Beating Around the Bush

by Buchwald, Art

  As the last person went out the door I said, “You should have been there.”

  Three-Letter Word

  SEX. There, I know I have your attention.

  The most used and abused word in the English language is SEX. Putting it on magazine covers, mentioning it in the newspaper, advertising it on television and inserting it in a movie are just a few of the places we see it every day.

  The Supreme Court has mentioned it in its decisions. The military academies try not to mention it. Priests worry about it. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals practice it.

  I first discovered SEX while waiting at LaGuardia Airport. I was looking at the magazine stand and I noticed almost every magazine had the word “SEX” on the cover. It wasn’t just Playboy and Penthouse—every periodical from Cosmopolitan to House and Garden was using it so that I’d buy their magazine.

  When I got home I turned on the television and darned if “Sex and the City” wasn’t on the air.

  “That does it,” I said to myself. “It is time to research the word.”

  I assigned the job to my assistant, Cathy Crary, who usually does my research on the federal budget. She was reluctant to take on the subject, but I told her she was doing it for her country.

  This is her report.

  “Originally SEX had something to do with making babies, but because it was forbidden in most cultures for anything else but procreating, it took on a life of its own. Since people found it very pleasurable and forbidden and fun, it wasn’t necessary to use it just to produce offspring.

  “Soon after, the word took on a broader meaning and the advertising industry picked it up because they found whatever was forbidden in our society sold like hotcakes.

  “They said a woman couldn’t be sexy if she didn’t use a certain shampoo and she wasn’t attractive if she didn’t wear a certain perfume, and the only reason for a lady/girl to wear a bathing suit was so other people would think she was sexy.

  “Different parts of the body attracted men to women, depending on how they were treated by their mothers.

  “This is not to say SEX has played a part only in men’s lives. Women talk about it as much as men, and possibly more.”

  Cathy continued her report.

  “SEX constantly rears its head in divorce cases. One or the other of the aggrieved parties claims the mate had an extramarital affair or affairs.

  “The reason SEX is so popular is that Homo sapiens discovered it was extremely pleasurable. It is even more pleasurable than finding a parking place on Main Street on shopping day.

  “The first person who discovered SEX was Hugh Hefner. He was laying out a new magazine on wild birds when he accidentally inserted a pullout of a beautiful unclothed girl.

  “‘Watson!’ he cried over the intercom. ‘I think I’ve got it. Instead of a magazine devoted to bird watchers, let’s do one on real birds.’

  “Hefner did, and for the first time SEX came out of the closet.”

  Cathy handed in her research. She said, “This is all I could find on the subject. Will it be enough for a whole column?”

  “It is more than enough. No one knows what an important role SEX plays in our culture and if we don’t tell them, who will?”

  Poor Rupert Murdoch

  POOR RUPERT MURDOCH. He owns newspapers, TV and cable networks, movie studios and magazines. He can hire the best lawyers in the world. He is a billionaire, yet he can’t even win a lawsuit against Al Franken, the satirist (aka Flaming Liberal).

  Franken is coming out with a new book titled, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, subtitled, A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

  The cover has a photo of Bill O’Reilly (the star Fox commentator), President Bush, and Vice President Cheney.

  Murdoch had his day in court and it was a bad one. Fox maintained that the words, “Fair and Balanced” are owned by them and no one else can use them.

  The Fox people asked for an injunction to keep the book from being distributed with the title.

  The Judge, Denny Chin, had to decide if “Fair and Balanced” was owned by Murdoch, Al Franken, or the entire English-speaking world. He also had to decide whether putting Bill O’Reilly’s photo on the cover would mean that he was endorsing the book.

  Murdoch’s lawyers said it was a deadly serious cover and Franken was using Fox to sell his book. The judge looked at all the evidence and then declared that Fox’s case was “Wholly without merit, both factually and legally.”

  Legal experts said this was the first time anyone found a Murdoch-filed lawsuit without merit. Mr. Franken’s lawyer said the decision was a great victory for the First Amendment.

  I wasn’t called as a character witness. If I had been I would be on Mr. Murdoch’s side. I am a die-hard conservative, far to the right of Robert Novak. I have two subscriptions to the National Review, one in the office and one at home.

  I read every book on the New York Times bestseller list that attacks liberals—who are worse than traitors and terrorists.

  I send money to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and all the right-wing causes. I subscribe to Murdoch’s New York Post, which I consider my paper of record.

  I would have made a telling witness for Fox because of my knowledge of the English language.

  Having said all this, I think Al Franken is a troublemaker. He makes fun of the things that Americans hold dear—and he wants to make money doing it. I have another reason to suspect that Franken is a liberal. It’s that he uses satire to put over one of his extreme left-wing ideas.

  As Fox so ably pointed out, most people don’t understand satire or that when Franken puts Bill O’Reilly on his book cover he is not calling him a liar but just joshing with him. The same goes for Bush and Cheney.

