Beating Around the Bush

by Buchwald, Art

  It’s amazing how many individuals can contribute to one’s Christmas. The people who make these products are as happy as those who received them. Did I tell you about the prescription drugs I got from Tijuana, Mexico? My wife wrapped them in a beautiful box that read, “Take 50 percent off tagged price.”

  I did get a wrapped bottle of men’s cologne called “America’s Best,” with “Made in the USA” printed on it. I asked the family, “How did this get in here? We better open it in the garage.”

  Saving Time

  PEOPLE ARE NOW EXPECTED to arrive at the airport at least two hours before takeoff due to security precautions. Once you go through the metal detector, what do you do to kill time?

  Here are some suggestions. If you’re married, pick up on the argument you were having at home. It’s also a good time to ask your husband if he shut off the gas jets on the stove. And your husband can wonder if the parakeet will be safe with the neighbors. Or alternately, sit there for two hours without talking to each other.

  If you are a person who is traveling with someone who is not your wife, buy her a box of See’s candy. Tell her what a wonderful time she is going to have in Disney World, where nobody will know the two of you.

  If you are a divorced woman, tell him your ex was a rat who never took you to Disney World in all the years you were married. Tell him you usually don’t eat candy, but in his case you’ll make an exception. If both of you are unattached, you may hold hands in the terminal. If one is married and the other isn’t, one of you should sit at Gate 40 and the other at Gate 29, pretending you don’t know each other.

  When a girl looks as if she is alone and you feel like flirting, ask her if you didn’t meet her in Chicago. If she says no, try Albuquerque, or Alaska. If she is bored and you look respectable, she will start talking.

  If it’s a guy and he is by himself, the girl can say something like, “I noticed your argyle socks when security made you take off your shoes, and they are gorgeous.”

  No one is going to be hurt, and you might even find Mr. Right or Ms. Right if you are taking the same flight.

  Plane-waiting may also mean being alert and watching everyone in the air terminal to guess whether they are terrorists or not. You may decide one person fits the profile of Osama bin Laden or one of his henchmen. Anyone who looks suspicious should be followed during his time at the gate.

  One pleasure of waiting is reading all the magazines at the newsstand your parents won’t let you read at home. For boys it could be Penthouse or Playboy, and for girls, Sex and Getting Your Man in a Week. My favorite is Cosmopolitan. It doesn’t pull any punches. It’s the magazine that lets it all hang out.

  There is nothing more tantalizing than food at an airport. Caution—don’t drink more than six cups of coffee before taking off. You can eat all the pizza you want, but limit yourself to five Whoppers.

  The most dangerous place at the airport is the bar. It’s a question of how much booze you can consume in two hours, particularly if you’re buying a stranger a drink and he is reciprocating beer for beer. Do not discuss politics, football, or even religion.

  Warning—the worst thing you can do while waiting is make friends with someone else’s child. Once the kid discovers you’re a patsy, he will drive you crazy. No matter how cute they look, remember, they’re a pain in the neck to somebody.

  These are just a few ways to wait in the airport. They were given to me by frequent flyers who know the ropes.

  Waiting is now more fun than flying, except if security makes you take off your clothes.

  Let’s Not Forget the Lobbyists

  ENRON’S DIFFICULTIES not only gave us a lesson in Economics 101, but they also explained how Washington operates.

  Everyone in Enron played his role—from the executives in the company and their accounting firm, to the lawyers who served them so well. But none of them could accomplish what they did without the Washington lobbyists. They are the ones who protect companies from a government that cannot be trusted.

  Lobbyists are just like you and me—they put on their golf shoes one foot at a time. But you have to be qualified to be a lobbyist. Many, if not all, are recruited from Congress. They have decided they are fed up with politics and want to make some big money for a change, or have lost an election and are not fit to do anything else.

