Grandpa Elliott sings Memorial Day music

See also this from Cassandra, if you missed it earlier.

Clearing the vocabulary deck

David Mills in First Things:

The word “spiritual” has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It’s not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.

Unless, of course, you like that little sense of importance and that comforting sense of social approval that our society still gives to “spiritual things,” though not to religious things. It’s a warm and fuzzy word. It’s a cute cuddly bunny word. It’s not like “religion.” That’s a cold and forbidding word. It’s a screeching preacher with bad breath word.

A better definition is not, however, wanted. The moment you acknowledge a real spirit to whom your spirituality is oriented and by whom it is guided, however distant and unengaged that spirit may be, you have a religion. You are bound by something. You have marching orders. You have to ask what the spirit wants and what he requires and what he says.

As the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a convert from a vaporous kind of religion, put it, we crave “a Christianity without tears; . . . an idyll rather than a drama, with a happy ending instead of that gaunt Cross rising so inexorably into the sky.”

(Speaking of clearing vocabulary decks, Mark Steyn is doing the same thing for politics in his current column, and Bill Jacobson has a funny piece up on fairness. Meanwhile, Christopher Johnson is always up for this game).

Playing with the Deepwater Horizon spill narrative

From comments at Ace's place on the President's speech in Louisiana, where he called the blown well head (April 20) and subsequent oil spill an "assault on our shore and on our people:"

"It's not so much an assault, actually. But it IS the work of an isolated, extremist oil well. And it's caused by Greeeeeeeeeeeeeed."

And along similar lines,

"The question Americans should be asking themselves is why does BP hate us? How can we answer their grievances?"

Sarah Palin was quoted, also:

"Why was Governor Jindal forced more than a month after the start of the disaster to go on national television to beg for materials needed to tackle the oil spill and for federal approval to build offshore sand barriers that are imperative to protect his state’s coastline?"

Federal response to Hurricane Katrina came up:

"I'm reading Karl Rove's book and he tells of how Bush was so frustrated with Gov. Blanco's refusal to ask him to Federalize the Katrina response that he came within a hair's breadth of declaring Louisiana "in a state of insurrection" so that he could take over the response and use Federal troops without violating the Posse Comitatus Act."

Nice Deb has a nice wrap-up. On the other hand, it's Memorial Day Weekend. The news can wait.

UPDATE: This is disquieting. And this is embarrassing.

The perjoratives of choice

Have you noticed how many self-proclaimed "liberal" or "progressive" thinkers describe even mild criticism of their points of view as "hateful"?

To hear some of my progressive friends tell it, any varsity "hating" team would have to include Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, John Stossel,* and everyone who draws a paycheck from FOX News-- and we haven't even mentioned major religious figures yet-- Monty Python was only partly right on that score, because among progressives, at least, everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

(If you have to ask why there are no "people of color" on that "hating" team, then you're just not with the program, baby. Try to keep up.)

I don't follow every word these alleged haters say (progressives call it "spew"), much less agree with everything that I do hear from them now and then, but I will say this: No one in that partial list makes a living off hate. They criticize; they entertain; they propose or object to legislation; they comment on the passing scene, but they're all happy rather than hate-filled warriors. The problem from a progressive point of view is threefold: First, they notice things. Second, they ask questions. Third, they refuse to shut up. Apparently, that inconvenient combination makes them "haters."

It's an Orwellian (and often determinedly ahistorical) world when anyone who bucks the preferred narrative is automatically guilty of a hate crime, and automatically a target for lesser-known but still virulent progressive hatred. To progressives of the "bird bath" persuasion, busy cultivating an outrage that is broad but not deep, conservatism itself is synonymous with hatred, and fascism has no roots in leftism (Jonah Goldberg isn't the first to have shed light on those embarrassing links, by the way-- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn beat him to it).

Methinks there's a fair amount of "dismiss the source so you can ignore the argument" going on here, garnished with a wholly imaginary right to Never Be Offended or Even Discomfited and a studious allegiance to Nonjudmentalism as an article of faith, with an important exception for Judging the Allegedly Intolerant.

To all of which I can only say, "Do you know the Muffin Man who lives on Drury Lane?" He's probably hateful, too.

