedly received a phone call from him saying that he had had to return to New York “to straighten those fellows out.” He instead went off to Atlantic City with a showgirl and then vanished after leaving a series of tantalizing clues.

Crater was declared legally dead in 1939 and his case was officially closed in 1979.

Then last August, police revealed that they had received a letter written 50 years earlier by a woman who claimed Hizzoner was buried under the boardwalk at Coney Island in Brooklyn.

They confirmed that skeletal remains indeed had been discovered at that location in the 1950s, but had been buried in a Potter's Field along with thousands of other unmarked and unidentified remains.

Ahem.

Hamza El Din (1929-2006)

It was a spring evening in 1978 at the old Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, and we had been tipped that there would be a special guest appearing with the Grateful Dead. The house lights dimmed to darkness. A few minutes of silence and then the most extraordinary sounds arose.

We didn't know what kind of instrument was making this swirlingly hypnotic music, let alone who was playing it and singing in a strangely accented voice until the stage lights slowly came up, revealing a dark-skinned man wrapped from head to toe in white with what looked like a lute across his lap.

As we learned later as the man finished and was introduced by Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, he was Hamza El Din, the Egyptian oud player and composer.

El Din, who died this week in Berkeley, California at age 76, was a master of the oud, a six-stringed lute and almost single handedly reinvented the musical culture of Nubia.

El Din performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. He released several albums, including one produced by Hart, and his music was used for movie soundtracks and dance pieces by several ballet companies. He also collaborated with the Kronos Quarter and helped arrange for the Dead to perform at the Great Pyramids in Gaza, Egypt, in 1978.

The Kiko's House Disk Picks For May

Good music gets a whole lot gooder when it can be shared.

In that spirit, here are the five marvelous disks currently in the CD changer at Kiko’s House. All but one are still in print in the U.S. and some are available on the cheap from the usual online retail suspects like Amazon.

(Meanwhile, drop us a line and let us know what you're listening to, especially new stuff that might have escaped our middle-aged ears.)

The Angel in the House (The Story)

The Story -- Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball -- were in and out like Haley's Comet, burning brightly for only a couple of years in the early 1990s before going their separate ways after touring behind "The Angel in the House." The album was voted the best of 1993 by listeners of WXPN-FM, then and now the pre-eminent Triple A radio station in the land. (Go to here to have a listen.)

Anyhow, Brooke and Kimball had a folk sensibility and jazz tastes, which make the songs on "The Angel in the House" special, notably "So Much Mine" and a chilling a capella song called "In the Gloaming."

0898 (Beautiful South)

The U.K.'s Beautiful South burst onto the alternative music scene about the time The Story did and like them have a quirky sensibility, in this case drop-dead funny lyrics over deceivingly simple melodies.

The pick of this litter are "Old Red Eyes Is Back" and "Domino Man," paens to the barflies we all know and love, and "We Are Each Other," a bitingly (pun intended) funny send-up of lovely-dovey couples who feed each other at restaurants. You know who you are. (Warning: This album is out of print in the U.S.)

Filles de Kilimanjaro (Miles Davis)

Over the years, I find myself coming back to albums made by artists just prior to their mega-hits. Dunno why. I just do. Three examples: Pink Floyd's "Meddle," which preceded "Dark Side of the Moon," Steely Dan's "The Royal Scam," which preceded "Aja," and Miles Davis' "Filles de Kilimanjaro," which preceded "Bitches Brew."

Having gotten that off my chest, here's the deal with "Filles": You can hear hints of "Bitches Brew," notably Herbie Hancock's Fender Rhodes on "Tout de Suite." The album as a whole is ever so slightly funky and Miles' phrasing is . . . well, breathtaking. (Buying Tip: Spend the extra dough and get the newer remastered disk. There is a substantial ssonic difference between it and the original.)

Five Leaves Left (Nick Drake)

Nick Drake was a little remembered member of the extended British folk-rock family that included Fairport Convention and John Martyn. That is until his music had a resurgence in the early 2000's after Volkswagen used it in TV commercials and it began being covered by artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams and Nine Inch Nails.

"Five Leaves Left," Drake's 1968 debut album, is a study in sensitivity. As in sensitive acoustic guitar work (listen to the finger picking), sensitive vocals and sensitive sounds from chamber strings. "River Man" is my favorite from this particular disk. Alas, life was too much for Drake, who battled clinical depression and finally offed himself in 1974 at the tender age of 26. (Buying Tip: Don't spend the extra dough to get the newer remastered disk. The sonic difference between it and the original is negligible.)

Twelve String Symphonies (Mendelssohn)

Do you have Sunday Morning Music? You know, the kind that sounds best as you slowwwly wake up? Ravi Shankar ragas are frequently my SMM, but this three-disk Hyperion box set also is a favorite.

Mendelssohn, the great German Romantic composed, wrote these symphonies between 1821 and 1823. They owe a good deal to Mozart to my semi-educated ears, but I care not. They're a gentle but stirring way to acclimate myself to a new week.

PREVIOUS KIKO'S HOUSE DISK PICKS

Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East
Bernstein Century - Copland: Appalachian Spring (Bernstein & NYP)
Burning Spear Live in Paris
Eat A Peach (Allman Brothers)
Heavy Ornamentals (The Gourds)
Hymns to the Silence (Van Morrison)
Imaginary Voyage (Jean Luc Ponty)
Let It Be . . . Naked (The Beatles)
One From the Vault (Grateful Dead)
Thelonius Monk Quartet With John Coltrane Live at Carnegie Hall

Meeting Soon: The Kiko's House Book Club

We're cleaning our spectacles (and the mess on the dining room table) in preparation for the June meeting of the Kiko's House Book Club. We'd love for you to join us.

Go here to see the books we've reviewed at previous meetings, and here for a provocative discussion courtesy of the New York Times on the great American novels of the last 25 years.

The Movie That Dubya Doesn't Want You To See

HBO, the cable movie channel, debuted a terrific new documentary called "Baghdad ER" last weekend and will replay it on Memorial Day.

"Baghdad ER" is a film about the Iraq war unlike any other. It opens with a medic carrying a human arm, amputated above the elbow after a trooper is maimed in an explosion from an IED (improvised explosive device), and for the next 60 minutes shows in shockingly graphic detail what war is really all about.

The documentary is the work of Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill, who spent two months at the main front line medical facility in Iraq -- the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone -- with the full cooperation of the Army.

That has now changed.

The Pentagon is concerned that "Baghdad ER" will send the wrong message, let alone become cannon fodder for antiwar activists. It also has taken the extraordinary step of having the Army surgeon general issue a warning that viewing the documentary could trigger symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for Iraq war vets.

According to Lieutenant Gen. Kevin Kiley, "Baghdad ER"

Shows the ravages and anguish of war.

No shit, general.

The surgeon general continues:

Those who view this documentary may experience many emotions. If they have been stationed in Iraq, they may re-experience some symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as flashbacks or nightmares.

What about Vietnam veterans? Or the equally brave souls who fought in Korea or WW2?

A WAR UNLIKE ANY OTHER

Rupert Cornwell, a commentator for The Independent, is doing some of the best stuff on Iraq, but unless you live in the U.K. and can buy the London daily or care to ante up so you can get through its online subscription firewall, you're not going to be able to read him.

As luck would have it, the Dear Friend & Conscience just got back from England and, as she always does, brought with her a big pile of newspapers, including an Independent with a Cornwell story on how the brass now fears that "Baghdad ER" will further undermine public support for the war.

Some excerpts:

Barring the odd technically blurred face of an appallingly injured soldier, "Baghdad ER" flinches from nothing, be it pools of blood and guts on the floor, shattered limbs, and men in the last instants of life.

You are spared nothing. In one harrowing scene a chaplain comforts a dying Marine. "We don't want you to go. We want you to fight," he says. "But if you can't, it's okay to go. But we'll be right with you. If you get better, or if you go."

Above all, "Baghdad ER" breaks a taboo. Insofar as possible, the Bush administration has kept this war as quiet as possible and as sanitised as possible. The victims that have been shown have mostly been Iraqis, not Americans.

Sometimes the President has talked of "sacrifice." But for ordinary Americans who do not have friends or family who have done a tour in Iraq, this has been a war virtually without sacrifice (unless of course you attribute the rise of petrol prices to the conflict).

Mr. Bush stresses constantly that America is at war, and may be so for decades to come. But for all the bumper stickers declaring "Support Our Troops," this has been a war unlike any other. Wars usually demand belt tightening, tax increases or some other form of deprivation, however modest for the citizenry. In the "war on terror," like other wars, spending has soared. But the last few years have been a festival of tax cuts -- at least for the better off -- despite record deficits. "Spend, spend, spend" might have been the official advice on how the home front should comport itself in this proclaimed time of national testing.

But "Baghdad ER" disposes with the illusion of normality as brutally as an IED.

* * * * *

You can read more about "Baghdad ER" and see a video clip here.

Keep Your Cotton Pickin' Hands Off My Congress

After six-plus years of acquiescing to a power greedy White House, Republican leaders in Congress are finally pushing back because, of all things, an FBI raid last weekend on a Democratic legislator's office.

