Yes, Martin Luther King Jr., was a great, great man

(OK, this post will have some rough language. And it will use the N-word. A lot. But to tell this story -- and to be true to the times I'm recalling -- it has to be done. Reader discretion is advised.)

* * *

The latest episode of the Revolution 21 Podcast spotlighting MLK and the Dreamers and their song "Great Man" has gotten me thinking . . . and remembering little slices of life from long, long ago (a couple of years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination) and far, far away (my hometown of Baton Rouge, La.).

On one hand, it seems like memories from an alien planet and an alternate timeline. On the other hand, hell no it doesn't. I find myself wishing I could impart what's in my heart and in my brain -- basically, the life experiences and heart of a middle-aged man who grew up in the segregated South and actually remembers that "great man," MLK Jr. -- to those Omaha teen-agers who decided to do a simple little song about the civil-rights leader.

Perhaps I can accomplish this a little by resurrecting -- and updating -- something I wrote almost 10 years ago. Here goes.

* * *

JOE'S BARBER SHOP smelled of witch hazel, hot shaving cream and talcum powder. Of old magazines, the newsprint of strewn-about State-Times and Morning Advocates, and of sweat and cigarette smoke.

When you opened the front door onto Scenic Highway, Mr. Joe's place might smell of complex hydrocarbons, too. The front gate of the Humble Oil and Refining Co.'s Baton Rouge complex sat slap-dab across the street.

One summer day in 1970, though, Mr. Joe's just smelled.

"My boy ain't goin' to school with no goddamn niggers," this fellow said from up in one of Mr. Joe's three barber chairs -- under the placard that proclaimed the establishment a proud "Union Shop" -- to expressions of sympathy from Mr. Joe, my old man and the rest. Fearing his son's life might be in mortal danger, the man was popping off about having his kid pack heat.

Blame it on the Feds. A federal judge had just ruled against East Baton Rouge Parish's grade-at-a-time "freedom of choice" school desegregation plan, which had taken effect in 1963, started with the 12th grade and worked its way down to the sixth grade. Starting in the fall, a "neighborhood school" plan would take over, coupled with voluntary majority-to-minority transfers. For the first time, all students in a school's attendance area -- black and white -- would go to the same school.

Not a popular concept in the all-white, working-class world of Joe's Barber Shop.

I was 9 years old.

Summer gave way to fall in 1970 -- to the surprise of many white folks (including, I imagine, the guy planning to arm his son), the world did not end -- and school opened, "integrated" under the neighborhood schools scheme.

"Integrated" Capitol High School was supposed to have 230 white students and 1,363 blacks. Five whites showed up for classes. And "integrated" McKinley High was supposed to have 81 whites and 1,051 black students. No whites showed up.

That fall, I returned to suburban Red Oaks Elementary School, a sprawling, brick-and-concrete 1950s monument to homogeneity and bad taste that assaulted the eyes with its covered walkways and copious amounts of puke-green paint. My parents saw no need to place a snub-nose .38 in my book sack; there was little chance I'd face assault by some snarling black menace from "Bucktown."

Chances were much better that I'd be assaulted by gangs of snarling white menaces from North Red Oaks.

In the fall of 1970, I was starting fourth grade, and for the past three years I had hated all-white, de jure-segregated Red Oaks Elementary. The only thing worse than Red Oaks, I imagined, must be having to go to "the nigger school," which, I was assured, just might happen if I messed up bad enough.

In the fall of 1970, Janice Grigsby was starting fourth grade at Red Oaks, too. She hadn't had the opportunity to work up a good hate for the place; this was the first year she and her little brother could attend.

Janice was black, and though her family had lived just a few blocks from the school since before there was a school there -- before there was a neighborhood, even -- she had been barred from Red Oaks by force of law, relegated to "the nigger school."

I remember that Janice had skin the color of a Hershey bar, a pair of pigtails and a big smile. She was the first black person my own age I'd ever known. And despite almost a decade of racial indoctrination -- with warnings about "nigger music," "nigger rigs" and "nigger lovers," deliveries from "the drugstore nigger" and subtropical heat that left you "sweatin' like a nigger preacher" -- despite growing up with Jim Crow as the crazy uncle in the attic, I liked Janice. She was in Mrs. Anderson's class with me, and I found that I didn't care whether she was black, white, purple or green.

She was a friend.

I remember that Janice and I used to play together at recess. I'd pull her pigtails, she'd chase me, and we'd both have a grand time.

My folks had no real problem with this. Poor Southern kids during the Great Depression, they grew up around black folks. And the only difference between them and "the niggers" was a society and a legal system that placed blacks at the bottom of the pecking order and "white trash" a little bit above.

So, for some white folks, there was nothing overly unusual about playing with black kids. Or about being friendly -- not friends -- with blacks as an adult, so long as everyone remembered that God Almighty ordained that whites were the superior race.

On the other hand, you had problems if black folks got "uppity." Uppity included such concepts as sitting in the front of buses, voting and using the same restrooms as whites. Or going to school with whites.

I guess that, by 1970 standards, my parents were something less than white-supremacy hardliners. I know they weren't hot on the idea of racial integration, not by a long shot. But I suppose they figured that if the Feds were letting the "coloreds" (what polite white folks called blacks in 1970) into "white" schools, there was no use being mean to them, or in keeping your kid from playing with Janice Grigsby.

The powers-that-be at Red Oaks Elementary, however, didn't see things the same way.

More than three decades later, I remember one day when Janice and I were playing at recess, following the standard rituals of 9-year-old boys and girls. Soon enough, Mrs. Anderson got my attention, took me aside by a red-brick wing of classrooms and gave me a good talking to.

Maybe I ought not be playing with Janice, she gravely advised me. It didn't look right, she was worried about it, the Red Oaks administration was worried about it, and white boys hanging around with colored girls wasn't wise. In 1970, it seems, certain white adults were worried about miscegenation, even among the playground crowd.

Janice Grigsby, one of two lonely black children among hundreds of white faces at Red Oaks Elementary, was to be isolated. Blackness was akin to the mumps, and the authorities were worried about infection.

At day's end, I walked across the playground, then over the foot bridge of heavy timbers and the pungent smell of creosote, then across Darryl Drive and down the sidewalk to home. My mother was waiting, and I told her I couldn't play with Janice anymore.

She was outraged. To this day, I'm not sure where that outrage came from -- perhaps it was that defiant suspicion of authority bred into a class of white folk raised dirt poor and accustomed to being beaten down by the powers-that-be. Maybe it was a subconscious compulsion to do the right thing despite her own prejudices and enculturation. Maybe it was the invisible hand of God determined to see that such blatant injustice, such cruelty directed toward a 9-year-old girl, not pass unnoticed.

Whatever it was, it caused my mother to go straight to the phone book, look up the number of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pick up the telephone and give whomever answered at the NAACP an earful about the shenanigans going on at Red Oaks Elementary School.

In an old movie, the outrage of the righteous would have come down foursquare upon the heads of Mrs. Anderson and her partners in crime, and Janice Grigsby would have lived happily ever after. But old movies are just that, and morality plays were long out of fashion by the dawn of the '70s.

Life did not get easier for Janice. Her black face stood out like a bulls eye in Red Oaks' lily-white world, and she took her shots from Mrs. Anderson, a surly, tanklike woman who had about as much business in the classroom as Pol Pot would have had on Amnesty International's board of directors.

No, for Janice, ridicule at Mrs. Anderson's beefy hands became a daily ritual.

For instance, every Monday was lunch-money day, and the proper procedure for paying for the week's meals involved paying separately for your lunch and for your milk -- or something like that. One Monday, Janice did something horrible. She brought a single check from home to pay for everything.

