As Long As They Keep Saying That, I'll Keep Saying This

Local news followed a group of D-Day veterans to the WWII Memorial, which gave Danny "Home Ballistics Test Kit" Burton the opportunity to spout off about how Hitler would have ruled Europe were it not for the Normandy landings.

Uh, no.

As awe-inspiring as the story of D-Day is, and without diminishing one bit the sacrifices made by Allied troops over sixty years ago, what D-Day did was shorten the war and begin the process of liberating France and the Low Countries. The outcome of the war had already been determined by the Red Army and the people of the Soviet Union at Stalingrad. The men who took those beaches deserve every accolade we can heap on them, but can we quit pretending we fought, and won, the war alone?

Mr. Wolcott? There's a Dogbone Riley on Line Two.

Grüss an Aachen, which we call "Jerry", the first rose to be categorized as a Floribunda (in 1930). It was hybridized in Germany in 1908 by Philipp Geduldig and named for his hometown. It opens like a hybrid tea rose, in pink, peach, salmon, and cream, then spreads out like an English rose and fades to bone white. I grow it in a container, where it's done pretty well for four years despite the fact that I almost killed it twice before I figured out how to overwinter it. Moderate, citrus-y fragrance for those who enjoy such things. I'm not really one of them, but Jerry is acceptable, not oppressive. If I want fragrance I'll go weed the camomile or walk through the bee balm, thanks.

I have no intention of starting a feud with James Wolcott because a) I'd certainly like to be more like him when I grow up and b) he has no idea who the hell I am anyway, but when in an otherwise excellent swipe at the Corner bunch he writes this:

Frederica Mathewes-Green--such a lady-of-the-manor byline. One can almost picture her trimming rose bushes...

one is tempted to sniff that it is poodles which are trimmed, while rosebushes are pruned, with practiced eye and frequently bleeding hand, and that the aristocracy is unlikely to perform either operation for itself, although they probably do do their own birding.

Weekend Roundup

As happens every so often I slammed smack into Morphean nonchalance last night about halfway through a post and actually slept for nine hours, or roughly two days' worth, the result of good honest farmboy labor, robust marital duties, and some 15-year-old Calvados. It looks like I slept through the horrible storm which was the second of two I was guaranteed was headed my way yesterday evening. The rainfall gauge reads "zero", but I'm sure that's in error.

Naturally these storm lines, marching across western Indiana like the Hun, were the cause of a great deal of panic in local newsrooms. There were reports of three-inch hail, or "hell" as the woman my Poor Wife has dubbed the "weather coach" (for her affinity for primary-colored pantsuits) kept saying. The situation was so fraught with terror they had to call in two other members of the Weather Team, one just to move a cursor around the screen like a kid looking for hidden doorways in an adventure game. And I finally got to experience the full impact of VIPIR, which I now admit beats DopRad 9000 all to hail. Not only can it switch to 3-D view, which gives the storms little rain lines underneath and makes them look like psychedelic mushrooms on parade, but it can zoom in to give actual street names. Although this feature is somewhat dulled by the fact that the operators never know where they are, so they wind up either highlighting the Interstate you already knew was there or trying to get the thing to name somebody's driveway.

We did have to turn on the air conditioning for the first time this year, or "cooling season" as the weather-types like to say. This was due to what the weeknight Weather Bunny had described as a "Line of Discomfort" descending on us. "Be sure to stay hydrated," she cautioned.

The other big event of the weekend, teevee-wise, was watching, or rather fast-forwarding through, the tape of the Miss Universe Pageant. We always tape these things so we can watch when we have the time necessary to recover from the massive doses of psychedelics required to make them entertaining. It's like a home-grown episode of MST 3K, and somebody always gets off a corker. "Rule Number One: only one hairdo at a time," is my personal all-time favorite. The trophy went to my wife this year, who asked, "Did she just get out of the hospital?" as Miss Venezuela or somebody sashayed past in an evening gown that featured an abdominal tourniquet. I had to forego Hinderrocket's live-blogging of the "event", but it was worth it. And did I mention that Billy Bush has all the charm and wit we've come to associate with that illustrious name?

TV Guide™ Roundup

There's no sharper illustration of the mind/body-East/West-action/contemplation dichotomia of our lonely struggles than giving the aching back a bit of rest from our Saturday morning gardening chores. To come in from the bright sun and gentle breezes, the serendipitous color and the happy accidents of texture, the symphonies of motion in the ferns and the northern sea oats, to the artificially lit, climate-controlled brick dwelling with its green digital time indicators and vexatious plumbing is to meet your other self coming and going and bark your shin in the process. Especially when there, on the ottoman, is the new TV Guide™ the Poor Wife picked up on her way home from picking through other people's cast-offs this morning.

And woe to the seeker of simple mindless pleasure to salve the aching soul and bones! It's "TV's Sexiest Men!" week, complete with six collector's covers. I just wanted to know what's on teevee this week, and maybe learn what some of my fellow citizens think about celebrities, and instead I'm trapped in a Platonic/Aristotelian debate. Does Sexiness exist as an ideal, or is it an imputation? Is Beauty Truth, and vice versa? Should I worry that there's some hidden meaning in my wife's selection of the Josh Holloway cover? Should I be working on my pecs?

Thank goodness someone shares my pain. Peggy Nicholson of Powder Springs, GA, for one, who takes issue with the Guide's examination of House's medical veracity. "I don't watch House to learn about medicine, just like I don't watch Boston Legal to brush up on legal skills...I tune in for fascinating stories and characters." Valerie Silensky-Lowe, from Carson City, felt a similar Zen-like peace when Uchenna and Joyce won The Amazing Race 7. And Dawn Hawn, from Eureka, MO, has had an Archimedes moment watching The Contender. She used to think Mark Burnett was a genius for producing Survivor, but in mixing Reality with the Sweet Science he's shown he's even more than that. For Dawn, all the contestants are winners. That's the sort of inner peace I can only hope to find some day.

Armed with a new-found sense of purpose, I face the Hot 25 with less trepidation than before. Here's what I learned:

• Sexy men, by and large, do not shave well.

• Gary Dourdan is firing on all cylinders.

• Confidence is incredibly sexy.

• If James Denton were an actual plumber, women across the country would be shoving Popsicle sticks down their sinks.

• Hugh Laurie is an adult rebel--the James Dean of our generation.

• There's nothing sexier than a man who isn't afraid to say his favorite smell is the scent of his wife's neck.

• Josh Duhamel has the looks, the sense of humor, and the butt.

That did not work out as well as I'd hoped. Which means I was in no condition whatsoever to turn the page and find "Summer Preview 2005 Part Two: Reality Shows." The 70s House, I Want To Be a Hilton, The Real Gilligan's Island II? Tommy Lee, Bobby Brown, INXS? We're the richest, most powerful nation on earth. Have we no compassion for the elderly, the infirm, the feeble-minded? If we need "reality", how about some real reality? This is Your President! Just Look At Him! Four hours a night for a week and he'd be cancelled.

More Fun With Lieber & Stoller & The Remote

So, this week Comedy Central changes the start time for The Daily Show rerun. You may recall that we already don't know what time it is in Indiana anyway, which makes this sort of thing is doubly troubling. The last TDS rerun of the day is the one we traditionally catch chez Riley, since it's the one we can watch together. And I watch Jeopardy! of course. Suddenly my hour of teevee viewing is a solid block, and I had to adjust evening chores, especially the outdoor ones because while there's enough light to work a half hour or more after 8 PM the bugs are getting pretty bad. So after Jeopardy! now I pick up the guitar, and my Poor Wife, freed just this week from educating our youth, picks up the remote, which is the only instrument she plays, though she's fast enough on the damn thing that Django would have to sweat to accompany her.

Anyways, she runs over the end of The Blues Brothers. They're doing "Jailhouse Rock" in the final scene. "Stop!" I yell. Now, it is physically impossible to actually catch her on a single channel and get her to stop there. What you aim at is going past no more than three or four, so you can figure out where she was if necessary. Because she never has any idea what channel she's on. It's like keeping a soccer ball in bounds, or stopping on ice. I talked her back to AMC and said, "Turn it up and wait for Aretha."

It's pure magic. They keep singing "Jailhouse Rock" as the credits roll, and the guest stars take four bars under their names. Since they're listed aphabetically, James Brown takes the first four, then Cab Calloway, then Ray, and since the song is basically a 12-bar blues, Aretha winds up with the last four ("Everybody in the whole cell block/ Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock"). Contrary to the running gag, this may be the one part of the production God actually took a hand in.

The melody is a sort of troglodyte shuffle, with a lot of sideways steps. When it gets to Aretha it's supposed to start on the II (the note just above the key), resolve that to the III, then head back for home with a little back step to the VII before coming to rest. But Aretha starts on the key, uncorks the II and immediately bends the VII and heads off in the opposite direction. It's like a dam has busted, like she senses this great kinetic force, reaches down and pulls the pin that detonates the whole thing. In four throwaway bars.

"Oh. My. God." was the Poor Wife's comment. "Guess how many notes Mariah Carey would have crammed in there," said I.

Friday Garden Blogging

Bush rose and the big maple, with the autumn fern at left just turning from brown to green.

Trent Lott, Dwarf

So, via The Next Hurrah I see that the Gentleman from Mississippi seems to have been the Republican who brokered the Filibuster deal. Funny how all the professional journalists, including the Dean of American political commentators, were touting John "Maverick" McCain. You know, the folks with the insider info? The ones who have to stovepipe unsourced administration propaganda in order to keep their vital contacts?

Short Answers

Pat Buchanan: "People that brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam..."

Well, Pat, I've always felt that South Vietnam fell because you pretended to have a trick knee so you wouldn't have to go.

Rush Limbaugh: "Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn't have lost Vietnam..."

Feel free to substitute "butt boil" in the above. Or let me ask you this: why didn't Nixon just go ahead and win the war in his first term?

Rush Limbaugh: "Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide."

Peggy Noonan: "Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events...the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide."

The rise of the Khmer Rouge is directly attributable to the actions of one Richard Milhouse Nixon. His secret bombing of Cambodia made the difficult position of the Sihanouk government untenable, which led to the US-supported rise of Lon Nol, who was both incompetent and corrupt. And the US invasion of Cambodia pushed Vietnamese troops deep inside the country, where they fought Cambodian government forces. Whether there would have been a Cambodian genocide without the American presence in Vietnam, or Cambodia, is moot. That the Khmer Rouge takeover was facilitated by the US presence there, rather than its eventual departure, is indisputable.

Cheers and Jeers

Cheers go out to Anurag Kashyap (above), winner of the 2005 National Spelling Bee, ESPN for carrying it, and my Poor Wife for taping the thing for me. And to the rest of the endearingly quirky young scholars who make the thing so damned entertaining.

And a Jeer to me, for actually, consciously tuning in some Where Are They Now Battle of the Bands piece of crap on NBC. Once or twice a year something like this comes over me, and I say, well, I'll tune in. It's going to be a huge reeking turd, but maybe it could actually be interesting. It's not like I don't realize that interesting would require ten minutes' thought and that's not in the budget. And, I tell myself, if it's really awful I'm going to wallow in its awfultude, knowing full well it'll never be that kind of awful. Just grindingly stupid.

It had some promise courtesy the set design, because the "artists" first appeared at the top of two stories worth of steps which looked to be pitched at about seventy degrees, a jesus-brilliant idea with geriatric has-been performers who might be tempted by the possibilities of a lawsuit or even a spectacular televised suicide, but no such luck this week. Yeah, this week. Turns out it's a limited series or something. They were just trying to hook me putting Wang Chung in the promos.

First up was Loverboy recreating what passed for a hit in those days. Two things. First, I have no idea who the members of Loverboy were, or how many there were, or what they looked like. Spandex and headbands is all I remember. And this is the level of interest the show wishes to sustain. I'm pretty sure that was the original singer, but the rest of the band could have been made up of stagehands, for all I know. Nobody was introduced, at least during that part of the show before I had a seizure.

Second, I'm just guessing here, but I'll give odds that even in what for want of a satisfactory word in English must be described as the "height" of Loverboy's "popularity" their audience was not composed of hot chicks wearing satin peignoirs. None of these young nubiles was even born when any of the performers flashed across our national consciousness, yet they seemed, like, totally into every last one of them. I guess that explains where the budget went.

The announcer, who was chosen because his accent remained on this side of indecipherable and for his edgy refusal to comb his hair even before appearing on national teevee, actually asked the singer, "What inspired the song 'Working for the Weekend'?" Swear to God. What I wouldn't give for such an opportunity. "What's the matter with you, you never read Proust? It was inspired by Swann's Way, you honking twit."


I made it through Ce Ce Peniston demonstrating why she disappeared in the first place, and watched long enough to confirm that A Flock of Seagulls did not have any problems with the stairs. A Flock of Seagulls should not even be allowed into this country, and no one should ever, ever be famous for a haircut. I had to leave before Arrested Development turned up. They could have been contenders. It wasn't the good kind of bad.

Friday Shuffle, Party Noises or Authoritative Voices Edition

Marvin Gaye, What's Goin' On
Walter Becker, Cringemaker
Donald Fagen, Ruby Baby
Wheatus, Wannabe Gangstar
Johnny Rivers, Seventh Son
Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues
Coasters, Young Blood
Coasters, Yakity Yak
Roxy Music, Bitters End
Beach Boys, Sloop John B.

Invading Iraq, Part One

Let's pretend.

Let's pretend it's 1999, and you are part of the group which has anointed George W. Bush the next Republican nominee. You're part of the Brain Trust, or the Brain Transplant. Look beyond getting the nomination--you're already the preemptive favorite, you've got money to burn, a host of operatives to do the dirty work, and a national press which is already hacking away at Al Gore the way it's been hacking at his boss the past eight years. You've got time to write up the agenda for the first term. Whaddya do? You make sure to call any win a "mandate". You're the Un-Clinton. While staking a public claim on compassion, responsibility, and a return to civility, you refuse to distance yourself from the incivility of the past, because Clinton deserved it. Your inaugural speech will backhand the man, never refer to him after the introduction, ignore his accomplishments. You will not note an America which has been uncommonly prosperous for eight years, an America which has been at peace but unafraid to use its military to halt needless slaughter; there will be no acknowledgment that it was your predecessor who accomplished what Ronald Reagan promised for sixteen years on the campaign trail: bringing the national debt under control and combatting government waste. Once in office, of course, you will continue to trash the Clintons, the easiest way to take attention off yourself while burnishing your own star in comparison.

[Vandalgate. Giftgate. Pardongate. Have you thought about them lately? Thought about how Ari Fleischer was permitted to promise evidence he never delivered, until Bush declared the matter "closed" two months later, as though he were issuing his own pardon for acts that never occurred? Ever considered that anyone with a modicum of public knowledge, let alone a political insider, could have suggested just those three areas as potential scandals? You likely recognized it at the time. Funny that it didn't occur to the source-checkers of professional journalism.]

There was plenty of reason to be irate in December 2000. I was. Yet although there will never been a condition of trust between me and the Republican party, it was not until Bush acceptance speech, in front of the "bipartisan" Texas state legislature, that I washed my hands of him. All I wanted was what was reasonable to expect: that George Bush would acknowledge more people had voted against him than for him, that the method of his ascension was, to say the least, a cause for consternation among his opponents and concern for the nation at large. I never got it. I got a stump speech. Within a week of the 2000 Selection some of his people were actually talking mandate. It was at that point I became convinced the Bush playbook was already written and they were going ahead with it, disputed election and majority of voters be damned.

So, here's my question. Given that you're helping to write that playbook, when would you plan on invading Iraq?

My answer? Spring of 2003. Precisely when we did. Invading before the midterm elections was out of the question politically. Ginning up war fever heading into them was the way to play it, forcing Democrats into the up-or-down vote they were maneuvered into in exchange for a UN hearing you planned to circumvent if it came to that. You can't invade in the heat of summer; waiting until the following winter runs too many risks. Eighteen months is just about right. Get it over with and still have plenty of time to lead a few parades before 2004.

I suspect that a lot of you agree with the assessment. But next time I want to talk about that in light of the Downing Street minutes, and look at some of the ramifications of a purely political calculation you may not have considered.

Thank God One of Them Is Trying To End Man's Inhumanity to Man

June is Gay Pride Month.

June is also National Accordion Awareness Month.