The execution of the search warrant for an all-night search of Rep. William J. Jefferson's office while Congress was in session appears to be unprecedented, if not unconstitutional, but fits the Bush administration's mania for asserting broad executive authority at the expense of Congress and the courts.

Never mind that Jefferson was literally caught cold -- as in $90,000 in bribe money found in his home food freezer back in New Orleans -- and is an obvious partisan target. This time the White House may have gone too far in its penchant for shatting on the separation of powers.

House Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, who has had no problem with constitutionally suspect Bush administration initiatives like the NSA domestic spying program and secret CIA-run prison, is shocked just shocked that the FBI would raid a congressman's inner sanctum and is demanding that the agency return the papers it seized.

Says House Speaker Dennis Hastert, another overnight convert to the notion enshrined by the Founding Fathers that each branch of government has inviolable powers:

I think those materials ought to be returned and [the FBI agents involved] ought to be frozen out of that case for the sake of the Constitution.

Boehner predicted that the case would go to the Supreme Court.

The New York Times noted that

A court challenge would place all three branches of government in the fray over whether the obscure "speech and debate" clause of the Constitution, which offers some legal immunity for lawmakers in the conduct of their official duties, could be interpreted to prohibit a search by the executive branch on Congressional property. . . .

Pursuing a course advocated by Vice President Dick Cheney, the administration has sought to establish primacy on domestic and foreign policy, not infrequently keeping much of Congress out of the loop unless forced to consult.

"It is consistent with a unilateral approach to the use of authority in Washington, D.C.," Philip J. Cooper, a professor at Portland State University who has studied the administration's approach to executive power, said of the search.

"This administration," Dr. Cooper said, "has very systematically and from the beginning acted in a way to interpret its executive powers as broadly as possible and to interpret the power of Congress as narrowly as possible as compared to the executive."

Some Republicans agreed privately that the search was in line with what they saw as the philosophy of the Justice Department in the Bush administration. They said the department had often pushed the limits on legal interpretations involving issues like the treatment of terrorism detainees and surveillance.

The Republican pushback is not entirely altruistic.

Several of the party's own lawmakers have looming legal problems of their own because of corruption investigations that led to the convictions of super lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Randy Cunningham, both of whom are cooling their heels in prison.

* * * * *

Contitutional issues aside, Jefferson refuses to resign although the evidence against him is overwhelming.

He's a disgrace to his flood-ravaged city, his party and his country. Quit, dammit!

Keep Yer Cotton Pickin' Hands Off My Language

The only thing stoopider than the perennial efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban American flag burning are the perenial efforts to make English the official language. As opposed to, say, Farsi or Klingon.

That's what the Senate did (again) last week in passing an amendment to the immigration "reform" bill sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe, N-Okla. (That's Neanderthal-Oklahoma), declaring English to be the U.S.'s "national language" and calling for a government role in "preserving and enhancing" the place of English.

E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post takes a pretty good swipe at the whole blatantly racist affair here.

It's an Epidemic: Conservative Fatigue Syndrome

An inevitable consequence of the mess that King George and his court have made of things is that conservatives would sooner or later tire of the cacaphony of bad news swirling around the castle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and jump the moat. And that even the hardest of the hardcore would begin displaying symptoms of what an erudite blogger by the name of Jon Swift has labeled

Conservative Fatigue Syndrome

(Insert screech, screech, screech sounds from the "Jaws" soundtrack here.)

Anyhow, Jon has put up a trenchantly funny post on his blog that is the first in-depth diagnosis of CFS's horrors that I've seen. It includes a photo of one of my all-time favorite movie characters -- Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (at right in photo), an archtypically loony conservative played by Sterling Hayden in "Doctor Strangelove."

I heartily recommend it. Jon's post, that is, although the movie is terrific, too.

Sneak Peek: 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold'

Here's a sneak peek at the cover of the publisher's advance excerpt sampler of "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina" by New York Times maestro Frank Rich, who for my money is one of the best writers (as in the craft of stringing thoughts together in an artful and compelling way) in the trade these days.

The title is almost as long as the sampler, but I was pleased to find that the book is not merely a regurgitation of Rich's columns, which is often the M.O. for book writing op-ed columnists

Here are the chapter headings, although possibly not in their final sequence:

Mission Accomplished
Heckuva Job, Brownie
Shock and Awe
Slam Dunk
Dead or Alive
Bring 'Em On!
Last Throes
The Smoking Gun Is a Mushroom Cloud
Uranium From Africa
As the Iraqis Stand Up, We'll Stand Down

"The Greatest Story" is due out in the fall.