  The First Amendment protects satire, but as the Fox lawyer maintained brilliantly, Franken’s title was ambiguous because it did not say “parody” or “satire” on the cover. How is anybody going to know?

  I, of course, believe in satire. I put it in the same class as pornography. If I ever want a picture of Bill O’Reilly on the cover of one of my books, I will never use the words “fair and balanced.” Those words belong to Rupert Murdoch and I’m not going to upset him. The reason is he owns a ton of newspapers and Franken doesn’t own any.

  If I am going to sell my column to the Murdoch newspapers, I want him to know that I am on his side.

  Senior Citizens Vote Too

  I AM ALWAYS HAPPY when we approach an election year and politicians start to worry about senior citizens and how they will vote.

  The main reason is that I am a senior citizen and I will take any help I can get. The reason I know I am a senior citizen is that I am not a prospect for product merchandising. I have been told by advertisers and TV networks that I don’t count and that they only want to suck up to the 18-to-45-year-old age group.

  Every time age discrimination is brought up it winds up in the Supreme Court, which is made up of nine senior citizens. While I would be happy to have the government pay my Medicare and pharmacy bills, the legislation has not yet passed, as it has many potholes in it, mostly put there by lobbyists. The one I lose the most sleep over has to do with urging us to give some of our Medicare business to private health plans. I am frightened that the company I sign up with will go bankrupt and the officers will wind up in Brazil.

  The honorable companies have to make a profit. Since more and more senior citizens will be urged to try out the private sector, the healthcare industry will raise its prices. More senior citizens will be dropped if they become an insurance risk.

  The second thing I worry about is prescription drugs. They are so expensive that the senior citizen actors in the commercials can no longer afford to play with their grandchildren.

  The government does not want the drug companies to go out of business, but we’ve reached the point that many of us have to use all our gas money to drive to Canada to buy pills.

  I don’t want to be a wimp, but senior citizens have
to pay $140 for a prescription. To make it up to them, they only pay $5 to go to the movies.

  Because senior citizens still might buy products—even if advertisers don’t want them to, it has been suggested that they carry an age identification card. The card will permit them to buy a Chevy, Chrysler, or Ford, provided they are accompanied by someone from the 18-to-45-year-old age group. Anyone who sells a car to a senior citizen that has no card will be fined $5,000.

  Not all senior citizens are retired. Some are still working because the company holding their pensions spent it on other things. Advertisers should pay attention because since they still have to work, these seniors might have money for Polident, electric toothbrushes, vitamins and Viagra. So even if Pepsi wants only youth to drink their products and Anheuser-Busch wants Bud Light Beer to be consumed by singles in bars, the senior citizen’s life span is getting longer and longer.

  And when the next election comes up, they will be mad as hell and not take it anymore.

  The Ten Commandments

  LITTLE DID MOSES KNOW when he brought down the Ten Commandments from Mt. Sinai that he would cause so much trouble in Alabama. The stone sculpture bearing the Ten Commandments has been banned from the rotunda in the Alabama Supreme Court building because it violates the separation of church and state.

  As everyone knows, Moses went up the mountain alone and stayed for 40 days, after which time God gave him the Ten Commandments on stone tablets. When Moses returned to the desert, he found his people had betrayed him and had acted very badly—so badly that Moses smashed the tablets. Then he demolished the Golden Calf they had constructed. He ground the calf into powder and put it in his people’s drinking water.

  Then he went up the mountain again and got a second set of commandments just like those banned from public display in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Everything had been going great in the state until a constitutional lawyer discovered the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. He told other constitutional lawyers who agreed it violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The lawyers won a case in court to have the commandments removed to the back where no one would read them.

  There was a hue and cry over it from various religious groups who demonstrated in front of courthouse. I wasn’t sure whose side I should be on so I called Moses on my heavenly cell phone.

  “Moses, do you know they want to remove the Ten Commandments from the rotunda in the Alabama Supreme Court?”

  “It’s not a sin unless they use the Ten Commandments to justify violent demonstrations. I have this trouble all the time in democracies where people keep trying to display the commandments in government buildings.”

  I said, “The people who say it should not be moved declare they believe in God more than the infidels who want the constitution obeyed.”

  “Have the people who want the Ten Commandments returned to the rotunda read them?”

  “I think so. Alabama is a very religious state. I would say they are true believers in spite of the fact they have one of the lowest literacy rates in the United States.”

  Moses said, “I hate to get into this fray. It’s not as if they want to do away with the commandments. It has more to do with where they want to place them. I am more interested in people obeying the Ten Commandments than in where they place them. The one I really want obeyed is, ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.’ It keeps coming up all the time in the courts.”

  “Where is God in all this?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t paid as much attention to Alabama as he did during the civil rights demonstrations. God believes you can have the Constitution and the Commandments and they don’t conflict with each other as long as you don’t put the stone tablets in the rotunda.”

  I know there are some readers who will doubt I had this conversation, but I swear I did, so help me God.