  Lobbyists are very friendly people. They call lawmakers and administration officials by their first names: “Ted,” “Terry,” and “George.” Theirs is the only profession, except for the FBI, that makes house calls.

  The job of the lobbyist is to stop a law that will hurt his clients and lobby for a bill that will make everyone rich.

  This is an example of how it works. The Hidden Valley Gas and Power Company has ex-Senator Glad Handle on its payroll to lobby for them in Washington. Glad Handle is a Republican, and he replaced ex-Congressman Taylor Bluewhistle, a Democrat, who was fired after Al Gore lost the election.

  Glad moves between the Capitol, the White House, and any agency that can affect Hidden Valley business.

  Let’s say Congress wants to pass a law forbidding Hidden Valley from delivering natural gas and smoking cigarettes at the same time.

  What Congress doesn’t know is that Hidden Valley owns a cigarette company as well as a gas company. Banning smoking near a gas plant will seriously hurt their tobacco business.

  Glad invites Senator Carl Fiddle to Burning Tree Country club. Fiddle is in charge of the Smoking and Energy Committee. He is greeted warmly by Handle, who says, “Remember when we filibustered an equal rights bill together?”

  They play eighteen holes and then Glad asks Fiddle, “How’s the election campaign going?”

  “We could use $100,000 in soft money to buy sweatshirts for our volunteers.”

  Glad takes out his checkbook and says, “Why didn’t you say that before?”

  Senator Fiddle replies, “You’re a lobbyist, so we hated to ask you for something. If we take your money what can we do for you?”

  “Nothing much. If you want to hold up the Anti-Smoking Gas bill in committee, that would be fun.”

  “It’s done.”

  “What about getting the oil rights to West Point?” Glad asks.

  “I know the person at EPA you should ask for.”

  Glad says, “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “You know, Glad, that’s against Senate rules.”

  Which God Is Your God?

  THE ARGUMENT STARTED late at night in a bar, where most arguments begin.

  Cornblatt said, “I wish to God I didn’t have to go home tonight.”

  Rutherford said, “There is no God.”

  And suddenly all of us were off and running.

  I asked Rutherford if he was an atheist and he denied it. He said, “I don’t believe there is no God, I believe there are too many gods.”

  George, the bartender, was happy to serve us all drinks, as it was a slow night.

  “And what in God’s name does that mean?” I asked.

  Rutherford said, “Everyone in the world seems to have a god, and that’s alright until they want to kill other people who have a different god. Look what’s going on in the Moslem world. They call people in the Western world infidels and are willing to fight a Holy War to satisfy their god.”

  “Those are only the terrorists,” Cornblatt said, “and it’s costing us billions of dollars to protect our God.”

  Rutherford asked, “What do you mean, ‘our God?’ Depending on our faiths, there are dozens of gods that we worship. Take Ireland, for example. The Protestant Irish have been killing the Catholic believers, and the Catholics have been murdering the Protestants. They are all the same people, except for their religion. If they can’t agree on who is the real God, how can anybody else?”

  George, the bartender, tried to protect his bottles because he didn’t know where this was going.

  Pearlstein, who was trying to stay out of the argument, said, “The Jewish religion has the true God, and that is
why we are the Chosen People.”

  “You may be, except Orthodox Jews don’t believe in what the Conservative Jews and the Reformed Jews stand for. They have an entirely different idea of what God thinks about women.”

  Pearlstein said, “If we had been proselytizing back in 1300 BC like the other religions do now, the whole world would be Jewish.”

  Cornblatt said, “When I was a kid I always asked God for something. He helped me if I didn’t do my homework or if I had a difficult test—and even when I asked for help after disobeying my parents. Every time I asked a favor I told Him, ‘I’ll never ask you for anything again.’”

  I said, “There was a bully at our school named Sam Tufano, and after school he would chase me. I asked God to make me run faster than Tufano, and He never let me down.”

  George said, “It’s time to close up—no more drinks.”

  It was a good idea because we were just about to discuss God and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Yesterday’s Enemy

  I WALKED PAST the Soviet Embassy the other day after President Bush made his State of the Union Speech.

  Over the years the Soviet Embassy was one of the most vilified buildings in Washington—and the most mistrusted.

  There were several U.S. Secret Service cars in front of the embassy at all times. The FBI rented apartments across the street for its cameras and listening equipment. The CIA even built a tunnel from a house on a hill that went right into the embassy. We listened to everything that Moscow was plotting.

  All a president had to do to get a standing ovation in Congress was call the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.”

  When criticized for our spy community’s vigilance, the State Department replied, “All is fair in love and the Cold War.”

  I ran into Davidson, who takes the same walk every morning as I do. I said, “It’s pretty quiet around here.”

  “It wouldn’t be if Bush had blasted the Russkies in his speech.”

  I asked, “Is it politically correct to call them Russkies now?”

  “What would you call them?”

  “Our brave allies beyond the Iron Curtain.”

  “But what happened to the days when we said the Russians were stocking nuclear arms and we had no choice but to do the same? That is why the president needs $200 billion for a new missile shield. The only enemies mentioned in Mr. Bush’s speech were North Korea, Iran and Iraq.”

  I said, “The president should have said he needs the money to prevent the Russians from smuggling nuclear weapons in battered suitcases.”

  “What made the Reds such an easy target for a State of the Union speech in the old days was that nothing in their country worked, and it was always cold.”

  “We had a real enemy in those days. All we have now are faceless terrorists who will never have an embassy of their own because just before they open one they commit suicide.”

  Davidson said, “I used to be afraid of Russian spies who hung out beyond those walls. Now when I see one on the street I imagine he is either a defector or someone going to the Safeway to buy a National Enquirer.”

  “How did the Russians become the number one good guys so soon after they were the number one bad guys?”

  “It is easy, because Bush can get Vladimir Putin on the phone anytime he wants to—but Osama bin Laden never returns his calls.”

  Dinner at the Darbys’

  I WAS HAVING DINNER at the Darbys’ when Sheila Darby said, “Guess what Caroline wants to be when she grows up?”

  We all looked at Caroline, who is sixteen years old. She said, ‘I want to be a whistleblower.”

  “That’s an honorable profession,” I said. “But you have to work hard to catch a person who is up to no good.”

  “That’s what I told her,” her father, Joe, said. “You have fifteen minutes of glory and then you can’t find a job.”

  Caroline said, “Sherron Watkins of Enron is my role model. All the girls at school think she is fantastic.”

  I said, “Whistleblowers have come into their own ever since Sherron spilled the beans. But no one at Enron backed her up. Whistleblowing is a very lonely business.”

  Joe said, “I don’t want TV cameras on my lawn all day and all night.”

  Caroline said, “That’s the part I like the most. I could be interviewed on the Today Show, and Good Morning America, and by Tom Brokaw. He could say I was a member of the Greatest Generation.”

  Sheila said to Caroline, “If you’re going to be a whistleblower you’re going to need a decent education. No one is going to believe you if you don’t have a college degree.”

  Joe said, “There are corporate whistleblowers who report on their bosses stealing from the pension fund. No one in the company will talk to them at the water cooler anymore.”

  Caroline asked, “How do I practice being a whistleblower?”

  I suggested, “For starters, you could snitch on your fourteen-year-old brother Tommy.”

  Caroline said, “I saw him smoking a cigarette outside Tyson’s Corner mall.”

  I said to the Darbys, “She’s a natural whistleblower.”

  Tommy was angry and yelled at Caroline, “I was not and you know it!”

  Joe said, “If I were you, Tommy, I’d take the Fifth Amendment.”

  Caroline said, “By the time I grow up, Sherron Watkins will have used up her 15 minutes.”

  I replied, “Not necessarily. Don’t forget she has a book to write and her story will be made into a TV movie.”

