“Dear Mr. Gordon,” the letter begins. “I am writing to you because you may be entitled to money damages as a result of an accident that occurred on February 25, 2007 in which you were injured and admitted to Memorial Hermann Hospital.”

So, I “may be entitled to money damages”, eh? If that isn’t enough to arouse my latent greed, the second paragraph is more explicit.

“I can help you prosecute your potential claim and recover money damages,” the letter continues.

Oh. So now I have a “potential claim.”

The next sentence is underlined, in case I have any fears about the legal fees involved in bringing a lawsuit: “There is no fee unless you recover money.”

Gosh, I have nothing to lose by suing, do I? Can’t beat that.

The considerate lawyer who wrote this letter then invites me to call him “as soon as possible” to discuss my potential claim. He assures me that when I call, I will not be rudely shunted off to a secretary or a paralegal, “You will talk to me, an attorney, at no charge to you.”

The same letter appears on the reverse side of the page –- in Spanish. (Hey, this is Houston. Ambulance chasers can’t afford to overlook potential clients who don’t speak English, or who may not yet have their citizenship papers.)

The letter, of course, does not tell me that the lawyer’s cut of my “potential claim” could well be as high as 40 percent of the amount recovered. Not to mention the litigation expenses involved, which are certain to be considerable in a case of this kind.

My first impulse on reading this advertisement (the word finally appears at the bottom of the page) was to tear it up –- and then wash my hands. But I decided to do a little pro bono work of my own by posting it on the Internet.

As regular readers of this blog know, I was indeed involved in a serious accident on February 25 when I was thrown from my bicycle while going 18 miles and hour. Happily, I was wearing a helmet and escaped serious injury, although I was rushed to the nearest hospital emergency room for first aid and a CAT scan.

I was the only party involved in the accident. So, unless I want to sue the city of Houston for negligently putting a crack in the road, directly in the path of my bike, I don’t have a claim. What I find particularly disgusting about this letter is that the law firm involved is simply trawling for clients. They’ve obtained access to hospital records in bulk, and are dangling the prospect of hefty settlements in front of accident victims indiscriminately, in the hope that some of these victims will decide to give them a call. That’s how I was caught in their net.

I can’t simply dismiss this incident, because it is a symptom of a much larger problem that is not only clogging our legal system with spurious lawsuits, but is imposing substantial costs on society as a whole.

The expense of all this frenzied litigation is, ultimately, borne by consumers in the form of higher prices. Some experts on the subject go so far as to speak of a “tort tax” on Americans that amounts to over $3500 a year for a family of four.

Trial lawyers claim that this figure is exaggerated, but they also know that the majority of their fellow-citizens regard them as shysters. That is one reason why the Association of Trial Lawyers of America voted last year to rename itself “The American Association for Justice.”

That particular exercise in semantics reminds me of an episode from Al Capp’s comic strip, Li’l Abner, when the citizens of Dogpatch voted to change the name of the skunk works to the perfume factory.

I, for one, am convinced that the stench emanating from our courtrooms today will not be lifted until this country adopts the “loser pays” rule that is currently in force in much of the developed world.

“Loser pays” means that the losing party in a civil case pays the winner’s legal expenses in addition to his own. If there were such a penalty attached to bringing frivolous legal actions, the tort tax would be repealed overnight.

And law firms like the one that sent me the letter I have just quoted would go out of business very nearly as fast. Good riddance!

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are today visiting Jamestown, Virginia, the site of the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

Jamestown was named after Queen Elizabeth’s ten-times great-grandfather, King James I of England and VI of Scotland.

Ironically, the fledgling colony survived and prospered primarily through the cultivation of tobacco, which James utterly abhored. In 1604, three years before the colony’s founding, the dyspeptic monarch penned his famous “Counterblaste to Tobacco”, in which berated his subjects for their enthusiastic consumption of this new-found noxious weed.

Short-sighted in many ways, James was curiously prescient on the dangers of smoking. He denounced it as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

He was even canny enough to see the health hazard of inhaling second-hand smoke. He wrote: “Is it not both great vanity and uncleanness that at the table, a place of respect, of cleanliness, of modesty [that] men should not be ashamed to sit tossing of tobacco pipes and puffing of the smoke of tobacco one to another, making the filthy smoke and stink thereof to exhale athwart the dishes and infect the air, when very often men that abhor it are at their repast.”