  Power Anonymous

  THE WEEKLY MEETING of Power Anonymous was held in Washington.

  “My name is George W. and I am a recovering power addict. I guess I inherited my liking of power from my father. I first started using power heavily when I became governor of Texas. The fellows I hung out with were all power abusers. Some drank it, and others sniffed it.

  “I had no choice but to use it myself because it was in my genes. I tried to kick the habit when I came to Washington, but I didn’t know this was the center of power for the free world.

  “I could buy all the power I wanted on any street corner. Every time I woke up I had to have a fix. Then I would go to my office and my staff said I didn’t have enough of it. It wasn’t long before I started having nightmares. I believed people on the Hill were out to get me.

  “Some say I am still on a power trip. But if I hadn’t hit bottom I wouldn’t be here tonight.”

  “My name is Donald R. I work in the Pentagon. As a matter of fact, I am the Pentagon. Next to George W., I have the most power in America. I can send troops anywhere I want to and no one can stop me except George W., but he never understood what real military power was all about and left the decisions up to me.

  “I have more power because George believes me more than he does Colin. I got my first taste of power when, as Secretary of Defense, I was flying a fighter plane over the no-fly zone in Iraq. I saw several tanks explode and realized that I had enough power to blow up anything I wanted to. Power didn’t come cheap. It cost billions and billions of dollars, but I had it to spend. The fact that I’m here tonight doesn’t mean I’m cured. Any day I can go back to getting high on it. There are twelve steps to Power Anonymous. I’m still on the first one. Giving it up is much tougher than you think.”

  “My name is Colin P. I used to be a general but in my present job nobody really listens to me. At the beginning I was hooked on power, but as time went by it was harder and harder to keep it.

  “That’s one of the reasons I am coming out of the closet. If you can’t get real power you can’t take a chance with the adulterated stuff.

  “I hope to help other secretaries of state who don’t realize what so-called power trips do to your health.”

  “My name is Condoleezza R. and I came late to power. Originally I wanted to be a pianist, but friends got me to try power and I became high on it. I hope to break the habit because power makes me look too serious—I know how important being on Meet the Press is. But I also know that after all the news shows your thinking becomes fuzzy and power becomes an addiction. Power Anonymous is my last resort. If I can’t stop using power I will wind up in the gutter and on the Jerry Springer Show.”

  “My name is Dick C. I don’t have much power except with the energy companies. The reason I am here is that I like to circulate with all you people. George W. is my role model. Once he was power mad, but he now realizes that it is not always the answer.”

  The meeting adjourned and everyone had doughnuts and coffee. They promised to meet the next week—unless there was another war—in which case they all might break their vows.

  A Great American

  YOU HEAR IT A LOT about public figures, particularly with an election coming up. Everyone running for office is described by his introducer at every political rally as a “great American.”

  I have never heard anyone say a person is a “good American,” but every once in awhile I hear someone called a “bad American.”

  The “greatest American” is President Bush (all presidents, even Nixon, have been referred to as the “greatest president” when in office). But Bush’s people have gone one step farther, particularly at Republican fundraising dinners, calling him the “greatest president the country has ever had.” This always is followed by a standing ovation.

  Who is a “great American” and who isn’t?

  Let’s take the attorney general as a role model. If you are in favor of his Patriot Act and don’t mind your private life being scrutinized and profiled, then Ashcroft will not only consider you a “great American,” but he’ll also throw in the w
ord “patriot” for free. If you raise any constitutional issues as to how he is running the Justice Department, you are a suspect and have to be watched carefully.

  Just because you know the words to the “Star Spangled Banner” doesn’t necessarily mean you are automatically a “great American.” Even football players and Britney Spears sing the national anthem before a game.

  With Iraq still in chaos, the real test of a “great American” is if you support the way Bush is handling the “Peace.” This means giving him all the money he needs, defending him against the anti-Bushies that are getting more numerous every day and supporting him in plans to restart the economy.

  If people who are unemployed don’t complain about their status, the White House will consider them “great Americans.”

  Even in the government, the questions of those who are and those who aren’t is still up in the air. For example, the FBI believes every member of the bureau is a “great American” (except for whistleblowers and Robert Hanssen, who is doing life for selling out his country to the Soviet Union).

  The CIA claims to have more great ones than the FBI, but they can’t talk about it. They have undercover agents who can’t even admit they are Americans.

  You don’t have to be born in this country to be a “great American.” Arnold Schwarzenegger is one—at least his wife Maria says he is.

  In days gone by it was okay to be an American, but now with the talk show hosts yelling and name calling, they can make or break your patriotism. The dean of TV and radio talk shows is Bill O’Reilly. He makes up his audience’s minds for them on where they stand. Sometimes it gets personal. For example, he believes Rupert Murdoch is a “great American” because he signs O’Reilly’s paycheck.

  It is much easier with the chaos in Iraq to weed out the good guys from the bad ones. If you criticize anyone in the Pentagon, you are a traitor and giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein.