No.101 Things you need to know about me.(Viewpoint essay)

The first thing you need to know is you're standing a little too close. Put down the magazine and take a couple of steps back, all right, friend?

It's for your own good. I am a man of strong and powerful opinions that often require sudden gestures and startling movements to properly convey. I wouldn't want to see you hurt, by accident.

Also, I do not suffer fools gladly but would gladly make fools suffer. I realize that may not make any sense to you. If so, could I see your thumb, please?

If you know me, which you don't, you know one thing: I'm against the war. As this magazine went to press, that included the Iraq war and the Israel-Lebanon war, which I'm counting as one war. If some new wars have started in the last couple of weeks, I'm against those as well. I opposed the Vietnam War as a baby, and I believe I would have opposed the Korean War; I'll have to look it up someday and find out. Had I been around, I definitely would have opposed World War II. In hindsight, you can say it turned out all right, but we'll never really know how many lives could have been saved had we given appeasement a chance.

Nevertheless, I am not an anti-Semite. I am an anti-anti-Semite. Unless that makes me a Semite. Then I'm something else.

I support gay rights, even though I'm not gay personally or professionally. I'm so heterosexual, I can't even masturbate. But I believe that whatever two guys want to do with each other's parts is fine, as long as I'm not in the room, and two gals as well, even if I am.

I won't eat anything with a face that I know or might recognize. Neither will I eat anything with a name, be it Elsie or Beauty or Old Red. If I must eat an animal (for example, if I order a cheeseburger), I insist on being led to believe it died humanely, preferably by its own hand. I eat a lot of lemming. (It tastes a little like vole.)