James has his faults as a monarch, but he also had his good points. He reigned for 22 years without ever going to war, which meant that his subjects enjoyed a prolonged period of peace, prosperity and low taxes. In addition to authorizing the founding of Jamestown, James also commissioned the version of the Bible that bears his name, and even today outsells all competing versions. Finally, James can be claimed as the first champion of smoke-free environments.

Not a bad showing for a king once derided as “the wisest fool in Christendom.”

The celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown included the arrival of full-scale replicas of the three ships that carried the English settlers across the Atlantic to their new home in Virginia. As I read the news accounts of the reenactment, it occurred to me that I already knew the names of the three ships involved. Indeed, I would never forget them, thanks to a poem I read when I was a schoolboy.

The poem was “Southern Ships and Settlers” by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet. It begins, appropriately enough, with the arrival of those three English ships:

O, where are you going, "Goodspeed" and "Discovery"?
With meek "Susan Constant" to make up the three?
We're going to settle the wilds of Virginia,
For gold and adventure we're crossing the sea.

Thanks to the poem, I will always remember the names of those three ships. I will also remember the hardships faced by the Jamestown settlers:

And what will you find there? Starvation and fever.
We’ll eat of the adder and quarrel and rail.
All but sixty shall die of the first seven hundred,
But a nation begins with the voyage we sail.

The same poem informs its readers that Maryland was founded as a refuge for oppressed English Catholics, and it tells how the state’s principal city got its name.

O, what are you doing, my handsome Lord Baltimore?
Where are you sending your “Ark" and your "Dove?"
I'm sending them over the ocean to Maryland
To build up a refuge for people I love.

Both Catholic and Protestant there may find harbor,
Though I am a Catholic by creed and by prayer.
The South is Virginia, the North is New England.
I'll go in the middle and plant my folk there.

The poem also tells us that Georgia was founded by another philanthropist -- to give people imprisoned for debt a fresh start in life, and to give dissenters from the Church of England a place where they could worship freely.

O, what are you dreaming, cock-hatted James Oglethorpe?
And who are the people you take in the "Anne"?
They're poor English debtors whom hard laws imprison,
And poor, distressed Protestants, fleeing a ban.

I'll settle them pleasantly on the Savannah,
With Germans and Highlanders, thrifty and strong.
They shall eat Georgia peaches in huts of palmetto,
And their land shall be fertile, their days shall be long.

The poem has more to say about the origins of the American South. The founding of North and South Carolina are covered in additional charming quatrains. But you get the general idea.

The poem is a painless history lesson. The lilting rhymes make it easy, even enjoyable, to memorize. It’s a valuable aid to learning.

Is it still taught in today’s schools? I hope so, but I rather doubt it.

British prime minister Tony Blair has announced that he will depart Number 10 Downing Street at the end of June, after ten years in office.

He leaves a mixed record. Any politician who has been in office for any appreciable length of time will always leave a mixed record. I leave it to the historians to assess his legacy.

Today, however, I want to talk about a speech he gave a few years ago that I, personally, regard as his finest hour.

The speech was an address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Blair was the first British prime minister to make such an address since Winston Churchill visited Washington in December of 1941, just weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

On each of these occasions, freedom was under attack. Yet each time, the visiting English politician made effective use of humor. Churchill began his speech by making the now-famous remark, “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.”

Mr. Blair told a humorous anecdote about his own family. He said that his middle son, who was studying the 18th Century and the American War of Independence, had recently remarked to him: "You know, Lord North, Dad? He was the British prime minister who lost us America. So just think, however many mistakes you'll make, you'll never make one that bad."

Yet both speeches were unavoidably serious in their overall tone. Churchill ended his with a stirring appeal that in the days ahead, “the American and British peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice and in peace.”

Blair, because the circumstances were less dire than those of 1941, could end on a more dispassionate and thoughtful note. He took the liberty of giving the American people a friendly warning – one that we should take to heart.

Britain, like the United States, had once been the world’s dominant superpower. So Mr. Blair spoke from his country’s experience when he said this:

As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but, in fact, it is transient.

We will be with you in this fight for liberty. And if our spirit is right and our courage firm, the world will be with us.

I don’t know if anyone – even Churchill – ever did a better job of summing up the importance of the special relationship between Britain and America than did Mr. Blair on this occasion.

