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A Bush Just Doesn't Fall Over For No Reason, Right? |
 The Original Martha Stewart |
 Martha Stewart Lately |
Is gravity screwed up?
Everything's falling over!
By MURRY FRYMER
of TheColumnists.com
I knew something was seriously wrong when my bush fell over. Yes, that's right, this huge, 10 foot high Photinea bush just fell over. And it lay there taking up a huge hunk of my new lawn, dead.
Hey, I said to Barb, bushes don't fall over. Trees might blow over in a storm, but a bush is pretty-uh-compact. It would take a tornado to knock one over and we didn't even have more than a stiff breeze. And there she went. I wasn't home to see it but it must have been shocking.
Anyway, that was the start. It has been one thing after another since that day.
Enron blew over. This top-10 corporation, blue chip, just fell over and died. Everyone was just as shocked as I was with my bush. They said that something like this could not happen. Little companies, run in back alley garages with crooked dealers, die. Enrons don't die.
But it did.
And then Arthur Andersen, the mammoth accounting firm fell over. Arthur Andersen? Come on! This company was international, global for god's sake. Companies the size and prestige of Arthur Andersen are the rock of Gibraltar. They don't just fall over. But this one did. (And speaking of global, Global Crossing which build a world-wide fiber optic network, never got to use it. It fell over.)
I kept watching TV with my mouth open. The news broadcasts could barely tell me one shocking thing when another came along. Priests were molesting kids in the confessional booth. Priests? Well, maybe there was one bad apple, I thought. No, the whole barrel was a mess, it seemed. Cardinals and bishops got together and decided one molestation was not a crime, but maybe more than one was. The Church, I thought, was falling over.
This week Martha Stewart fell over. They said she and the president of Imclone, which was working to find a cure for cancer, were involved in insider trading. Hell, I didn't even know that was a crime. I figure if you are an insider, you’re bound to hear the bad news before it gets to me. But, apparently, somebody once passed a law saying that insider trading was illegal. Yeah, sure.
That's like nabbing someone for not paying sales tax. As a matter of fact they did--this big fat Kozlowski guy with Tyco. That really irked me because I own some shares of Tyco. And I'm not an insider so I couldn't sell before they arrested Kozlowski. So Kozlowski fell, as I did for the Tyco line.
Hey, level with me. Are baseball players using steroids? Is that true?
What's with the FBI and the CIA?
Hey, did that historian on PBS, whatsername, did she really plagiarize stuff in her books?
Hey, did some football coach at Notre Dame fake his resume? Hey, did Bush really win the Presidency?
Today, I hear that one of the biggest corporate frauds has suddenly been discovered at World Com Inc., the second biggest telephone company, the one which owns MCI. I used to get my long distance from MCI and I had a suspicion they were crooked. Now I know. That whole phone giant is about to fall right over.
I was thinking of writing a letter to Ann Landers and then I heard she was gone. She was a straight shooter and she would have set us straight. Though I hear she didn't really write those columns of late.
Well, I wrote this. And
though I am coming to the end of this column, I fear I am going
to keep hearing of new horrors in the days and weeks to come.
It's some sort of an outbreak in nature, I fear. A bush doesn't
just fall over for no reason.
©
2002 by Murry Frymer. The
Frymer caricature is © 2000 by Jim Hummel.
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