Today was the holiday luncheon at work, an event notable mostly for marking the terrifying, undeniable truth that I have spent an entire year of my life in this place. The volumes of sound and fury aside, I actually only spent nine months at Beelzetron; I have been working for this maniacal rabbi for more than a year now.
Everyone else has been frantically busy all week working on fundraising events, but my workload has been light, as most of the rabbi's current schemes won't kick in until January, and there hasn't been much to write, because I don't think he's especially interested in Hanukkah, compared to the other Jewish holidays. Too mainstream, perhaps. (Comparatively, I produced several novels' worth of yammering on about Yom Kippur.) He also isn't much for office functions, so he left before the lunch. I wasn't interested in the social aspects of the party, but I do regard it as something of a moral imperative to abuse the hospitality of my employers, so I attended and overate and was charmingly abusive to passersby. Then I put my phone on 'do not disturb', slipped off my shoes and took a nap in the rabbi's nice, dark office.
(news) Arms teams are welcome, Hussein says, but the Iraqi leader insists inspectors will find nothing. Hussein's measured comments and stab at statesmanship ... seemed designed in part to blunt U.S. criticism and counter Hussein's image in the West as a brutal dictator defying international opinion.
The ongoing argument about the reception of the weapons inspectors in Iraq is clearly a public-relations battle that is being waged for the American people's benefit. Not to lend a hand to an evil megalomaniac, but if Saddam wants to convince the majority of the American people that he has been welcoming the weapons inspectors, he needs to move the focus of the debate away from questions of access and weapons and towards issues such as: Did he provide chips for the weapons inspectors to snack on? Was there salsa for the weapons inspectors to dip those chips in? Was Iraq's dog playful, mixing up all of the weapons inspectors' shoes? Conversely, the Bush administration can deal a deathblow to Saddam's hopes for public opinion by disclosing that Saddam will not allow casual day for the weapons inspectors, and so forth.