You would have thought Janice had just set fire to the classroom.

"What am I supposed to do with this!" Mrs. Anderson thundered. "Cut it in half?!?"

The classroom erupted with the laughter of small minds. The cruelty of a middle-aged teacher toward a little girl is really funny when you're 9, I guess.

But Janice just sat there. She just took it.

I am not sure why this is the incident that sticks in my mind after all these years and all these miles away from Baton Rouge. There were others, many others. But as the years have passed, those incidents have subsided into the fog of memory. All that remains is the surety of Mrs. Anderson's withering remarks, the hoots of my classmates and Janice just sitting there.

Taking it.

And I remember that I hated Mrs. Anderson. I really did, and I don't know that I'm sorry I hated her.

I left Red Oaks Elementary after the fall semester of 1970. Like Janice, I was the butt of many jokes and much abuse -- at the hands of Mrs. Anderson and little rednecks with littler minds. I didn't fit in, probably was too smart by half when being smart was a one-way ticket to Adolescent Hell, and I rebelled mightily.

I ended up at the next school over, Villa del Rey Elementary. It was a much better school, though I still had my problems.

My new fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Hawkins. She was black, talented and a sweet soul amid a sea of, on average, slightly more affluent little rednecks. I spent a while catching up on my studies, thanks to the curricular deficiencies Mrs. Anderson brought to the classroom along with her sunny disposition.

In many ways, it was Mrs. Hawkins who caught hell at the hands of her students. More than once, students might be heard to mutter "nigger" under their breath after being disciplined. I know she had to have heard, but I don't remember her ever saying anything.

And I am ashamed to admit to being among those who muttered the N-word. Like they say, racism isn't congenital; it's learned. And oftentimes we learned all the wrong lessons.

I didn't see Janice Grigsby again until seventh grade at Broadmoor Junior High, where there was just a small handful of black kids. We didn't hang out together anymore, but I did notice one thing about her -- it seemed that her smile wasn't so big anymore. At least not often.

The dresses she once wore, I recall, had given way to a denim jacket and pants. It was fitting; she seemed to me at the time as this James Deanlike loner amid the junior-high hustlin' mob. I don't think we spoke much, if at all, during those years. But then again, the black kids had their world, and we whites had ours. The teen-age rednecks and thugs ruled supreme -- and perhaps the Mrs. Andersons of the world had won our hearts and minds.

Too, somewhere along the way at Broadmoor, Janice had to repeat a grade. I wonder whether maybe she, at some point along the line, had bought into the subtext of Mrs. Anderson's daily barrage: Niggers are stupid. Niggers don't belong. You're stupid, Janice. You don't belong.

From time to time, I wonder whatever became of Janice. Did she graduate? Is she happy? Did she ever come to terms with how that old battle axe treated her?

Is she married now? Does she have kids of her own? Grandkids?

Is Janice alive?

Of one thing I am sure: Janice Grigsby was a real little girl who suffered in very real ways due to the aftershocks of America's Original Sins -- slavery and bigotry. One's dead and buried; the other's still alive, burrowed deep into the American psyche like a mutant gene unleashing deadly cancers.

Yes, I'd like to think things weren't as bleak as my 9-year-old eyes viewed them; at least I would like to think my memories of Red Oaks, and Janice, have been darkened, have been fogged over, by the jadedness of adulthood.

But I don't think so.

And I don't think things are as changed as lots of people -- lots of people white like me -- would have us all believe. Better, yes.

Good? Probably not.

That bunch of teen-agers -- MLK and the Dreamers -- was 20 years from being born when Martin Luther King Jr., died. And they are right; he was a "great, great man."

And somebody shot him dead. Shot him dead for his greatness.

Somebody'd probably shoot him dead today, too.

God help us. Lord, have mercy.

Ahmet Ertegun, RIP

Another giant has fallen.

NEW YORK - Ahmet Ertegun, who helped define American music as the founder of Atlantic Records, a label that popularized the gritty R&B of Ray Charles, the classic soul of Aretha Franklin and the British rock of the Rolling Stones, died Thursday at 83, his spokesman said.

Ertegun remained connected to the music scene until his last days — it was at an Oct. 29 concert by the Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theatre in New York where Ertegun fell, suffered a head injury and was hospitalized. He later slipped into a coma.

“He was in a coma and expired today with his family at his bedside,” said Dr. Howard A. Riina, Ertegun’s neurosurgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Ertegun will be buried in a private ceremony in his native Turkey, said Bob Kaus, a spokesman for Ertegun and Atlantic Records. A memorial service will be conducted in New York after New Year’s.

Ertegun, a Turkish ambassador’s son, started collecting records for fun, but would later became one of the music industry’s most powerful figures with Atlantic, which he founded in 1947.

The label first made its name with rhythm and blues by Charles and Big Joe Turner, but later diversified, making Franklin the Queen of Soul as well as carrying the banner of British rock (with the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin) and American pop (with Sonny and Cher, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and others).

Today, the company, part of Warner Music Group, is the home to artists including Kid Rock, James Blunt, T.I., and Missy Elliott.

“Ahmet Ertegun was a true visionary whose life’s work had a profound impact on our cultures musical landscape, as well as around the world,” said Neil Portnow, president of The Recording Academy.

(snip)

In later years, Ertegun signed (Bette) Midler, Roberta Flack and ABBA. He had a gift for being able to pick out what would be a commercial smash, said the late producer Arif Mardin, who remembered one session where he was working with the Bee Gees on an album — but was unsure of what he had produced.

“Then Ahmet came and listened to it, and said, ‘You’ve got hits here, you’ve got dance hits,”’ Mardin once told the AP. “I was involved in such a way that I didn’t see the forest for the trees. ... He was like the steadying influence.”

One strength of the company was Ertegun’s close relationships with many of the artists — relationships that continued even after they left his label. Midler still called for advice, and he visited Franklin’s home when he dropped into Detroit.

“He cared first and foremost about the artist and the music — much more than the business,” Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates said. “He believed that if the artist was true to him or herself, good business would follow. Sadly in today’s atmosphere, this isn’t the case. But, during Ahmet’s days of influence it was.”

His friendships extended to the younger generation, too, including Kid Rock and Lil’ Kim.
Besides his love of music, Ertegun was also known for his love of art, and socializing. It was not uncommon to find him at a party with his wife, Mica, hanging out until all hours with friends.

Although he was slowed by triple-bypass surgery in 2001, he still went into his office almost daily to listen for his next hit.

Music mogul Quincy Jones called Ertegun “definitely one of the pioneering visionaries in this whole scene.”

“He was a very 360-degree person. He loved to have a good time. He knew how to party, which is my kind of guy, and he knew how to work. He knew how to look into the future and how to execute to bring it to fruition,” Jones said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.

American pop music would have been very different if there had been no Ahmet Ertegun. I'm glad we don't have to find out how.

May he rest in peace.

What Atlantic Records has meant to American music will be the primary focus of tonight's Revolution 21 Podcast. That, and a look at the Omaha teen-agers who took a minimalist ditty about Martin Luther King Jr., all the way to London -- and to a top-seven finish in the search for the world's best young band.

Be there. Aloha.

New Orleans steps up in Iraq War effort: Army tests new PsyOps tactics on 'Yats'

You know, if we just let President Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco do for Iraq what they've done for South Louisiana -- particularly for New Orleans -- that just might be a workable game plan.

I project the insurgency would crumble in a year, its spirit and will broken. After all, look how well the pilot program is going in finishing off Louisianians, who bear some small, yet not insignificant, similarity (particularly the colorful New Orleans tribe sometimes known as the "Yats," or Howsicus Yo'mamacus An'demensis) to the squabbling hordes of old Mesopotamia.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

The yellow award letter from the state Road Home program -- meant, at long last, to be the final statement of a flood victim's federal rebuilding grant -- started on a celebratory note: "Congratulations!"

With all their savings tied up in their flooded-to-the-ceiling Lakeview house, and desperately needing that money to live, Saul and Mildred Rubin, both in their 90s, had been waiting for their grant award for months. In the meantime, they have been reluctantly living in a West Bank retirement community paid for in part by their children.

So what was the good news?

The government estimated the damage to their uninsured, 2,000-square-foot home -- which took on nearly 9 feet of water from the nearby 17th Street Canal breach -- at $550.

Even if the Rubins wanted to return to the devastated block of slab homes, they couldn't: The damage estimate, combined with a deduction because of a previous FEMA grant, concluded that the Rubins don't qualify for a rebuilding grant at all.

The letter does not make clear how Road Home officials calculated the Rubins' damage, but based on the $130-per-square-foot formula officials use to estimate repair costs for severely damaged homes, the couple's estimated damage would have totaled about $260,000.

In another case, April Allen, 37, a biological research technician living with her husband and two children in a FEMA trailer park, received a Road Home letter that estimated the catastrophic damage to her Vista Park home in New Orleans at just $6,430.

The two families' dilemmas are not unique, as a smattering of letters to the editor, weblogs and phone calls to state offices attest. Melanie Ehrlich, a founder of the New Orleans advocacy group Citizens' Road Home Action Team, said she has seen 15 yellow final award letters and found errors in 11 of them.

Among those errors: insurance proceeds for repairs to fences or outbuildings being counted against homeowners in reducing the amount of their Road Home grants; and FEMA payments for rental assistance -- a separate program that has no bearing on house repairs -- counted in deductions.

"I'm sure that a very large (number) of mistakes have been made because of the rush to get letters out quickly," said Ehrlich, a Tulane University human genetics professor.

Road Home administrators say they cannot publicly discuss the specifics of any applicant's case.

But officials with the state Division of Administration and Louisiana Recovery Authority who monitor the program said that, at this point, they have not noticed a major problem with errors in final Road Home award letters.

Residents who think their final award letter is incorrect can file a formal appeal, but Road Home staffers acknowledge they don't encourage such a step because it could cause delays in resolving problems. Instead, they recommend that homeowners call the Road Home assistance number, then press 6 and a "resolution" expert will respond as soon as they are able.

Road Home spokeswoman Carol Hector-Harris said that if a resident files a formal appeal, it's unknown how long it will take. "We haven't done any yet," she said.

Road Home administrators -- though they recently conceded a 25 percent error rate in so-called "preliminary" award letters -- dispute charges that they are still fumbling on a grand scale in the final letters, which they printed on yellow paper to distinguish them from the earlier, mistake-ridden batch.

Hector-Harris said "mistakes may happen here and there," but she could not estimate what the error rate might be in the final letters. She said Road Home officials have found no systemic pattern of foul-ups.

She suggested that some complaints about inaccuracies stem from simple frustration that proposed grant awards are not higher.

"A lot of times people decide that we don't know what we're talking about because they don't like what they're hearing," said Hector-Harris, who works for the contractor ICF International, based in Virginia. "People send e-mails all the time suggesting all sorts of things."

Whatever the scope of Road Home foul-ups, Alan Rubin, 62, who holds power of attorney for his parents, called the numbers in their award letter sheer foolishness. In addition to the $550 damage estimate, the much-anticipated yellow letter contains other curious figures, he said.

In noting that the Rubins must elevate their home, the letter lists $25,517 as an "elevation allowance." It also lists, without explanation, the same amount in an offer of an "affordable compensation loan," which the program makes available to those earning far less than the city's median income level.

Alan Rubin said the letter has caused considerable stress for his elderly parents.

"They're terrified," he said. "All of their cash in the world was tied up into the value of this house."

The errors, combined with the difficulty Alan Rubin, a retired businessman, has faced in getting a call through to the Road Home switchboard, led the son to believe that such errors -- after such a long wait and a cumbersome application process -- will lead people to abandoned their rebuilding plans.

"My concern is, the people we need in this city are going to say, 'Screw it,' and leave," said Alan Rubin, a Metairie resident who bristled with anger during a recent visit to his parents' ungutted home. "If they don't have time to do this thing right the first time, when are they going to find time to do it?"

JUST BEWARE the Cajun version of the roadside IED.

You think that the old pickup with the plywood extenders on the truck bed is a fisherman selling fresh shrimp on the side of the road. Fool.

Britney Spears: Paragon of 'partying ethics'

The saga of these twits passed the parody-proof frontier long, long ago. Now, the vapid Paris Hilton is defending the "partying ethics" of "Barebottom" Britney Spears, who proves every day in every way that "common" can't be cured by large infusions of cash.

In an entry on her page on the popular social networking Web site MySpace on Tuesday, hotel heiress Hilton called the attacks on Spears cruel and shameful.

"For people to call out her parenting skills on behalf of her partying ethics is appalling," Hilton wrote.

"Britney loves her kids to death, and I know for a fact that it truly hurts her when she sees these cruel things being written about her. She goes home every night to her babies and partying has not come in the way of her parenting," Hilton added.

Spears, who put her recording career and social life on hold for marriage and motherhood, said on her own Web site last week that she "probably did take my newfound freedom a little too far," but said she had not been out with friends for a long time.

Spears has been photographed with Hilton wearing plunging dresses and tight miniskirts on all-nighters at clubs in Las Vegas and Hollywood, shocking some of her younger fans and making her the butt of jokes. On at least three occasions, photographs of her getting out of cars revealed she was wearing no panties.

PORE BRITNEY. That lil' gal jes' cain't hep it, and folks are jes' so MEAN about her-a-goin' 'round ta them uppity juke joints all night long 'n' showin' her pride 'n' joy ter all them thar papanazis or whatever you call 'em.

On the other hand, though, there is one sure way to end "these cruel things being written about her."

***

Come close, Brit. I'll tell you how to stop this awful gossip. Let me whisper it in your ear, child. We don't want everybody to hear.

OK . . . .

STOP IT!!!!!!! STOP ACTING LIKE WHITE TRASH!!!!

DON'T. DO. THAT. ANYMORE.

STOP PARTYING. ETHICALLY OR OTHERWISE. STAY HOME WITH YOUR CHILDREN. PUT ON SOME DRAWERS . . . WE REALLY, REALLY DON'T NEED TO SEE IT !!!!!!

JUST. STOP. IT. NOW!!!!!

Oh . . . I'm sorry sweetie! Did I hurt your ear? Good.

NOW, STOP IT!

***

Pity the unfortunate offspring of Britney and K-Fed. Talk about your no-win situations . . . .

The very thought makes one wish that Los Angeles County had the Taliban Child Protective Services: Three complaints about the treatment of the Spears-Federline children, and the authorities knock over a concrete-block wall onto Britney and Kevin.

In a most ethical manner, of course.

Second verse, same as the first . . .

Taking the lead from their presiding bishop, the remaining living parishioners of Grace Episcopal Church of Newark, N.J., have reached out to their too-sexy-for-the-pope Catholic neighbors.

Some Roman Catholics whose spiritual lives are grounded in the Mass and in the sacraments are, nevertheless, unable to concur with the Vatican’s position on issues such as the role of women in the church, contra- ception, remarriage of divorced person, homosexual relation- ships, or abortion. They have become increasingly disaffected as the hierarchy’s response to dissent has grown more strident and authoritarian.

