Beating Around the Bush (23 page)

But the Republicans are more excited. Wall Street sees enormous future brokerage fees if people are permitted to invest in the stock market.

Oakie, a broker, said, “I will not only sell shares, but inside information to anyone who becomes my client.”

It is a known fact that the TV networks do not cater to senior citizens. The reason is that people over 65 don’t have any money from their Social Security to spend on what the sponsors advertise.

A seventy-nine-year-old friend told me, “I am lucky if I can get through the month on one box of corn flakes for dinner.”

The fight over Social Security reform is a spectator sport and takes people’s minds off of Iraq, same-sex marriage, abortions, and the Academy Awards. At dinner at tables all over the country people are discussing what to do with their parents.

Elderly people don’t trust the government, and as Brinkerrhoff said, “Why should we?”

The only hope senior citizens have is that they can now get Viagra on Medicare.

NO ONE THOUGHT that after the election President Bush would be the one doing all the flip-flopping. In his first term he made a
lot of countries mad at him when he invaded Iraq, but he didn’t seem to care.

We Americans supported him (except for the anti-war traitors).

Now he is flip-flopping and on his trip to Brussels he told Europe we need each other, and the U.S. wants to be friends again.

The State Department Assistant Secretary for Flip-Flopping explained the new policy to us. “The President now loves everybody.”

“Even France?” I asked.

“Yes, even France. Americans can once again eat French fried potatoes, French onion soup, go on French leave, and even French kiss.”

I said, “That is certainly a flip-flop. What about Germany?”

“We don’t see anything wrong with Germany anymore. You can now order sauerbraten, schnitzel, drink beer from Munich, and German kiss.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“We have opened an entirely new policy in our relations with, as Don Rumsfeld used to call it, the ‘Old Europe.’”

“This means we don’t have to boycott our friends anymore?” I asked.

“Au contraire. We have to embrace them and tell them how much we love them,” he replied.

“Just when you put Americans in one mode, you ask us to change to another one.”

“It can be done. If the president is willing to make up with the countries he thought did him in, everyone should do the same thing.”

“Flip-Flopping is one of most important posts in the State Department.

How did you get it?” I asked.

“I was on Condoleezza Rice’s National Security team. When she realized the U.S. could no longer go it alone, she told me the president asked for the most dedicated flip-flopper on her staff—a post that doesn’t need congressional approval.”

“And your duties?”

“I go where our leader goes and I have a briefcase full of flip-flops he can use on any of his stops.”

I said, “Despite his flip-flopping, his unpopularity in Europe is still at an all time high. The man on the street, the Champs Elysee that is, doesn’t believe we did the right thing by going into Iraq.”

He replied, “We don’t care what the man in the street thinks. Our flip-flopping is concerned with the leaders. If we can win their hearts and minds, and also buy French perfume, we will consider it a major diplomatic victory.”

“They say the president has never been too interested in foreign affairs.”

“That is true, but it is a plus and not a minus. Since he is not emotionally involved he can switch horses in midstream, and coming from Texas, he knows how to do it.”

“Spoken like a true diplomat,” I declared.

“Do you think that someday the president will flip-flop on Iran, Syria and North Korea?”

“Not at the moment, but now that the elections are over we are waiting to flip-flop on who will be Prime Minister in Iraq. If our guy doesn’t get in, we will announce we always wanted the candidate who does win.”

He continued, “The nice thing about a democracy is the president can flip-flop anytime he wants to, and still do great in the polls.”

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, Harvard is in crisis. It is not in as much crisis as Social Security, but it is in enough of a crisis to be on the front pages for something other than winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

The trouble started when Harvard’s President, Larry Summers, delivered a speech in which he said, among other things, that women were not as successful in engineering and math as men. He also said that men would work eighty hours a week, while women had other things to do. (Read: give birth, clean, cook, and raise a family).

This and other gender and ethnic slurs enraged the faculty, and they held angry meetings where Summers was pilloried and denounced by professors for sullying Harvard’s good name.

As with any crisis, there are two sides of the story. On one you have an unyielding university president who speaks out on academic issues, but also raised the school endowment by millions. And since he was a former secretary of the treasury, he has clout in Washington. The alumni and the Board of Governors backed him, and the students were split on his remarks.

On the other side were the faculty, who accused him of being abrasive and using his position to speak publicly on issues that they considered politically incorrect.

While this began as an in-house crisis, it became everybody’s problem when it got into the newspapers and on TV.

The country became divided. Those who believe Harvard is the Taj Mahal of learning (students and alumni) were grief stricken that their school’s name was muddied.

The campus filled up with more national reporters than the number of attendees at a Harvard-Yale football game.

President Summers brought the gender gap out of the closet.

It is sad to say not everyone cried for Harvard. Many people enjoyed its misfortune. These were not Harvard people, but those who didn’t go to the university.

Harvard is considered by many to be an elite school attended by snobs, who look down on everyone, and let them know it. To say you went there is enough. It is a smug indication that you are on the top of the educational food chain. As far as Harvard is concerned, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League institutions are no more than trade schools, where you learn how to build bookshelves.

Unlike Notre Dame, which is beloved by everyone, Harvard has never had a Knute Rockne, or a former president who asked the coach to “win one for the Gipper.”

I am not one who enjoys bashing the school because of what Larry Summers said. I flunked math and science, so I can sympathize with women who are not too good at these subjects. Also, I have no problem working an 80-hour week, especially since I don’t belong to a longshoreman’s union.