  Joe complained, “That means we’ll have to give up all our privacy. Sherron Watkins may be a very successful whistleblower, but there are thousands of tattle-tales whom you have never heard about. They lost their jobs and their health insurance.”

  Sheila said, “I like what Caroline wants to do. If she can find a crooked accountant or a smarmy lawyer to rat out when she grows up we should encourage her.”

  Tommy said, “I would rather be a crooked accountant. You make more money.”

  Caroline told him, “If you were, I would send you to jail.”

  Tommy retorted, “Says who?”

  I interrupted and said, “I would rather have a whistleblower than a crooked lawyer in the family.”

  Sheila said, “Wouldn’t we all?”

  Book Flogging

  I FLEW DOWN to the Broward Public Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to do a book signing for a paperback I wrote.

  Over the years I have done thousands of book-signings (well anyhow, quite a few). It’s even tougher than writing a book. Sandy Vanocur once told me, “You know you’ve been on the road too long when you’ve run out of quarters for the vibrating bed in your motel.”

  I have had many adventures in my book-signing career. One of my favorites was when I went to a department store in Rochester. The books were set up in the lobby. By accident I received a copy of the instructions for the staff.

  One employee was assigned to make sure the books were there. Another supplied the ice water. A third person was in charge of supplying the pens.

  The last assignment on the list had to do with security. Written next to it was the notation, “Mr. Buchwald does not need security because he is not that well-known.”

  When you’re flogging a book you sit in a lot of TV show Green Rooms, waiting to go on the air. I shared one in Chicago with a chimpanzee that was holding on to his owner for dear life. I kept eyeing the chimp, and he kept eyeing me. Finally, his owner, a little old lady, asked me to hold him while she changed his diaper. At that moment I declared I was going to give up show business.

  Sometimes on the road you are the victim of a breaking story, and they tell you they are going to bounce you off the air.

  This happened in Detroit. A friend, Tony Kornheiser, was with me plugging his book. The producer came out and said, “We have to cancel both of you. We just invaded Grenada.”

  I immediately said, “I just came back from Grenada.”

  He said, “Then come on the air.”

>   When the producer left the room, Tony growled, “You lying SOB. You don’t even know where Grenada is.”

  I said, “You have to think fast when you are out on the road.”

  Jim Michener and I were good friends, though he outsold me in the bookstores by one hundred to one.

  One time I was at a bookstore on Fifth Avenue for an autograph session. Michener’s Hawaii was displayed all over the window. My book was hidden all the way in the back.

  I took off my suit jacket and looked for someone who worked there. I called over a stockroom boy and said, “You see all those Michener books in the window? Put them in the back and take the books in the back and put them in the window.” It was one of my greatest book-signing triumphs, and when I told him, Michener laughed and said he was wondering why everyone was going to the back of the store.

  The toughest book-signing competitor I ever had was Sylvia Porter, the business author and columnist. I appeared with her at a book luncheon. She talked about bonds and I talked about Washington. After we both spoke, we signed books. I had two people (my sisters) waiting to buy my book, and Sylvia Porter had a line that went around the block.

  I learned from Andy Rooney that the only way to speed up a book-signing line is not to talk to anyone whose book you are autographing.

  That is what I did in Fort Lauderdale. Flogging one’s book is a dirty business, but somebody has to do it.

  Shadow Government

  AS YOU READ THIS COLUMN, there is a “shadow government” somewhere in the bowels of the mountains of Maryland, where people are stationed to keep the country going in case of nuclear war. I’m not sure how long these officials have to remain underground, but it is the toughest job in the country.

  This is what it must be like:

  The officials are having dinner in their cave.

  Marty Muggeridge says, “I am supposed to be the shadow president this week.”

  Hal Haige says, “It’s my turn. You were president last week.”

  “No one ever lets me be president,” Gonbalt says. “I’m tired of being the shadow environmental Cabinet officer.”