If you are among them, you may find a comforta- ble spiritual home at Grace Church in Newark.

(snip . . . like in a vasectomy)

At Grace Church you will find:

* Traditional Catholic worship, offered with care and reverence

* Worthy liturgical music, including Gregorian Chant

* A respectful approach to Scripture and Tradition, without fundamentalism or authoritarianism

* A diverse congregation that embraces divorced persons, gay men, and lesbians as fully as it embraces all others.

The Episcopal Church is not a Protestant denomination. As John Macquarrie, sometime Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, wrote, "Anglicanism has never considered itself to be a sect or denomination originating in the sixteenth century. It continues without a break the Ecclesia Anglicana founded by St. Augustine [of Centerbury] thirteen centuries and more ago…" The Episcopal Church is Catholic in polity. It has maintained the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons. It faithfully ministers all the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Its liturgy affirms the sacrificial character of the Eucharist and the real, objective presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Nevertheless, its members differ widely in their theological positions. Since the sixteenth century many Anglicans—at times the majority—have embraced Protestant ideas; but other have always remained faithful to Anglicanism’s Catholic heritage, and the Anglican Communion has never departed from it in any essential. Grace Church, since its founding in 1837, has stood squarely with those who emphasize and treasure the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism.

On Sunday, December 17, after the 10 a.m. Mass, we shall hold a special forum for inquirers who wish to learn more about Anglican Catholicism. We are eager to welcome you at any time; but we especially invite you to join us then.

IN OTHER WORDS, "We don't believe in that crap, either, but the incense smells pretty and the bells sound nice. Coffee and doughnuts, anyone?"

It's all about thinking with one's little head, as opposed to the big one, isn't it?

You know, sometimes it's really difficult to endure as a Catholic when so many in the Church don't act like it has much to do with . . . well, anything. But my heart really goes out to those Episcopalians who try to be faithful to Christ when their denomination has taken the appearance of not giving a s#!+ and formalized it into actual doctrine.

We all need prayers here. And, being that St. Augustine said "Those who sing, pray twice," I feel a song in my heart.

EVERYBODY NOW . . .

I'm Henery the Eighth I am,
Henery the Eighth I am, I am,
I want to screw the floozy next door,
But damn Benedict don't want me to score,
So I will join th' Episcopalians,
They'll give me a rubber or a little pill,
I don't believe in all that Papist doo,
And th' Episcopalians don't believe it, too

Second verse, same as the first . . . .


(Hat tip: Midwest Conservative Journal and Amy Welborn)

The questions we're afraid to ask

How long can a society last, do you reckon, when in the face of stuff like this, this, this, this and this, what we end up getting from Americans entrusted as guardians of moral seriousness and transcendence is idiocy like the Barney Mass and Franklin Graham's Talking Cow?

Just asking.

The Islamic extremists figuratively storming the West's gates are intent upon fighting us to the death because they see our societal unseriousness as a mortal threat to their continued existence, however utterly warped that existence might be.

Our response -- amid our own profoundly warped, yet profoundly different, existence -- is to scream "USA! USA! USA!" as we rest assured of the unending blessings of gods we've created in our own image. And though we have a sizable chunk of the American military fighting against the Mohammedan hordes in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't think we have a clue in hell of what we're fighting for.

Just sayin'.

Americans and their political leaders contend we're fighting for "freedom," but how does our present notion of freedom differ from license? And if freedom equals license and we -- in our licentiousness -- by some miracle summon the wherewithal to defeat committed Islamic jihadism, how does that result in the "life of man" being any less "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" than if the Osama bin Ladens of the world won?

IN OTHER WORDS, why should we not just cut our losses and submit to the jihadis if ultimately our fate is going to be a case of "six of one, half a dozen of the other"?

Those are some of the questions we. as Westerners, are deathly afraid to ask. But if you listen carefully, those are the questions Pope Benedict XVI has been throwing in our clueless, self-absorbed faces for a while now.

Just been thinkin' is all.

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Well, then! Now you can help us promote the cause of financial freedom by buying one of our "Dollar" Bill's Cold Cash Club tees! Rest assured that your money will be safe with us.

Right between the ribeye steak and the frozen corn.

Homina homina homina homina

From The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune:

Confounding political pundits and a slew of rivals who had become confident of his defeat, U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, neatly sidestepped a roiling federal corruption probe to win re-election on Saturday to his ninth term in Congress.

Guilty pleas by aides and associates who admitted to bribing the congressman and the revelation in court documents that FBI agents had found $90,000 in marked bills stuffed into Jefferson's freezer had put the scent of blood in political waters.

A field of a dozen candidates began circling Jefferson in the primary. Hefinished first, but with only 30 percent of the vote, inspiring conjecture that his performance amounted to repudiation of an incumbent and that he would surely lose the runoff against state Rep. Karen Carter, D-New Orleans.

Instead, Jefferson, 59, scored a dramatic upset by racking up huge pluralities in African African-dominated precincts in Orleans, and winning outright in Jefferson Parish, where Sheriff Harry Lee had spent his campaign.The final margin for Jefferson in Jefferson Parish was 71% to 29% -- a margin that can be attributed to Sheriff Lee's furious political assault in the closing days of the campaign.

Lee not only endorsed to Jefferson, but in the final days, urged Jefferson Parish residents to stay home and not vote. The final tally shows that while 28% of registered voters cast ballots in the primary, only 15% voted Saturday.

Jefferson's victory was even more confounding because the Second Congressional District race was missing all the advantages that usually come with incumbency. Carter had the edge in funding raising, including from business interests that had backed Jefferson in the past. Most of the high-profile endorsements -- including those by two former Louisiana senators -- went to her, as well.

Un(expletive deleted)believable.

But not really. I was thinking like a Nebraskan, there, for a minute. That's kind of like trying to understand Iraqi insurgents by thinking like a Yale man.

Here's what I say: BRING THE TROOPS HOME FROM IRAQ! If W. wants to do some "nation building," take those 140,000 personnel, and all the armor, and all the political consultants, and all the civil-engineering teams (and all those billions of federal dollars for "helping children and building schools") and send them to Louisiana.

Of course, "nation building" may be just as futile in Louisiana as it has been in Iraq, and "the transformative power of democracy" probably will find itself "transformed" into foil-wrapped bundles of Franklins and Jeffersons in somebody's freezer (probably Jefferson's).

But at least the government of the United States futilely would be trying to instill American values into actual American citizens, and Louisiana schoolchildren would be blissfully ignorant in shiny new schools, as opposed to crumbling dungheaps of peeling paint and dripping ceilings.

I even have a spiffy operational name for the U.S. invasion of the Bayou State. Call it "Operation Reconstruction Resumed: Trying to Get It Right This Time."

'Dreamers' didn't 'win,' but they won

"Martin Luther King Junior was a great, great man . . . ."

AND OMAHA'S MLK AND THE DREAMERS is a pretty decent little -- OK, big at eight members -- band, sayeth an international panel of judges for the BBC World Service's The Next Big Thing contest.

The teens, students at three local high schools, didn't win the whole thing (the winner hailed from Armenia). Or finish second (a tie between acts from England and Malawi). Or third (Brazil).

But if you ask your Mighty Favog, reaching the top seven from more than 1,000 entries from around the globe, then getting a trip to London, then playing live on the radio for 160 million listeners and having nice things said about you by a panel of music-industry luminaries . . . well, that sounds like a winner to me.

