It is not my custom to use this blog for doing public service announcements or for talking about near-death experiences. But since I had a near-death experience this past Sunday, I am making an exception and doing a PSR today.

Public service announcement: If you ride a bike, wear a helmet. If someone you love rides a bike, beg, bully, cajole or otherwise compel that person to wear a helmet. I promise you, you will never be sorry.

I know what I’m talking about. This past Sunday, on a beautiful Houston afternoon, I was biking with my local Episcopal church group, the Holy Spokes. I was speeding along at an exhilarating 18 miles an hour when my front wheel got caught in a rut and I went flying.

When I recovered consciousness some minutes later, the paramedics had already been summoned by my anxious Episcopal brethren. I was whisked off to the emergency room of Memorial Hermann Hospital. There, in the immortal words of Leo Durocher, “They x-rayed my head and found nothing.”

My helmet was shattered by the impact, but it almost certainly saved my life. It absorbed the brunt of the collision, and I walked away from a potentially fatal accident without even a headache.

While I’m writing this post, let me take this opportunity to salute this country’s dedicated paramedics and ER staff. They are wonderful, skilled, caring people who don’t get a tenth of the recognition they deserve.

So, while I am still very sore, I have no broken bones and expect be back to normal soon. Meanwhile, I repeat: If you ride a bike, please wear a helmet. Thank you.

My recent biking accident has reminded me of an observation by Mark Twain: "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."

As usual, the old boy was right.

On the evening March 5, 1836, Colonel William Barret Travis made a stirring speech to the garrison of the beleaguered Alamo.

“My brave companions,” he declared. “Our fate is sealed. Within a few days –- perhaps a very few hours –- we must all be in eternity. This is our destiny, and we cannot avoid it. This is our certain doom.”

The approximately 200 men of the Alamo were outnumbered more than ten-to-one by the besieging Mexicans led by General Santa Anna. They could expect no help. They had three options: Surrender, and be shot as traitors; scatter like rats, and make a vain attempt to slip through the Mexican lines; or stay where they were and sell their lives as dearly as possible.

Travis laid out the grim alternatives, and left it to each man to decide for himself which course to follow. “My own choice,” he said “is to stay in this fort and die for my country, fighting as long as breath shall remain in my body. This I will do even if you leave me alone.”

With that, Travis drew his sword and traced a line in the sand, calling on all those ready to die with him to cross over. One after another, the heroic defenders crossed the line. Jim Bowie, desperately ill with typhoid and confined to his bed, asked to be carried over.

When, as a boy, I saw this scene re-enacted in the 1960 John Wayne movie, I was awestruck by the bravery of these men.

But is the story true?

Skeptical historians point out that there was no mention of it until nearly forty years after the event, and that the supporting evidence is slender and suspect. There is thus a high probability that it was a later invention. Indeed, the makers of the 2004 movie about the Alamo, who strove for historical accuracy, chose to omit it –- to the fury of many tradition-loving Texans.

In their excellent book, A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory, Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, assess the evidence impartially and conclude that the skeptics might be right.

“But,” the authors go on to say, “they also just might be wrong. The idea of scratching a line in the dirt and then asking men to cross to one side or another was hardly novel. Southerners often voted in this method, and Ben Milam supposedly rallied Texans to take Bexar in December 1835 with just such an action. Certainly it was a melodramatic gesture, but it was a melodramatic age and Travis was far more melodramatic than most. His letters are filled with dramatic excesses and lofty hyperbole. He courted the notion of death as avidly as he wooed females – thinking about it, speculating about it, writing about it. In several letters he considered how people would think about him after he died, seemingly more concerned with his posthumous reputation than his chances for survival. One senses, reading his letters, that death probably didn’t frighten Travis as much as the idea that in death he would be forgotten or considered a fool. Not only was Travis capable of tracing a line in the sand, the action would have been a perfect expression of his character.”

In short, the real Travis was probably every bit as vain, arrogant, bombastic –- and courageous –- as Laurence Harvey portrayed him in the 1960 film. If the story of Travis tracing that line in the sand with his sword is a myth, it is a myth that is more compelling, more durable and more illuminating than mere fact.

In my last post, I recommended A Line in the Sand, an excellent book on the Alamo in history and legend by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. The book ends with a curious episode that has had me chuckling since the day I read it.

The Alamo has been endowed with mythic significance from the first, but the mythology has morphed over time. Among other unfortunate transformations, the Alamo story became corrupted by racism. Later generations of Americans tended to see the battle as a conflict between progressive, democratic Anglos, and benighted, brown-skinned people who preferred despotism to freedom.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. When Mexico won its independence from Spain, the people adopted a democratic constitution in 1824. This document, like the U.S. Constitution, established a federal republic. This was the constitution under which Americans settled in Texas.

The problem was that political opinion in Mexico was sharply divided between those who favored a federal system and those who favored a strong central government. In 1835, the centralists prevailed when General Santa Anna overthrew the 1824 constitution and established a dictatorship.

The Alamo was actually part of a larger civil war in Mexico between the federalists and the centralists. Several other Mexican states, where a majority of the people remained loyal to the 1824 constitution, attempted to do exactly what Texans did –- to preserve their rights and liberties by seceding from Mexico. It is often overlooked that the flag that flew over the Alamo was a red, white and green Mexican tricolor, emblazoned with the year 1824.

Also overlooked, at least until fairly recently, was the role of the tejanos –- the Mexicans living in Texas. The tejanos supported the independence movement, and they were among the men who fought and died at the Alamo. In fact, the first vice president of the Republic of Texas was a Mexican named Lorenzo de Zavala. Zavala, a liberal, was serving as Mexico’s minister plenipotentiary to France when he learned that Santa Anna had made himself dictator. Furious, Zavala resigned his post and joined up with the Texans. He helped draft the constitution of the Republic of Texas.

Ironically, denying the tejanos their rightful place in Texas history allowed left-leaning historians to create their own Alamo myth –- depicting it as a particularly nasty symbol of “Yankee imperialism.”

This brings me to the curious episode with which Messrs. Roberts and Olson end their book.

A Hispanic man, a CPA with a Wharton degree, was showing his wife and three daughters around the Alamo one day. He told his girls that the defenders of the Alamo were heroes, and that they should cultivate the same virtues of courage and integrity in their own lives.

This was too much for a scruffy Anglo graduate student who overheard the conversation. Butting in, just as the family members were happily snapping pictures of each other, he decided to set the father straight: “Don’t you know what this place stands for?” he demanded. “It represents the rape and destruction of your people … You shouldn’t be teaching your kids this stuff.”

At first, the CPA listened politely, but when the Anglo student had the temerity to tell him, “You don’t understand, you just don’t understand,” he decided enough was enough.

“Escucheme, bolillo [Listen to me, white bread],” he said sharply. “If Santa Anna would have won the war, this whole city would be a shithole just like Reynosa. Soy tejano [I’m a Texan]. Mind your own goddamned business. It’s my Alamo too.”

Many years ago, when I was a college student in London, I sat in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Lords and heard Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, make a speech in favor of a bill to make certain reforms in that institution. “My Lords,” he declared, “this occasion reminds me of a hymn that we no longer sing: ‘There is room for new creations in that other house above.’”

These days, it appears that there is unlimited room for new creations in that other house above. On March 7, the House of Commons voted in favor of an elected House of Lords.

Nothing startling about that to Americans. We have been directly electing U.S. senators since 1913. But America has a federal system. We have an upper chamber for the obvious reason that it protects the smaller states from being swamped by the larger.

But what is the purpose for an upper chamber in a parliamentary system like Britain’s?

The usual reason advanced for an upper chamber in any democracy is that it saves democracy from itself. In other words, it acts as a brake on the passions of the moment and blocks, or at least delays, the passage of hasty and ill-considered laws.

The question that the British people must now ask themselves is whether an elected upper chamber will perform that role more effectively than a chamber filled, as it now is, partly by heredity and partly by appointment.