In settings where decorum matters (i.e., when they can't beat up people like conservative tee shirt vendor Kenneth Gladney with impunity), progressives check "hate" at the door but still accuse their critics of being "divisive." For that to be understood as the mild or anguished more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger barb it is meant to be, however, everyone to whom it is broadcast must agree with the presumption that unanimity of feeling is always preferable to disagreement. This bias in favor of homogenized outlooks is especially comical when it comes (as it often does) from people who otherwise think the world of "diversity." Do they not see the hypocrisy in themselves?

* Stossel is taking heat from the usual suspects because (like Ron Paul and a few other contrarians) he dared to question the Constitutional fallout from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His dispassionate wielding of the Law of Unintended Consequences on broadcast TV was converted by progressive alchemists into primal rage from Stossel at anyone whose skin color is darker than his own. I don't see it, because it isn't there, and because these progressive alchemists are the same people who heard an unspoken "boy" after Representative Joe Wilson said "You lie!" to President Obama during a health care speech to members of Congress.

N.B.: That "perjorative" in the post title should be "pejorative" (full spellout as "the pejoratives of choice")

A big church acts the part

My darling wife wonders why I like Pope Benedict as much as I do. Having imbibed snippets of misinformation -- some from friends and some from random media reports -- she thinks Benedict is a bad man. I say "by their fruits, you shall know them."

This pope has made mistakes, of course -- they all do, except when teaching officially about doctrinal matters -- but the old guy remains a formidable and humble servant of God. Two more reasons why:

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Pope Benedict XVI in their joint effort to salvage and nurture Christianity in those precincts where it has withered lately.

In other hopeful news, Cardinal Walter Kaspar sparred with then-Cardinal Ratzinger over the history of the church some years ago (Ratzinger had the better argument), but in an address that Pope Benedict undoubtedly either approved in draft form or had a hand in, Kaspar recently pledged to open the extensive wartime archives of the Vatican, spoke candidly of when Catholicism was "too feeble" to resist the persecution of the Jews, and reaffirmed the mutually supportive relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

The dog that did not bark

Peter Ferrara makes a pretty good detective in shedding light on what President Obama is trying to do.

Grudging admiration

TV critic Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times extends a polite golf clap to the series finale of "24," which we on the Paragraph Farm enjoyed watching last night.

Here's a personal mix of quibbles and additions to that solid valedictory essay:

• Ex-president Charles Logan was indeed "deliciously weaselly."
• Stanley called the series "dazzlingly violent," but that only makes me wonder what she thinks of mainstream movies like Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas, where -- unlike in 24 -- the cinematographer and director chose to linger on scenes of mayhem.
• I agree that the series stretched credulity, mostly by making Jack close to indestructible and betting too much on the computing power accessible to CTU.
• I also think that Kiefer Sutherland and his creative team paid more attention to ethical and moral questions than most critics give them credit for. Jack Bauer and his various adversaries had grieviously sinful moments, but they also provided a forum for pop culture to consider the rights, duties, and assumptions of American citizenship more profoundly than most politicians do in real life.
• The farewell between Jack and Chloe, while not entirely unexpected, was emotionally powerful and true to the characters we've come to know.
• If the series had a dominant note, I think it was irony -- a man in a job that played hell with his family life never hesitated to put himself on the line to protect the families of his fellow citizens.

Twisting the fairy tale

Is the Tea Party too hot, too cold, or just right? Some thoughts on the Goldilocks approach to political commentary, now playing over at American Spectator Online.

Andy McCarthy wrote about the same phenomenon with a more personal take, it turns out. And William Jacobson spotted the kind of progressive illogic I wrote about in earlier commentary about the oil spill in the Gulf.

Many progressive thinkers seem to forget that the American Revolution was essentially conservative.

Manga hagiography

All you really need to know about the Manga-style comic book treatment of Saint Paul's life by writer Matthew Salisbury and artist Sean Lam is that 12-year-old Thomas thought they did a great job on volume one ("Tarsus to Redemption").