Whatever his failings, he was a friend of America and a friend of freedom. And for me, at least, this speech was his finest hour.

The Ragan Report last week joined the Chicago Tribune in noting the tenth anniversary of the death of legendary columnist Mike Royko.

To say that Royko was an opinion journalist with an edge would be an understatement. “Run your hand across a Royko column,” said the Trib, “and you could get cut.”

As proof, the Trib cited a Royko column on California in which he explained the state’s peculiarities by suggesting that God had tipped the nation on its side, “and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.”

When I read that, I had a shock of recognition. After nearly 30 years, I remembered the column. As I recall, it was a roast of Jerry Brown, then California’s governor, titled, in typical Royko-esque fashion, “Running Amok With Governor Moonbeam”

That was the title! You can imagine what the text was like.

As I recall, Royko began by alluding to a novel that had been published a few years before about California seceding from the U.S. and setting up an ecologically perfect society.

I think I can quote what followed from memory: “It was the stupidest book I ever read, but the idea of California becoming an independent country appealed to me. That way we could post guards on the borders. No one from California would be allowed to enter the U.S. without first passing a sanity test.”

Warming to his subject, Royko declared it was common knowledge that since the earliest days of the Republic, the nation’s oddballs had “migrated west in search of the land of their dippy dreams. And the oddest of the odd settled in California.”

The Trib said that Royko would be too politically incorrect to meet today’s standards of professional journalism. The Trib is probably right. And that is our loss.

Watching Republican presidential hopefuls straddle the issue of evolution is an amusing, if slightly sickening spectacle.

Take Mitt Romney, for example. In a recent interview, Mr. Romney clarified his views on evolution by saying, on the one hand, that “God designed the universe and created the universe,” and then, on the other hand, that “evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

Clear enough?

Politicians have been straddling the question of evolution since Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. But few have done it with better style than British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.

In a speech at Oxford University in November of 1864, Disraeli –- a Jew by birth, an Anglican by convention and a skeptic at heart -– said this about the furor provoked by Darwin’s ideas: “What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? This question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.”

This observation provoked a wave of laughter and rash of political cartoons, depicting Disraeli with wings and a harp. And yet, as his biographer Hesketh Pearson suggested, “he was being quite serious in his own way, for he believed that the spirit of man was more significant than the animal in man.”

Perhaps that’s the best way of responding to the question.

I picked up Victor Gold’s current book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers, with high hopes of a good political read.

The opening lines, recounting the author’s emotions on election night 2006, seemed to justify my hopes: “You know something has gone wrong in your political universe,” he writes, “when the party you’ve worked and voted with for over forty years is getting blown out in a national election and you feel good about it.”

Mr. Gold was deputy press secretary to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, and went on to become press secretary to Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter and senior advisor to the elder President Bush.

I wasn’t of age when Barry Goldwater ran for President, although he was one of my political heroes in my adolescent years. But I am old enough to remember when the Republican Party stood for ideals like limited government, individual rights and fiscal sanity –- not federal meddling, foreign adventures and profligate spending. Like Mr. Gold, I felt good to see what he terms the party of the “Holy Rollers and the Neo-Cons” trounced by the Democrats last November.

But my enthusiasm for the book was short-lived. Sadly, has it little real substance and seems to have been written as much to pay off some old political scores as for any other reason.

Gold’s crotchets create some strange inconsistencies. On the one hand, he attacks what he calls “piranha ideologues” operating under conservative Republican colors, and laments the loss of civility in American political discourse.

Yet when was American political discourse ever civil? Consider this extract from a political pamphlet published during the early years of the Republic: “and as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship, and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?”

So wrote Tom Paine about George Washington. The agitated italics were Paine's own.

It cannot even be said that Republicans invented the slash-and-burn political tactics we know today. Credit for that development surely belongs to Clark Kent liberals like Bill Moyers and Daniel Schorr. Gold can’t resist reminding his readers that it was Moyers who authorized the infamous 1964 political commercial that showed a golden-haired little girl picking petals off a daisy, counting “ten… nine…eight...seven…” When she gets to “one” the screen explodes and the child disappears in a mushroom cloud. An announcer then intones: “Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay at home.”

There was worse. That same campaign year, CBS newsman Daniel Schorr claimed to have been “reliably” informed that Goldwater planned to travel to Bavaria after the GOP convention in San Francisco to address a neo-Nazi group.