"We're going to have the party right here, right now," judge Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records said after the Dreamers' performance. "I love it."

See the BBC story here. And here.

After listening to the band's "Great Man" for the first time a week or so ago, I found myself -- in a manner of speaking -- back at WLSU, Louisiana State University's then-carrier current radio station. It was the fall of 1979, and the B-52s' "Dance This Mess Around" was on the turntable.

My reaction was rather simple, and heartfelt.

"What the @#&! is THAT?!?"

HATED, ABSOLUTELY HATED, the song the first nine times I heard it. No. 10 was the charm.

Twenty-seven years later, I needed no ear adjustment with MLK and the Dreamers. I heard the rough outlines of a B-52s-type thang going on in "Great Man." Not a B-52s copycat, by any means, just a similar kind of "Oh, what the hell. Let's party!" aesthetic.

I liked.

Hey, kids! Send me a CD, will 'ya? The addy is at the bottom of the Revolution 21 homepage.

BTW, the Omaha World-Herald did a nice article (free registration required) before the Dreamers left for the UK.

Dear Peggy, we welcome you to commie-lib.com.We hope you enjoy your stay on the blacklist

Peggy Noonan has done it now.

The erstwhile conservative writer has demonstrated a disturbing level of independent thought, and the Red (State) Channels crowd is about to blacklist her butt. And the rest of her, too -- particularly the fingers she uses to type her weekly Wall Street Journal column.

May God have mercy on her Commie-Lib soul.

You should SEE what this TRAITOR to Our Maximum Leader wrote this time!
Wait a sec; I'll SHOW you what this (and spew spittle when you say this) denizen of the mainstream media said in that lib'rul crapper of a column (and don't forget to try to sound like Douglas C. Neidermeyer when you say "crapper of a column")! Here:

He stood there at the podium, the kind of podium he'd stood at 5,000 times in a long political life, and talked to the kind of audience he knew well: supporters and loyalists, old friends and new. He knew how to play them, how to use the old jokes and have fun. And suddenly he was sobbing.

He had referred to his son Jeb's first campaign for governor. He had seen some "unfair stuff," but Jeb "didn't whine about it, he didn't complain." The old president began to weep. "The true measure of a man," he then said, "is how you handle victory, and also defeat." And here a sob tore out of him and he could not continue.

It is not fully right, or fully fair, to guess about another's emotions. But no one who
knows George H.W. Bush thinks that moment was only about Jeb. It wasn't only
about some small defeat a dozen years ago. It would more likely have been about
a number of things, and another son, and more than him.

Uh oh, Sparky. It's a-lookin' like she's castin' aspersions at our Commander in Chief. This can't be good.

Surely Mr. Bush knew -- surely he was first on James Baker's call list -- that the report would not, could not, offer a way out of a national calamity, but only suggestions, hopes, on ways through it. To know his son George had (with the best of intentions!) been wrong in the great decision of his presidency -- stop at Afghanistan or move on to Iraq? -- and was now suffering a defeat made clear by the report; to love that son, and love your country, to hold these thoughts, to have them collide and come together --this would bring not only tears, but more than tears.

And the younger President Bush, what of his inner world? He has been shorn of much --his place in the winner's circle, old advisers. A man who worked for Richard Nixon reminded me the other night that when Nixon fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman, "he lost his asbestos suit." He lost his primary protectors and loyalists. President Bush is now without a similar layer. Old staffers gone, Rumsfeld gone, Cheney marginalized, Condi and Karen off representing. And the ISG. And the loss of Congress.

AAAAAIIIIEEEE!!!!!!!!!! That thar woman done become a Democrat!!!!

Unlike anguished wartime presidents of old, he seems resolutely un-anguished. Think of the shattered Lincoln of the last Mathew Brady photographs, taken just weeks before he was assassinated. He'd gone from a bounding man of young middle age who awed his secretaries by his ability to hold a heavy ax from his fully outstretched arm, to, four years later, "the old tycoon." Or anguished Lyndon B. Johnson sitting in the cabinet room by himself, literally with his head in his hands. History takes a toll.

But George W. Bush seems, in the day to day, the same as he was. It is part of the Bush conundrum--a supernal serenity or a confidence born of cluelessness? You decide. Where you stand on the war will likely determine your answer. But I'll tell you, I wonder about it and do not understand it, either what it is or what it means. I'd ask someone in the White House, but they're still stuck in Rote Talking Point Land: The president of course has moments of weariness but is sustained by his knowledge of the ultimate rightness of his course . . .

If he suffers, they might tell us; it would make him seem more normal, which is always a heartening thing to see in a president.

But maybe there is no suffering.

Maybe he outsources suffering. Maybe he leaves it to his father.

(SFX: Sound of right-wing echo chamber having collective case of the vapors. Punctuated by the occasional THUD! of fainting without benefit of a "fainting couch.")

And now we cut to the OpinionJournal.com reader responses to Miss Noonan's column. Keep in mind, now, that the following ARE NOT parody:

When or if we lose in Iraq, it will be in large part because of a liberal media that has done everything in its power to undermine the decision to go to war, turn the American public against the war, predict defeat and proclaim defeat while ignoring successes.

***

I see the current President Bush as a visionary and I believe that someday the world will thank him for going to Iraq to liberate the people. Things are bad there now because the terrorist do not want the President to succeed in Iraq. Yes, some mistakes were made but mistakes happen in wars and this is the war on terrorism and I hate the American people who do not understand that. The American people need to support President Bush and show a united front against the enemy and what did they do during the last election. The stupid voters elected a bunch of dingbats who are going to make matters much worse you just wait and see.

***

I'm not enjoying Peggy Noonan's recent snarky blind sides of our sitting president. Just because a president doesn't include you in his inner circle doesn't mean he should die from a thousand cat scratches from someone who couches her attacks in therapy-speak.

***

After reading Peggy Noonan's offering today I'm a bit confused. Is it the aim of former friends and forever foes to "break" our current president? If so, he must be driving everyone nuts because thus far it appears that is not going to happen. Questioning his "mental capacity" keeps sneaking into columns. Someone should address the "mental capacity" of Baker/Hamilton, et al The ISG is a very bad joke pushed off and supported by Democrats, has been Republicans and major media. I smell lots of rats. I enjoy your writing and have for years. Not today's offering.

Lord, have mercy. The final act of lemmings -- chucking the dagger at the Independent Thinker before diving off the cliff. Or drinking the Kool-Aid. Whatever.

Here's my favorite line. If there's a Dumbass Remark Hall of Fame somewhere, this needs to be in it:

Yes, some mistakes were made but mistakes happen in wars and this is the war on terrorism and I hate the American people who do not understand that.

Well, start by hating me. I am not amused that there are 2,928 American soldiers dead from a war we were railroaded into by the Bush Administration. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no working relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

There are, however, those dead sons and daughters of American mothers and fathers. And those dead mothers and fathers of new American orphans.

And there are the 22,057 wounded, many grievously so.

That, of course, doesn't count the wounded capability of an American military that's being run into the dry, sandy ground. And that's not counting this country's wounded credibility.

And that's not counting the next president's wounded ability to govern a nation inclined -- after Vietnam, Watergate and, now, King George's Plague (Iraq + Katrina lies and bungling) -- to go outside and check every time he (or she) tells us the sky is blue.

Nekkid Britney! Lewd Lohan! Babes in Boyland!(Hi there! Now that I have your attention . . . )

Britney Spears! Underwear-free zone! Party all the time with Paris!

Lindsay Lohan! Girls gone wild! Admitted to Harvard as Lit major!!!!!!!