Salisbury's story adds to bit of conjecture to what we actually know of Paul's life, but for understandable reasons (he would have had a best friend, right?). The story sometimes seems frenetic, but given the genre and the zest with which author and illustrator mix-and-match panel sizes for the different scenes, that's to be expected.

Sean Lam is a talented illustrator who has obviously mastered the manga conventions (sharp noses, big expressive eyes, heart-shaped faces, and wild hair that on certain heads seems a character in its own right).

Apart from one instance where the perspective on a foreshortened arm holding a drawn sword makes the arm look more like an antique table leg, Lam draws everything well. He also deserves kudos for changing his drawing style for the three pages it takes to tell about Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus: Drawings in that section are shaded more lightly than elsewhere, in a none-too-subtle nod to the radiance of the risen Christ, and it works.

Thomas and I agree that the only thing we wanted that the book did not have was color on its inside pages.

"Biblical Manga" has a bright future in the hands of Salisbury and Lam, whose ambitious collaborative work is published in handsomely-bound paperback by Atiqtuq.

Book Review: Wolf Whistle

A book reviewer for The Nation called Lewis Nordan’s award-winning 1993 novel Wolf Whistle “an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” I think he went too far. Is Nordan being praised for breaking alleged “white silence” on the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett “Bobo” Till, or for talking honestly about race relations in Mississippi before the Civil Rights era? Did he punch through some barrier that keeps writing teachers from having their work embraced by book clubs around the country? The reviewer could have meant any or all of the above.

Nordan has an ear for dialog, an appreciation for scene, and a gift for shedding light on absurdities. He writes well about men who while away the hours on a storefront porch playing blues tunes by Robert Johnson. Up in New Jersey at that time, some of the white kids were starting to sing doo-wop on street corners, but – for anyone at risk of missing the glaringly obvious point -- life was harder below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Wolf Whistle held my attention. My problem with the novel is that although I believe the author when he says that he was deeply affected by the murder, which happened when Nordan was a teenager living just down the road, the story he wrung from that experience some 38 years later has more craft than heart.

If I’m right in that judgment, it’s because of two decisions that Nordan made before he started drafting the story. First, he wrote from a deep well of guilt, and it shows. The only decent people in the novel are the relatives with whom Bobo is staying when we meet him. “Auntee” and “Uncle” make a positive impression, but the world-weary goodness of their cameo appearance is not enough to lift the pall from the parade of horribles with which Nordan populates the rest of the narrative. George V. Higgins put fewer caricatures into The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that novel was, as Vizzini might say, “entirely peopled with criminals.”

A first-year teacher named Alice could have been a counterweight to the bigots in Wolf Whistle, but Nordan makes her tragicomic by emphasizing her lack of boundaries. Alice, you see, is not yet over a recent affair with one of her married professors. We’re told that she has what the people of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi consider “new ideas.” But the only idea that Nordan actually gives Alice involves self-expression, and for her, that means taking fourth-grade students on traumatic field trips. The little darlings are frog-marched into sewage treatment plants, funeral parlors, and the home of one of their classmates, a dying boy who accidentally burned himself in a gasoline fire while trying to kill his shiftless father. When Alice eventually reserves balcony seats for her children at the trial of the men who murder Bobo, we are not surprised.

Critics praised Nordan for his honesty, but that honesty often looks like contempt, because other characters in the novel fare little better than Alice does. We know at the start of the book that an appreciative whistle from a black teenager to a white woman in Eisenhower’s America will not end well: Bobo’s reflexive response to a double-dog dare cannot bridge the racial and economic gulf between himself and the leggy blonde (not Alice) at whom he whistles. One wishes for his sake that the two of them had never met, and that she had driven her white Cadillac elsewhere rather than stop in a rainstorm to buy a tampon while Bobo and his friends were hanging around the store. Obviously that bell cannot be un-rung. But Nordan makes Mississippi sound even more hellish than the rest of us had thought it might be. His retroactive and undying shame suckles burdensome reading. It says something when even the suicidal John Kennedy Toole had more affection for the people of his native New Orleans than Lewis Nordan appears to have for other residents of Mississippi.

I said at the start that there were two things Nordan had done to unwittingly sabotage some of the force in his story. Deciding to write from guilt was one thing, and the other was choosing to rely on the literary approach known as “magical realism.” Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez pioneered that tone with Love in the Time of Cholera, and while magical realism works better in Wolf Whistle than it did there, Nordan’s forays into vulture, parrot, and monkey minds feel more like tricks than narrative imperatives. The technique becomes a crutch. Remember the reviewer who was slack-jawed at “wall-shattering” literary talent? Calling the pet monkey in a black barbershop “Jefferson Davis” is a nice touch, but when Nordan writes from a vulture’s point of view, he’s building a wall between reader and writer, not shattering it. The wall comes with graffiti that says “I teach creative writing and you don’t.”

Pat Conroy, the dean of dysfunctional drama in Dixieland, could show Nordan what it means to practice self-restraint. When Conroy had a tiger deliver jungle justice to convicts who terrorized people in The Prince of Tides, he wisely did not write that scene from the tiger’s point of view.

In summary, Wolf Whistle is an impressive and psychologically rich novel about a tragic, important subject, but it is not the monument to unvarnished truth or progressive compassion that it so transparently aspires to be. The book falls short of masterpiece theater because it is cathartic without being redemptive. Arrow Catcher, Mississippi will never be confused with Winesburg, Ohio.

We've heard this tune before

Visiting the White House today, Mexican President Felipe Calderon predictably called Arizona's new immigration enforcement law discriminatory toward Mexicans.

Although this is part of ongoing fallout from the new legislation, it isn't the first time that Calderon has presumed to lecture state legislators in the U.S.A.

What Rep. Tom Tancredo said in an open letter to Calderon after the latter's dressing-down of the California legislature two years ago still applies:

In your speech yesterday to the California State legislature, you lectured the American people on how to improve our immigration policies. Why did you not propose that we model our policies on Mexico’s own policies toward illegal entry across your own southern border? Mexico expends enormous resources to prevent Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans from entering the country illegally, but you castigate the United States for wanting secure borders. Mr. President, in my neighborhood that is called hypocrisy.

Tancredo is regularly excoriated by his opponents for "spewing hatred," but he doesn't deserve that rep, and unlike apologists in and for the current U.S. administration, he at least understands that both action and inaction have consequences.

Postscript May 20, from an email sent by Elisabeth Meinecke of Human Events:

In case you weren't in the White House neighborhood last night, President Barack Obama hosted his second state dinner, this time honoring the President of Mexico.

They worked up an appetite earlier that day bashing the Arizona immigration law (running question: have either of them read it yet?).

At this point, I am quite convinced that Miss Oklahoma knows more about the Arizona immigration law than the politicians in Washington, D.C. She's given a far better sound bite on the issue than Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, or either president.

Then there was this rebuttal from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA): "The Mexican government has made it very clear for many years that it holds American sovereignty in contempt, and President Calderon's behavior as a guest of the Congress today confirms and underscores this attitude." (Sister Toldjah has the transcript.)

How the West Was Won (per Rodney Stark)

"To sum up: the rise of the West was based on four primary victories of reason. The first was the development of faith in progress within Christian theology. The second victory was the way that faith in progress translated into technical and organizational innovations, many of them fostered by monastic estates. The third was that, thanks to Christian theology, reason informed both political philosophy and practice to the extent that responsive states, sustaining a substantial degree of personal freedom, appeared in medieval Europe. The final victory involved the application of reason to commerce, resulting in the development of capitalism within the safe havens provided by responsive states. These were the victories by which the West won."

-- Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Chrisitianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005)

Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, H.W. Crocker III, Michael Flynn, and Vincent Caroll would agree with Stark (as would many others, of course)

Compare and contrast (again)

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reverse-engineers the style book at the Washington Post to find that "pro-choice" women get effuseive treatment in Style section profiles, but "pro-life" women don't. In fact, you could interpret the contrast as flowers for one group and latex gloves for the other.

Oh, the irony!

Real actors and political ones

Some thoughts on recent Arizona legislation and presidential reaction to it, now playing at American Spectator Online.

Instapundit noted a related item, but he deals almost exclusively in squibs. J.R. Dunn and Heather Mac Donald have interesting essays up addressing other parts of the same issue, while P.J. Gladnick documents "boycott backlash" in Los Angeles, and Arnold Ahlert talks about publicity stunts by the owner of the Phoenix Suns.

Stealing shamelessly from Julie

When I mentioned "trespasses" earlier today, it wasn't because I intended to commit a few of my own, but there you go. This book review works on two levels and is hilarious either way.

(I don't know anything about the SFF audio readalong that is apparently the impetus for her current exercise in self-flagellation).

Julie, my friend, life is too short to read bad books. This might be the first year of my reading life where I've abandoned as many books as I've completed, for good reasons -- The Noodle Maker was harshing my mellow -- and idiosyncratic ones -- Brad Matsen's Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King looked interesting until Brad let slip (nonjudgmentally, natch) that Cousteau cheated on his wife. Look, we're all human, but I've already read about Magic Johnson and Clarence Clemons this year, and neither of them were paragons of fideility to marital vows, either, so by the time Cousteau came along, I'd hit my liimt, and that bio went back to the library.

Apart from bookishness, I also like the quote she pulled from Dappled Things. The juicy bit was a fastball high and inside:

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Islam was clearly the most scientifically advanced civilization on Earth, and China boasted a more advanced technology. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages the Latin West was clearly ahead of both Islam and China. How did this reversal of fortune take place? Joseph Needham called this ‘the Grand Question.’

There were two reasons: China never had an Aristotle; Islam never had an Aquinas. Consequently, logic, reason, and science in those cultures were like the seed that fell on barren ground, or among the weeds. In China, science withered; in Islam, it was choked out after a promising start.

"Forgive us our trespasses"

Mary Kochan, writing in Catholic Exchange:

"Forgiveness is not merely God’s way of covering our sin with a veneer of righteousness (pure white snowfall covering a dunghill, as Luther would have it) but is a medicinal application of grace whereby the Great Physician cures us of what kills us. And a good part of the medicine of grace involves swallowing our pride, recognizing the single most obvious truth — we are not God and we cannot judge. To withhold forgiveness is to attempt to stand where we cannot stand — even with our shoes off. "

"Papa Ratzi," speaking the good word ("bene dictus") in Portugal:

"Focussing her attention upon her own saints, this local Church has rightly concluded that today’s pastoral priority is to make each Christian man and woman a radiant presence of the Gospel perspective in the midst of the world, in the family, in culture, in the economy, in politics. Often we are anxiously preoccupied with the social, cultural and political consequences of the faith, taking for granted that faith is present, which unfortunately is less and less realistic. Perhaps we have placed an excessive trust in ecclesial structures and programmes, in the distribution of powers and functions; but what will happen if salt loses its flavour?

In order for this not to happen, it is necessary to proclaim anew with vigour and joy the event of the death and resurrection of Christ, the heart of Christianity, the fulcrum and mainstay of our faith, the firm lever of our certainties, the strong wind that sweeps away all fear and indecision, all doubt and human calculation. The resurrection of Christ assures us that no adverse power will ever be able to destroy the Church. Therefore our faith is well-founded, but this faith needs to come alive in each one of us."

Stickball

Christopher Johnson hits a home run ball over Kathleen Parker's head and into the next street:

Katie bear? Christian spirituality has nothing to do with biology or with feeling good. If warm and fuzzy is the goal, most of us figured out a long time ago that we could stay home and get “spiritual” with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Christianity revolves around something that all other religions either reject outright or do not see a need for. And Christians who turn away from it or call it one way among many to “get to God” all for the sake of getting along with secular society aren’t Christians in any meaningful sense of that word.

The Cross.

Frank Sheed, John Zmirak, and G.K. Chesterton would be proud.

Live Oak

It's not just an annual music festival to benefit KCBX; it's also a high school in Morgan Hill, CA whose chastened administrators seem befuddled.

Fortunately, other news is better.

Fire sale at (and on) First Things

In case you had not yet heard...

FWIW, I've never been published there, but I think well of the magazine and its online presence, not least because the late great Father Richard John Neuhaus once wrote me a wonderfully personal and encouraging letter after I questioned what seemed to be the too-predictably-academic mix of regular contributors in his writing stable (this was more than six years ago; the place has diversified since).

Some wisdom

A beautiful thought from Sr. Bridget Haase, shared with the rest of us by the incomparable Jennifer Fulwiler. "Sparkle with self-forgetfulness," indeed.

Postscript: More wisdom, this time from Anthony Esolen: avoid hate.

Still not comfortable in his own skin

Former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz calls Obama's humor "a work in progress."

Scary thought, that one. After the mentoring, the ghostwriting help, the re-reading of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," the "skinny but tough" thing he uses as a talisman, the "let me be clear" tic that invariably introduces obfuscation, the famous aside about the price of arugula, and the utter inability to say anything even mildly self-deprecating -- our prickly president is still not comfortable in his own skin.

Book Review: Night Fall

I did not much care for Wild Fire, the 2006 thriller from Nelson Demille, mostly because John Corey's near-constant sarcasm wore thin in the context of that thriller set in and near an exclusive hunting club. Whatever else could be said for the story, Wild Fire laid the Corey schtick on so thick that even Corey's wife found it tiresome after awhile.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise to learn that the same kind of sarcasm plays much better in an earlier DeMille novel with the same lead characters. Night Fall (2004) is about John Corey's fictionalized attempt to unravel a real-life mystery that made headlines in the summer of 1996, namely, what happened to TWA Flight 800? Did mechanical failure in a center fuel tank trigger an explosion that killed everyone on board shortly after takeoff from New York, or were 230 people on a commercial airliner brought down by a missile?

Night Fall is heartfelt. Demille dedicates it to the people who died on TWA flight 800, but the book is also a valentine to the NYPD. Corey's sarcasm in Night Fall works because a lot of what he does while in a second career with the Anti-Terrorist Task Force depends on help from his NYPD buddies, chief among them former partner Dom Fanelli, who is utterly believable as a wisecracking homicide detective in his own right.

Demille knows cop banter, and understands that sarcasm in its natural milieu is what macho men use to disguise brotherly affection for each other. When Corey calls Fanelli as the latter is being dispatched to the scene of a double homicide, Fanelli makes time to listen to his old partner because the homicide victims "aren't going anywhere." Another call from Corey interrupts Fanelli at a family barbeque, and when Corey asks if Fanelli has a drink in his hand, the pitch-perfect (for 2001) reply is "Does the pope eat kielbasa?"

Demille was smart to write his best-known character into the TWA case five years after it had made news. While that makes clues harder to come by for John Corey, it also gave his creator the literary latitude to put John and his FBI agent wife on the job in late summer of 2001, and that timing is important to the story.

The bulk of the novel involves Corey's search for two people whom we know from the prologue inadvertently videotaped the demise of TWA flight 800 while having an extramarital romp with each other on the beach. Some of the tedium of investigative work leaches into the text. But the book's few slow parts are more than offset by knowing asides about trust, character, office politics, inter-agency rivalry, and many of the other things that color both John Corey's world and our own.

Demille did his homework: the various theories about what happened to Flight 800 each get a proper airing, although it's obvious which theory Demille thinks is most credible. Even the Manhattan bar used for several scenes is carefully chosen.

This novel demands maturity beyond that of the young-adult set, and its ending may leave some readers unsatisfied, but I put it down hoping that there are people like John Corey in the world, and knowing -- thanks to an NYPD connection in my own extended family and a cameo in the book from real-life hero John O'Neill -- that there are. Few authors can walk the line between convention and conspiracy as skillfully as Demille does here.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow

...don't be alarm-ed; it's just a sprinkling for the May Queen

That quasi-medieval lyric from "Stairway to Heaven" might be the most famous mixed-metaphor in rock music (thanks to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page).

If I heard a bustle in a hedgerow, I'd assume it was the noise made by bird or a small mammal (I'm dating myself, but the gopher in Caddyshack comes immediately to mind, as does the argument between Bugs and Daffy over whether it's duck season or rabbit season).

"Sprinkling," on the other hand, implies baptismal water or pollen; it doesn't generally "bustle."

The various lyric sites that transcribe the line as "spring clean" make even less sense. Druids weren't that into domesticity.