So American politics was always rough and tumble. Even Mr. Gold is not above a little mud-wrestling himself. Consider his assessment of our current President: “For all the Rove-built façade of his being a ‘strong‘ chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even the hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out-of-touch American president in modern times. Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”

All that may be true, but it’s scarcely civil to say so.

Still, Gold asks the right questions: “Is the Republican Party we once knew salvageable and, given the damage done by the Bush-Cheney White House and DeLay-Hastart Congress in the past half-decade, is there anything left of it worth saving?”

And I think he offers the right answers. “Yes” in both cases, he says, “but with a cynic’s caveat. The salvage can come only if the patient here dies and is reborn; which is to say, the transmogrified political entity now passing itself off as the party of Lincoln will have to pay the price for its masquerade, as occurred in November 2006 – and, given the in-denial response to that election by the party’s leaders, will likely recur in 2008.”

We’re still more than a year away from the 2008 elections, but I think Mr. Gold is right in predicting another disaster for the Republicans. If it comes to that, the question is whether a phoenix will arise from the ashes -- or a political dodo.

Monday, May 28, is Memorial Day, which means a three-day weekend for most of us. So millions of Americans will head for the shopping malls or the recreation spots, or else gather around the barbecue pit in the back yard.

And they should.

The men who died for this country died as much for the American dream of a better life, materially, for themselves and their children, as for our rights, liberties and independence.

So we should enjoy our prosperity on Memorial Day. But we should also remember the men who died to make it possible, and make some gesture, however small, to show our appreciation. Otherwise, our free and affluent lifestyle is … well, playwright Arthur Miller once put it a lot better than I ever could.

Shortly after World War II, Miller wrote a tragedy of awesome power called, All My Sons. In the play, a young returning veteran named Chris Keller tells the girl he plans to marry about his experience in the war. He was a company commander, and nearly all his men were wiped out. In a moving speech, he describes their sacrifice, and his own feelings as to what that sacrifice ought to mean to the folks back home –- but doesn’t:

They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today. And I got an idea –- watching them go down. Everything was being destroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of … responsibility. Man for man. You understand me?—To show that, to bring that on to the earth again like some kind of monument and everyone would feel it standing there, behind him, and it would make a difference to him. [Pause] And then I came home and it was incredible. I … there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a –- bus accident. I went to work with Dad, and that rat-race again. I felt … what you said … ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you’ve got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it.

So, on this coming Memorial Day weekend, drive the new car, see the new refrigerator and enjoy American way. But take a moment to remember the men who died to give it to us, and do something in return: help a disadvantaged child learn to read, volunteer at a homeless shelter, give some time at a veterans’ hospital –- do something to make America a little more just, a little more kind, a little more responsible. Do something, in short, to make this country a little better –- a little more worthy of the men who died for it.

Otherwise, what we have is really loot -- and there's blood on it.

Last week marked the centenary of the birth of screen legend John Wayne on May 26. The occasion reminded me of the fact that the actor’s grave remained unmarked for 20 years –- a fact that helped to inspire a wickedly funny speech by a Native American scholar and activist that might have been titled, “The Red Man’s Revenge on John Wayne.”

When Wayne died in 1979, his family left his grave unmarked, fearing that grave robbers or political leftists would desecrate the site. A headstone was not erected until 1999.

But in 1981, Cherokee author Dr. Rayna Green alluded to Wayne’s unmarked grave in a speech to a group of Native American educators.

The speech, a tongue-in-cheek appeal to create a “Museum of the Plains White Person”, was a tour de force. Dr. Green pulled off what is one of the most difficult feats of public speaking: to sustain a tone of high repartee throughout an entire speech.

In discussing the exhibits that would be featured in the proposed museum, Dr. Green paid particular attention to human remains.

“We have begun our national campaign to acquire the bones of famous white people,” she declared with a straight face, “since they themselves insisted for centuries that we can all learn so much from studying and displaying such remains. And, accepting their notions of reverence for the exhibition of the dead and goods from graves, White People will be honored to have the remains of their grandmothers and grandfathers on display. We have just acquired what I think is quite an important and moving find, the bones of John Wayne, the White Culture Hero, and we plan to acquire the remains of many other famous white persons. You might guess who we have our sights on.”

That is the power of satire. The most cogent and learned argument in favor of leaving the graves of Native Americans undisturbed could not have made the point more effectively than Dr. Green does here.