Hey, how ya' doin'. Just in from the search engine are we? If you're looking for nekkid Britney pics . . . you really should consider going to confession. Soon.

She's somebody's mama, now, man! Get a grip!

(ahem)

ANYWAY . . . on the Big Show this week, we're exploring some of this past week's Grammy nominations. Bob Dylan, Irma Thomas, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Beck . . . you get the picture.

Ever notice how much of the really good stuff this year has something, somehow to do with the near-Atlantisizing of New Orleans last year? What do they say about great art coming out of great tragedy?

Maybe, from a Catholic perspective, we can look at this amazing artistic output related to such a calamity as just one of God's means of teasing good -- bringing beauty -- out of the awful and the ugly. What is right and good gets the last laugh, in a cosmic sense, so to speak.

Well, that's the Revolution 21 podcast in a nutshell. But nutshells aren't half as fun as listening, now, are they?

So get to it. Listen. The player's to your right, at the top of the page.

If Barney Fife had gone gangsta

Or, Laurel and Hardy do Columbine. (Link requires free registration.)

Thank God. A non-doofus could have pulled off mass murder at this Omaha high school Thursday.

The lights were out in the Northwest High School classroom Thursday morning so the students in the child development class could take notes off the overhead projector.

Their teacher had said it was all right to talk, so Michael Brannon was standing up, chatting with a girl, said Michael Betts, a senior in the class.

Brannon had his hands in the pocket of his hooded jacket.

Then came a loud, booming noise, Betts said. The teacher said, "What was that?"

Brannon "didn't cry out, didn't shout or nothing. He just looked scared," Betts said. "He started saying, 'I didn't do it! I swear to God, I didn't do it!'"

Robert Michael Brannon, a 17-year-old sophomore, had accidentally shot himself in the finger. The bullet also grazed his thigh before it hit the floor, Omaha police said.

Betts said once the students realized that Brannon had been shot, girls screamed, the teacher -- who thought it was a firecracker -- called for security and Brannon ran.

Brannon went from Northwest, at 8204 Crown Point Ave., to Immanuel Medical Center, a mile and a half away at 6901 N. 72nd St., where he was treated for his injuries. It wasn't clear whether Brannon got to the hospital on foot or by car.

Betts said that a few minutes after the gun went off, students noticed a hole in the carpeting about four feet from where Brannon had been standing. A shell casing was a couple of feet from the hole.

Students leave Northwest High School after the school was locked down Thursday.

En route to the hospital, Omaha Public Schools spokeswoman Luanne Nelson said, Brannon called his grandmother to say he had been injured by a firecracker and was headed to the hospital. A school administrator later called her to tell her that Brannon had left the building.

The grandmother told the administrator of Brannon's phone call, and the school resource officer, an Omaha police officer, went to Immanuel.

Brannon hid the gun somewhere between the school and the hospital, police said.

As young master Brannon is now finding out, happiness is NOT a warm gun. Bang, bang. Shoot, shoot . . . OW!

She didn't make y'all look like anything

In the New Orleans-area congressional runoff between Democrats Karen Carter and William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, the parish poobahs of Jefferson (the parish, that is) are lining up behind the alleged crook, Jefferson (of the $90,000 hidden in the freezer, that is).

Now why would they do that? Apart from the fact that it's Louisiana, that is.

Well, the rulers of Jefferson Parish, which lies immediately to the west and to the south of the Crescent City, are P.O.'d that Carter, a 37-year-old state legislator, said less than nice things about the "unwelcome mat" Jefferson (the parish, not the cold cash man) officials put out for desperate, mostly African-American residents of New Orleans trying to escape the waterlogged, hellish city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year. As an Associated Press story puts it:

A popular but pugnacious suburban sheriff unleashed an attack this week on Jefferson's opponent, state Rep. Karen Carter, because she called officials "inhumane" for stopping thousands of people from walking across a Mississippi River bridge to the less-impacted west bank to escape New Orleans after Katrina.

Jefferson faces Carter, a fellow Democrat, Saturday in a runoff that will decide one of the last unresolved midterm congressional elections, its lateness tied to Louisiana's multiparty open-primary system.

On Tuesday Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee called a news conference and railed against Carter for nearly 20 minutes, charging "she wanted to run her fat mouth" to get attention by laying down racist charges.

Carter, 37, is well-financed and politically connected. She's seeking to become the first black woman from Louisiana ever elected to Congress.

The incident opened old wounds and the images of chaos after Katrina, which continues to haunt the lives, and historical record, of leaders in Louisiana.

"When their obituary is written one day, the main point will be that during Katrina they did this or they did that in the city's darkest hours," said Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane University history professor and author of a criticized book chronicling Katrina.

Last spring, the mayoral election was dominated by Katrina. Ray Nagin managed to wade through the fallout from the Aug. 29, 2005 storm to win re-election. Next year, Gov. Kathleen Blanco is up for re-election and she faces questions about her performance after the catastrophe.

But the congressional race had marched to a different beat.

"It's hard to overshadow Katrina as an issue, but Jefferson has managed to do that with his bribery investigation and the $90,000 in the freezer," said Susan Howell, a political scientist with the University of New Orleans.

Jefferson's troubles surfaced last year when the FBI raided his homes and offices in Washington and New Orleans in an investigation into African telecommunications business deals. The FBI alleges agents found $90,000 in bribe money in his freezer. Two Jefferson associates have pleaded guilty in connection with the probe.

In the fallout, Jefferson was stripped of his seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and a posse of candidates was lured into the race to unseat the embattled congressman. Jefferson has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing.

So, Lee's outburst has interrupted a campaign that had settled into a somewhat predictable mudslinging contest between Jefferson and Carter and provided Jefferson a breather from attacks against his moral standing.

Carter's comments were aired during Spike Lee's in-depth documentary on Katrina. In one segment she says: "There's no question that the officials there were wrong, absolutely wrong, and they need to be reprimanded accordingly. It was unjust, it was inhumane, and it was unacceptable."

Lee, who looked rattled and acted belligerent toward reporters during the news conference, said he was "incensed" by her comments and that he could not stomach the idea of having Carter represent his parish, which makes up the populous western and southern parts of the metropolitan area.

"She makes us look like a bunch of yahoos down here, a bunch of racists, that we kept black people out of Jefferson Parish," Lee said. The people of Jefferson Parish, Lee countered, "think we are heroes for what we did, and there were no racial overtones whatsoever."

Sheriff, Karen Carter didn't MAKE y'all look like anything. Any resemblance of Jefferson Parish officials to yahoos and racists is . . . more or less on the mark, actually.

If readers are interested in exploring exactly how ugly that scene on the Crescent City Connection (the river bridge in question) was that day in 2005, I cannot recommend Brinkley's book "The Great Deluge" highly enough. Your eyes will be opened.

Unless you're from Louisiana, of course. Then your worst realizations will be reconfirmed.

It works like the 'daisy cutter' . . . only with hydrogen and methane

NASHVILLE (R21 People's "News") -- Authorities removed an alleged dirty-bomber from an American Airlines flight here early Monday after the jet made an emergency landing, and government officials said the nation narrowly averted a cataclysmic demonstration of the confluence of two explosive technologies -- the "dirty" bomb and the fuel-air "daisy cutter."

Pilots made the unscheduled Tennessee stop after passengers reported that a flatulent passenger was repeatedly lighting matches. A Dallas-area woman was questioned by federal agents as all 99 passengers were rescreened before being allowed back onto American Flight 1053.

The woman -- who authorities allege was trying to set off a fearsome new IED known as the "Fart Blossom" -- was not allowed back onto the plane.

Washington sources report that President Bush has ordered the Pentagon to gear up for an imminent invasion of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which Bush today declared was "full of flatulent women" who could be "deployed against American cities and exploded with virtually no warning."

"The enemies of America are out there -- many of them in the Metroplex -- and, by God, we are not going to lose a city as long as I am in office," Bush said. "We are gonna show them Dallas people some real 'shock and awe,' and with God's help, and that of the 82nd Airborne and the 1st Armored, we are gonna let loose the transformative power of freedom in North Texas. Uncle Sam will once again make Dallas into a place Tom Landry could be proud of."

Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decried the White House war talk.

"Uh, couldn't we just airdrop some Beano into North Texas, instead?" Pelosi asked at a midafternoon press conference. "Can't we just all pass on the cole slaw and baked beans, instead?"

White House spokesman Tony Snow accused Pelosi of "aiding and abetting terrorists" and wanting to "cut the cheese and run."

Film at 11.

Now this is rich. Priceless, even

Pore Britney is daid . . . drunk. Or something like that.

And looking back from Kentwood, La., on the Hollywood monster she helped raise -- or not, as the case may be -- The Britney Mama (a.k.a., Lynne Spears), is fit to be tied over her newly separated daughter's non-stop carousing with Everybody's Favorite Bimbo, Her Right Skankitudinousness, Paris Hilton.

As my own Louisiana mama might say, "Dem tings happen."

Lynne rang up Britney and begged her to calm down, but the pair ended up having a "ferocious bust-up".

Family friend Marina Watts told Britain's Star magazine: "Lynne is absolutely devoted to Britney and really only wants the best for her. She has seen TV footage of Britney showing off her backside, displaying her boobs and generally partying up a storm with Paris and thinks it is tacky."

Lynne, 50, suggested Britney, 25 -- who filed for divorce from Kevin Federline last month after two years of marriage -- should move back to her hometown in Kentwood, Louisiana, for a quieter life.

She reportedly told Britney: "You're going off the rails, can't you see?"

However, the 'Toxic' singer apparently ignored her mother's pleas, saying she didn't want to be back among the "rednecks".

Oh, Britney! Sweetiepie, don't you get it at all?

Are you too blind drunk to see that you ARE the "rednecks."

Honey chile, the way you're acting is no different from Tee Bubba and his (ahem) buddy, Wanda Sue, out on a bender at the Moonlight Inn just off of La. 16.

Well, that's not exactly right. There is a difference -- two, actually. You do not own a bass boat, and you do have more disposable income.

But "white trash with cash" is white trash, nonetheless. The tragedy is that God don't make trash.

That, child, you have done all by your lonesome. With an assist, probably, by a now-distraught Britney Mama who ought to have figuratively kicked your butt while she still had the legal standing.

Sigh.

Spot the metaphor

The New Orleans Times-Picayune's Chris Rose has written another stellar column, this one in Sunday's paper. I think it's a gigantic metaphor, dripping in meaning and symbolism about modernity's murder of any notion of a humane society.

I think it's a classic case of telling a little story as a means of conveying the big story

But that's just me. What think you?

As far as crimes go in this town, the incident in the parking lot on South Clearview Parkway outside of Marshall's department store on Oct. 26 was hardly a blip on the screen.

An elderly woman was walking with an armful of packages. A couple of guys pulled up in a car. They grabbed her purse, knocking her to the ground. They drove off with a haul that amounted to 40 bucks.

Witnesses ran over to help the victim. The cops came. A report was filed.

In an era of brazen daylight shootings, horrific gangland executions and post-disaster fraud schemes that run into the millions of dollars, this was just a petty annoyance, a piece of paperwork, a statistic. Except for one lingering detail.

The victim, 85-year-old Ellen Montgomery, broke her left hip when she hit the ground. She had an emergency hip replacement operation at Ochsner Hospital and spent three days in post-op and then nine days in rehab.

Her son Jamie picked her up and brought her to his house in Gentilly. By mid-November, she was making good progress with a walker; despite her age and injury, Ellen Montgomery's life had been marked by an unbending will to get by on her own.

But on Friday, Nov. 17, she complained of shortness of breath and had trouble with her balance. Sunday the 19th, she collapsed in the kitchen. An ambulance rushed her back to Ochsner where doctors tried to revive her. But in the end, she died of a pulmonary embolism -- a blood clot in the lung.

The Jefferson Parish coroner's office determined that the blood clot was a result of the hip surgery and therefore a direct result of the purse snatching and thus she became another member of the mounting murder victim roster in Jefferson Parish.

(snip)

Ellen Montgomery was my friend and, at times, my muse.

In the Days of Pain that followed Hurricane Katrina, she was my only neighbor and it's funny; I guess as a result of some sort of ageism on my part, during the weeks we spent together last fall, I always had this self-delusional notion that I was taking care of this old and eccentric woman, helping her get through the traumatic aftermath of Katrina when, in fact, she was taking care of me.

But I bet she knew it the whole time.

We had first met shortly after I bought my house on Magazine Street in 1992. Her house had the classic pack rat/cat lady look to it, all paint-peeled and overgrown, hidden from the street by an iron fence and tangled trees that conjured Boo Radley or some other kind of weird or scary resident therein.

She lived there alone -- unless you count her 33 cats.

Our single encounter way back then wound up being a small life-changing event for me. I was single, reckless and in a world of financial and legal trouble. My car was wrecked and my phone service cut off for months because I couldn't make the bill.

My home had been burglarized three times in a six-week period, pretty much relieving me of all my possessions and distractions. I think I can say with certainty that it was the roughest patch, both personally and professionally, that I had ever known and would know until the fall of 2005.

I was 32 years old and welcome to any new idea or direction that might drag me out of my self-pitying ways. Miss Ellen had heard about me -- the troubled soul on the block -- and she offered what she thought was the key to happiness: a stray dog.

Lord knows where she got the thing, but its presence in Miss Ellen's house was none too welcome by the feline masses that had been living there for years. The dog needed a home and I needed something, anything, and that's how I wound up adopting an exotic silvery-blue mutt of some sort of husky derivation whom I named Alibi and who taught me the notion of unconditional love and who gave me something to do, something to love and something to look forward to in an otherwise bleak time.

Alibi left a lasting impression. In the years since, I have adopted four more homeless dogs.

After that, I rarely saw Miss Ellen. Truthfully, she had made a great impact on my life but in my typically self-absorbed way, I never really kept in touch with her. She had her life, I had mine, and there weren't many opportunities for a shut-in cat lady and a gregarious party boy to commune.

And that was my loss, not hers.

Read this column. Just go read it. Now.

What we're all about . . . redux

It's been a while, so I thought I'd rerun this blog's opening post just to make sure a few things that need to be said keep getting said. After all, Revolution 21 IS kind of, well, unique.

So here goes, a blast from the recent past:

Greetings. The Mighty Favog here. Welcome to Revolution 21.

Let's get something straight right now, O huddled masses: Revolution 21 ain't your grandma's radio podcast. It ain't your typical Catholic radio thing, and it ain't your typical corporate, over-researched, same-boring-playlist rock radio thing, either.

But is it really useful to define Revolution 21 by what it's not? So sorry, my plebes! My bad.

Let's just say -- plainly -- what Revolution 21 is. Revolution 21 is radio that aims to reflect life as it is lived by screwed-up, struggling, inspired-yet-bumbling children of God sorely in need of His grace and forgiveness.