The House of Lords was once a citadel of privilege. You inherited your seat in the Lords from your ancestors. Or, if you were a commoner elevated to the peerage, you passed your seat to your descendants. Then, in the late 1950s, the government began creating “life” peers, who held their titles and their seats in the Lords for their lifetimes only, and could not pass them on to their heirs.

The advantage of life peers was that eminent people from the arts, the sciences and the professions could be elevated to the Lords and provide the government with expert advice on pending legislation. Hereditary and life peers, sitting side by side, acted as a council of tribal elders. An eccentric arrangement, to be sure, but one that often worked surprisingly well. There was no deadlock between the two houses of Parliament, because with the creation of life peers, the party that controlled the Commons could automatically assure itself a majority in the Lords.

Then, in 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair cleared out most of the hereditary peers, and filled the vacancies with party hacks who were widely derided as “Tony’s cronies.” Currently, a brewing scandal over the alleged sale of peerages proved to be the last straw for many MPs. So, by a significant majority of 113, the Commons voted to wipe the slate clean and start over with second chamber that is wholly elected.

The problem is that no one has yet decided what the powers of the elected second chamber will be, or what, exactly, it will represent. Nor does anyone yet know what it will cost the taxpayers to make the change. One Labor peer estimates that it will cost over a billion pounds.

Will it be worth the price?

British journalist Quentin Letts, expressed his doubts in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. “The horrid truth,” he wrote, “for all this talk of democratic principle, is that the dotty, dusty House of Lords was cheap to run, gave the country a sense of history and worked pretty well. Even Mr. Blair's patsies, when they arrived, started to exercise some independence of mind. Being from the center-left, they also loved their titles.”

It may be that the best solution for what to do with the Lords was made as far back as 1882 by another British institution –- the comic opera duo of Gilbert and Sullivan. In his libretto for their opera Iolanthe, Gilbert proposed that membership in the House of Lords be determined by competitive examination. Gilbert meant the suggestion as satire, but it would be one way of combining modern democracy with a government of all the talents.

If you’re making a speech on St. Patrick’s Day, you have to tell a good Irish story.

Normally, that’s not a problem for me. Through my sainted mother, I’m related to that eloquent race of whom Oscar Wilde boasted, “We’re the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”

But once in my career, I was almost stumped. I was writing for Jim Miller, President Reagan’s budget director, and he was giving a speech on St. Patrick’s Day. Trouble was, the subject of his speech was taxes and spending, and there aren’t many Irish stories appropriate to a discussion of fiscal policy.

But I was able to recall one. It fitted the thrust of Jim’s speech admirably, given that revenue bills originate in the House of Representatives, which was then controlled by the Democrats.

So, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here is the story:

Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, is also known for his spirited defense of the Irish people at a time when they were being harshly ruled by England. One day, Swift was presented to the wife of the newly-appointed English viceroy. This was the lady’s first visit to Ireland, and she remarked to Dr. Swift how fresh and invigorating the air was.

Swift recoiled in mock terror and replied, “For God’s sake, Madam! Don’t say so in London. They will tax it!”

Want a particularly good example of using simple words to devastating effect? Consider Winston Churchill’s treatment of Admiral Jellicoe’s failure to destroy the German fleet in the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

Churchill describes at considerable length how Jellicoe had three opportunities to smash the Germans, and how he let each one slip past him.

He then delivers his verdict: “Three times is … “

Is what, exactly? Inexcusable shortsightedness by a supreme naval commander? A series of incomprehensible blunders? A deplorable lack of initiative?

None of the above.

“Three times,” says Churchill, “is a lot.”

Several years ago, I gave a talk at the annual Ragan speechwriters conference in Washington on “The Secret Lives of Speechwriters.” Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I likened speechwriters to Rudolf Rassendyll, the hero of Anthony Hope’s hyper-romantic 1894 novel, The Prisoner of Zenda.

Rassendyll is an Englishman on holiday in the mythical Central European kingdom of Ruritania, when he is suddenly called upon to impersonate that country’s king.

The point I was trying to make was that as speechwriters, we do the same. To write convincingly for our clients, we have to assume their identities –- at least in our imaginations.

To underscore the point, I showed a scene from the 1937 David O. Selznick movie version of Zenda. Somewhat to my surprise, no one in the audience appeared to be familiar with it.

But now, thanks to Warner Home Video, the film is available on DVD, paired with the 1952 MGM Technicolor remake on the flip side.

“Remake” is a particularly apt term in this case. Hollywood gossip has it that Selznick charged so much for the rights ($500,000 –- more than any studio had ever paid to do a remake) that MGM tried to save money by copying the original, almost frame-by-frame. Even the musical score by Alfred Newman was recycled, albeit with a new orchestration by Conrad Salinger.

MGM’s economies are rather painfully obvious. Yes, the pastel colors are pretty, but the sets and costumes look as if they were borrowed from a touring company production of The Student Prince. Selznick’s spare-no-expense version, even in black and white, looks richer and more authentic. However improbable the plot, you feel that you really have been transported back to an 1890s Central European kingdom.

The performances are better, too. Playing the dual roles of Rassendyll and the king, Ronald Colman outshines Stewart Granger, who starred in the remake. One scene in particular highlights the contrast. Princess Flavia, who is betrothed to the king whom Rassendyll is impersonating, complains to him, “I still don’t understand.”

To which Rassendyll replies: “Then will you believe this without understanding? I love you.”

Granger delivers the line flat, with no particular emphasis, while Colman’s delivery is a two-sentence dissertation on how to speak the written word: “Then will you believe this … without understanding? I love you.”

The 1937 version has better villains as well: Raymond Massey as Black Michael, the king’s treacherous half-brother, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Michael’s henchman, Rupert of Hentzau.

Fairbanks Jr., son of the legendary silent-movie swashbuckler, would make film and TV appearances for fifty years afterwards, but he never again exuded the same sinister, decadent charm he displays here. Note the scene where he catches sight of himself in a mirror, tilts his gilded helmet to a rakish angle, and saunters off, whistling a waltz.

Other supporting actors include a young David Niven, making his screen debut as Fritz von Tarlenheim, and veteran English actor C. Aubrey Smith as the king’s faithful aide, Colonel Zapt.

Early in the 1937 film, Zapt has a speech that was abridged in the later version, which I think is a pity.

The king and Rassendyll are at the king’s hunting lodge at Zenda on the eve of the king’s coronation. After an evening of heavy drinking, the king can’t be roused the following morning. But he’s not drunk. Half-brother Michael has drugged the last bottle of wine so he can stage a coup when the king fails to show up for his enthronement. It is at this point that Zapt persuades Rassendyll, the look-alike, to impersonate the king.

While Rassedyll changes into his coronation togs, Zapt hides his unconscious royal master in the wine celler. Displaying an almost paternal tenderness, he rolls up his tunic, places it under the king’s head for a pillow, and intones: “The night before your coronation you must have wine. Wine! And more wine! But you’re my king: the son of your father. And may I rot in my grave before Black Michael sits in your place!”

Plunk down a paltry $19.95 for the DVD and spend a night in Ruritania –- either in black and white or in color. Romantic getaways don’t come any cheaper than that.

Last weekend’s edition of the Houston Chronicle carried a long article on the subject of cowboy poetry. Somewhat defensively, the article began by insisting that cowboy poetry isn’t an oxymoron. Indeed, according poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, cowboy poetry, by making use of traditional poetic devices such as rhyme, meter and narrative, helps to rescue poetry from the highbrows and give it back to the popular culture.

There may be something to that argument, since the article went on to state that there are approximately 200 annual cowboy poetry readings in the U.S. every year.

Joel Nelson, a 61-year-old working cowboy quoted in the article, says he grew up listening to his mother read aloud from such well-loved poets as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen Vincent Benet. Today, Nelson is the host and unofficial laureate of the annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas.

According to Nelson, cowboys are natural poets for two reasons. First, because they live and work alone much of the time, which gives them lots of room for reflection. Second, because the act of riding a horse is rhythmic in itself, and naturally leads the rider to spin verses.

Nelson’s 2002 poem, Equus Caballus, is a case in point, because it traces the history of the horse:

I have run on middle fingernail through Eolithic morning,
And I’ve thundered down the coach road with the Revolution’s warning.
I’ve carried countless errant knights who never found the grail.
I have strained before the caissons and moved the nation’s mail…
I am roguish –- I am flighty –- I am inbred –- I am lowly.
I’m a nightmare –- I am wild –- I am the horse.

The reference to “errant knights who never found the grail” poses an intriguing question. Does Nelson here refer to knights errant –- solitary knights who wandered the world in search of chivalrous adventures? Or does he mean that the knights were “errant” in the moral sense –- that they never found Holy Grail because they erred and strayed from the true path? Or does he mean that the lone cowboy is America’s version of the knight errant?

Owen Wister, who wrote the classic western novel, The Virginian, would probably have endorsed the last interpretation. In his introduction to the novel, he paid this tribute to the cowboy:

What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay sometimes gone in a night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or "blowed in," to be perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

Wister was right. The cowboy will be among us always, singing his songs that celebrate the freedom of the open range. The rough rhymes of authentic cowboys like Joel Nelson, read aloud to appreciative audiences at 200 cowboy poetry gatherings a year, are ample proof of that.

Is speechwriting “really” writing? Or is it an occupation that “real” writers should shun, lest they cheapen their talents?

Well, at least it isn’t advertising.

Writers are not the only creative people who have to balance their duty to their art with their need to make a living. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal last week, columnist Emily Meehan suggests that the moral dilemma is particularly acute for younger artists who are just starting out.

She writes: “What happens when an artist must make art, but can't afford to make only art? Do you separate art and money, or try to find a way to join the two? Aspiring artists do have the option of pursuing one of any number of relatively creative vocations -- designing ad campaigns, writing slogans or composing music for the movies, for example. But plenty reject creative commercialism on principle, instead taking retail, bartending, blue-collar or other jobs because they are just that, jobs.”

For most of history, artists –- even the greatest artists –- would have found the distinction between “real” and “commercial” art incomprehensible, if not absurd. The great painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, for example, were wholly dependent on their patrons for their living, and the patrons looked upon them as little more than interior decorators.

Musicians fared no better. Many of Franz-Joseph Haydn’s compositions were intended as dinner music for his employers, the aristocratic Eszterhazy family, and their guests. Haydn actually wore a livery and dined with the footmen.

Even Beethoven, who may be said to have created the role model for the artist as hero, wasn’t above “cheapening” his art to earn the money he needed to write his masterpieces. As the critic Deems Taylor so amusingly phrased it, “Only a genius could have written the Ninth Symphony; but the man who composed Wellington’s Victory was obviously thinking about the rent.”

Commercialism has its advantages. An artist who has to work in order to eat is not going to sit around waiting for the muse to perch on his shoulder. And who’s to say that working for pay can’t produce great art? Johann Sebastian Bach, to give just a single illustration, composed his delightful Goldberg Variations for no better reason than to beguile the sleepless hours of a titled insomniac.

Perhaps it’s good for an artist to stay at least a little hungry. The most famous case in this regard is probably the Finnish composer, Jan Sibelius. Sibelius was awarded a government pension in 1897 so he could devote all his time to composition. But his pension wasn’t adequate to his needs, so he still had to compose to live. (According to one account, he once bartered a small composition for a leg of mutton.)

Sibelius’ pension was increased in 1926. That, along with his royalties, put him in comfortable circumstances. Perhaps too comfortable; although he lived for another 30 years, he scarcely composed another note.

Do I suffer artistic guilt over being a pen for hire? Not at all. As Dr. Samuel Johnson so aptly said: “Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”