Underneath their hubris, Harvard people are just like you and me, ready to take on the world by hook or crook or networking.

The Larry Summers remarks will blow over. Someday a woman will invent a new light bulb that will never go out. Thanks to paltry Social Security payments, everyone, men
and
women, will have to work 80 hours a week—at three different jobs.

Like so many people who never went to Harvard, the Summers flap is not my problem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sit back and enjoy it.

Martha Stewart paid her dues and is home (or at least serving the rest of her sentence there).

The world is a better place now that Martha once again can go about her business and tell the rest of us how to mind ours.

It goes without saying there will now be thousands, no millions, of jokes about her on the Internet, in beauty parlors, and at office water coolers, not to mention Jay Leno, David Letterman and
Saturday Night Live
.

What makes this such a great country is that when someone gets in trouble the rest of us can laugh at him or her. But the jokes have a short shelf life and soon go stale. Then we become ashamed. I have a plan for when this happens.

Every time you tell a Martha Stewart joke or hear one, you have to send a $10 check to the tsunami relief fund ($20 if you have heard the joke before).

If someone uses a Stewart joke on television he has to donate $2,500 to rebuild Sri Lanka.

The fact that someone tells a joke about Martha doesn’t mean he doesn’t admire her. We sleep on her sheets, bake her cupcakes, and smell her roses. When we go into a Kmart (now Sears) Martha is everywhere. We find her in the bookstores peering from magazine racks, and the Web. As a wise man said, “it’s Martha’s world—we just live in it.”

Is Martha a better woman for being found guilty of insider trading? The Wall Street pundits are split on what she did. Fifty percent say she should never have been tried, and the other fifty percent say she was guilty, not of insider trading, but of making the paltry sum of $40,000 on the deal.

It’s too late to cry over spilled milk, or Martha’s cream puffs. The future is now, or as another press agent said, “Today is the beginning of the rest of Martha’s life—as long as she sells more advertising pages for her
Living
magazine and has a hit television show.”

No matter where you stand concerning her, you have to admit she is a household name—more famous than Janet Jackson or Betty Crocker.

The public is the jury. Will she once again become a billionaire, or will she have to live on her Social Security checks? Will she be remembered for the quilts she made in Bedford, New York, or those sewn during the last five months in Alderson, West Virginia?

Because I’ve devoted so much space to Martha Stewart, I am sending a $100 check for the tsunami victims in care of Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr.

Okay, all together now, “Hello, Martha, well hello Martha, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong . . .”

“THE CLASS WILL COME TO ORDER. Today we will discuss the ‘Smoking Gun,’ the most important subject you will learn in Law School. Who knows what a ‘Smoking Gun’ is? The man in the back.”

“A smoking gun is a piece of evidence that is produced in a trial, most of the time as a surprise to the other side.”

“Very good. Where will you find a smoking gun? The lady over there.”

“The best place to find it is in e-mails that people have sent to each other because they never dreamed a third party would read them.”

“Example please?”

“I am the plaintiff’s lawyer in a suit against an automobile company. I want the in-house e-mails written by executives pointing out the brakes don’t work, the vehicle rolls over when another car passes it, and the wheels fall off when you go down a hill. If I can prove the company knew all this I have my ‘smoking gun.’”

“Good answer. So the first thing you must confiscate is a defendant’s computer before they erase the messages on it. In most cases you need a judge’s order. Now who knows of any other examples?”

“
Enron v. United States
. The government used the company’s confidential e-mails to prove fraudulent bookkeeping, greed, conspiracy, offshore banking and natural gas that never existed.”

“Professor, what if I defend Enron executives?”

“Then be sure and get your fee in advance. Now, next question. What is a perfect ‘Smoking Gun’ case? The gentleman in the front.”

“That’s easy—the state of New York against General Electric.”

“What was the smoking gun?”

“The Hudson River.”

“Professor, do most Smoking Guns come from computers?”

“No. Many come from whistleblowers. Let’s us say an ex-employee at a drug company found out that an antidepressant caused depressions. The whistleblower would produce e-mails proving the executives insisted on doubling their advertising budget to sell the pill before the FDA made them take it off the market.”

“Professor, suppose I was defending the drug company?”

“Then you would try to prove the whistleblower was a disgruntled employee, a wife beater, and someone who cheats at solitaire.”

“Are smoking guns permitted in court under the Second Amendment?”

(Laughter)

“That is not as funny as it sounds. There will be lots of work for you when you get out of school defending gun manufacturers, dealers, and the National Rifle Association who, every day, are being sued by the relatives of people who were shot. The most important thing to remember today is people on a jury have seen thousands of hours of television, and are influenced by what they have seen. On every show it ends with the good-guy lawyers producing a ‘smoking gun’ and the bad guys going off to jail. You will never see a
Law and Order
segment with a hung jury.”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE became a celebrity when he said, “Kill all the lawyers.”

A serial conservative friend of mine, Sam Sampson, went one step further and said, “Let’s kill all the judges.”

I whistled. “Does this mean you want to pull the rug out from under the judicial system?”

“Yes. If they don’t want to interpret the Constitution as we know it, then I say off with their robes.”

“But if you are for Right to Life you are not supposed to kill anybody.”

“There can always be exceptions.”

“Judges are human like everybody else,” I said.