Revolution 21 realizes that Catholics like the Mighty Favog -- your host and the master of dysfunctionality -- live life with one foot in Heaven and the other in the gutter with all the other schmucks called Humanity. We strive for holiness, we occasionally achieve it, and sometimes the best we can muster is Holier Than Thou.

Oh, well. Blame it on Eve and that damned apple.

For his part, the Mighty Favog -- though a great and mighty Favog -- is a Bad Catholic. It is to be hoped, however, that he is capable of decent radio . . . and a stellar podcast.

And he's trying most mightily to become, at the least, a Mediocre Catholic.

So, like us believing schmucks, Revolution 21 is a mixture of the sacred and the secular. The serious and the foolish. Rock . . . and roll. And blues in the night.

But Revolution 21 has a problem with our oversecularized, materialist and ultimately shallow culture. We figure schizo is the only thing you get out of putting faith waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in one corner of your life and "real life" waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over in another corner so the two never touch (probably out of fear of some Matter-Antimatter cataclysm).

Or something like that.

Well, Revolution 21 LIKES IT when things get blowed up good. We say put that Faith Thing and that Life Thing in a bag, shake it the hell up and see what happens.

I mean, ain't that a lot more fun than alienation, ennui and life in Schizo City? Or, if not always fun, at least always a lot more interesting and, ultimately, rewarding.

But then again, it's not All About Me -- or All About You -- is it, now?

Enough blather, proclaims the Mighty Favog, your potentate of New Media!

Let us now proceed with trashing preconceived notions of radio formatting and stale bourgeois convention. Let us now do radio like we ought to be living -- faith and life together, recognizing only two kinds of music. That would be Good and Bad.

The bad, we don't mess with.

My favorite conservative

I don't consider myself a conservative, at least not politically. A social conservative, yes. But politically, I'm more like the Last New Deal Democrat.

(OK, kids. Go to Wikipedia and look up Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then look up New Deal. I'll wait for you.)

That said, I love Peggy Noonan. (Don't tell my wife.)

I would love to spend an afternoon with Peggy at Caffeine Dreams -- or at the watering hole of her choosing -- and solve the problems of the world as I tried not to look all gaga or something equally lame-o. (Again, don't tell my wife. WHAT?! My wife READS this blog?!? Hi, honey. LOVE the new shoes.)

ANYWAY, this is why the onetime speechwriter for Ronald Reagan is My Favorite Conservative:

America is turning against a war it supported, for the essential reason that no one is able to promise a believable path to a successful outcome, and Americans are a practical people. It is not true that Americans are historical romantics. They are patriots who, once committed, commit on all levels, including emotionally. But they don't wake up in the morning looking for new flags to follow over old cliffs. They want to pay the mortgage, protect their children, and try to be better parents in a jittery time. They are not isolationist. They want to help where they can, and feel called to support the poor and the sick wherever they are. They are also, still, American exceptionalists, meaning they believe the creation of America--the long journey across the sea, the genius cluster that invented the republic, the historic codifying of freedom--was providential, and good news not only for us but the world. "And the glow from that fire can truly light the world."

Much has been strained. We were all concussed by 9/11--we reeled--and came down where we came down. For the administration, extreme events prompted radical thinking. American exceptionalism was yesterday. They would be universalists, their operating style at once dreamy and aggressive: All men want the same thing, and we're giving it to them whether they want it or not. Now the dreamers hope to be saved by men--James Baker, Vernon Jordan--they once dismissed as cynics. And the two truest statements on Iraq are, still, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" and Pat Buchanan's "A constitution doesn't make a country, a country makes a constitution." Iraq has a constitution but not a country.

When history runs hot, bitterness bubbles. Democrats who should be feeling happy are, from what I've observed in New York and Washington, not. The closest they come to joy is a more energetic smugness. Republicans are fighting among themselves--or, rather, grumbling. They haven't, amazingly, broken out in war, and if they did, no one would be debating if it were a civil war. It would be like Iraq, like a dropped pane of glass that is jagged, shattered, dangerous.

We will need grace to get through this time: through the discussion of the Baker-Hamilton report, through debate on the war, through a harmonious transfer of legislative power in January, through the beginning of the post-Bush era.

People often speak of an absence of civility in Washington, but that's not quite the problem. Faking civility is a primary operating style: "My esteemed colleague."

What is needed is grace--sensitivity, mercy, generosity of spirit, a courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty. We will have to summon it. And the dreadful thing is you can't really fake it.

A very small theory, but my latest, is that many politicians and journalists lack a certain public grace because they spent their formative years in the American institution most likely to encourage base assumptions and coldness toward the foe. Yes, boarding school, and tony private schools in general. The last people with grace in America are poor Christians and religiously educated people of the middle class. The rich gave it up as an affectation long ago. Too bad, since they stayed in power.

The latest example of a lack of grace in Washington is the exchange between Jim Webb and President Bush at a White House Christmas party. Mr. Webb did not want to pose with the president and so didn't join the picture line. Fair enough, everyone feels silly on a picture line. Mr. Bush approached him later and asked after his son, a Marine. Mr. Webb said he'd like his son back from Iraq. Mr. Bush then, according to the Washington Post, said: "That's not what I asked you. How's your son?" Mr. Webb replied that's
between him and his son.

For this Mr. Webb has been roundly criticized. And on reading the exchange I thought it had the sound of the rattling little aggressions of our day, but not on Mr. Webb's side. Imagine Lincoln saying, in such circumstances, "That's not what I asked you." Or JFK. Or Gerald Ford!

"That's not what I asked you" is a sentence straight from cable TV, from which many Americans are acquiring an attitude toward public and even private presentation.

Yep.

Dammb Blakbery!.

Lindsay Lohan's publicist DID NOT like it when the press marveled at the spectacle . . . um, movie star's truly impressive atomization of the English language in a condolence E-mail she sent to the family of late director Robert Altman.

Lindsay is not an illiterate boob, says spokeswoman Leslie Sloane.

"When I got the reports that he had died, I reached Lindsay on her cell phone, and she had no idea. She was devastated. She started crying," Sloane told Reuters. "She quickly put something together on her Blackberry."

"Here was a girl who found something special in this man that she felt so close to," Sloane said. "And she was completely shocked and blown away that he just died. It was written very quickly and it was from the heart."

Lohan titled her November 21 e-mail "Dead is hard, Life is much easier," a quote she attributes to actor Jack Nicholson. In it, she sent condolences to Altman's family, adding, "I feel as I've just had the wind knocked out of me."

The film star, who is famously estranged from her father, also describes Altman as "the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years."

Days after the missive was made public, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison ridiculed it on a Web site as "alarmingly incoherent," apparently referring to misspellings and grammatical errors by Lohan, and wrote that Altman himself might find it "comedic."

Andrew Gumbel wrote in the London Independent that the letter, which ends with the odd sign-off "Be Adequite," had become the talk of Hollywood.

Leslie, sweetie daaahling, the problem the press has isn't that this poor child wrote an incoherent, misspelled mess of an E-mail to Altman's survivors. The problem the press has is that this poor child wrote an incoherent, misspelled mess of an E-mail to Altman's survivors, then self-servingly released it to reporters of her own free will so that the world might be duly impressed with her (ahem) profundity.

That, and the fact that Lindsay -- who truly, more than anything, deserves our pity -- has spent the past couple of years or so making a royal ass and spectacle of herself.

Still, Ms. Sloane's point about quickly and distraughtly dashing off messages on teeny weenie keypads is well taken. I'm sure Lindsay Lohan DID NOT mean to type "Be Adequite."

What she meant to type, I am confident, is "V2 #d2@U-tE."

Who do people think Lindsay is, after all? Britney Spears?