Beating Around the Bush Read Free Page 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