Ben Stein's Diary
Stein, Ben
BEN STEIN'S DIARY MONDAY St. Cloud, Minnesota I am here because I am speaking at St. Cloud State University tomorrow. I flew in via a very circuitous route, or maybe I should just say a very long...
...Just from this little example, it does look as if there is more integration in Greenville than in Beverly Hills, but then that's not surprising...
...Considering that life is everything and that to give it up for us is a sacrifice even beyond calculation, what can we calculate that we can do to make it up to the people who die for us...
...And isn't organized crime also supposed to have something to do with casino gambling...
...There is a lot going on in the Greenville area...
...Anyway, when I got to St...
...And I can break it down even more usefully than that: the people with infantile senses of entitlement and lack of ability to see that self-discipline and self-restraint and respect for others are basic requisites of life, are conservatives politically, and the people who are big babies always bitching and moaning tend to be liberals (or Democrats...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 What should I do...
...Maybe I should move here...
...He was drug czar...
...They were angry, bitter women...
...My driver took me in to the parking lot, and he and I walked around it...
...But as soon as I got off the plane in Greenville, I felt happy, happy, happy, and revived...
...Now, I can get by without belonging to the Los Angeles Country Club...
...THURSDAY Afull and cheerful day except for one big crisis...
...Not really racial exclusivity, but exclusivity by income or wealth, and that usually equates to racial exclusivity...
...But I hate the idea of being rejected because I am Jewish—or that thin wafer of disguise—because I am in show business...
...In these cases I can only say, "His will be done," and then go on to my own worthy tasks like feeding my family and helping reelect George W. Bush...
...CNN was, of course, reporting that things were terrible and we were bogged down in a place called An Nasiriyah and that it was beginning (after a couple of days) to look like a stalemate a la Vietnam...
...What do you think Beverly Hills is all about if not exclusivity...
...All it led to was a vast increase in air travel and a major clogging up of airports, a wild downgrade of service, and 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 now the ruination of all of the good airlines like American and United and Delta because of competition with the subway airlines like Southwest...
...Black people sitting with white people having a meal...
...So I called the desk and asked if anyone had any tweezers...
...I also think Northwest should get a prize...
...Plus, there is a war on and still people are happy...
...One of them explained her gripes...
...Remember you heard it here first...
...In I went and soon I was surrounded by cheerful, friendly men who were buying me drinks...
...I stayed up watching the news and then decided it was time to go to sleep...
...No matter how I tried, I could not get it out of those teeth...
...There are tire plants and auto plants and tech plants...
...What if there were only reporting of how many women and children were killed each day in bombing and never a word about the moral culpability of the Germans for their aggressive behavior...
...The drunk and insane (who are almost always the same people) are bitter about America and everything else...
...I love Fox News for putting things in context...
...There is something extremely wicked about it...
...Yes, there are plenty of other grounds on which I might be deemed unworthy, but turning down a potential member because of reasons of birth seems wildly un-American...
...6 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 I went back to my room and felt happy to be confirmed in my theories of life in this glorious America...
...Could he please look into it...
...I am getting to a point here...
...The Greenville airport is heavily treed, homey, and has a restaurant serving fried chicken and blowing that wonderful fried chicken smell all over the airport...
...There I was, a fifty-eight-year-old guy with my old mouth of fillings, and she bravely just reached in there and did her thing...
...Plus, I will never be a very good or even decent player...
...I can't wait to graduate so I can leave this f–king country and move to Canada:' She didn't wait for me to ask her why...
...Who should suddenly appear at our table but the staggeringly beautiful cocktail waitress whom I met last time around, the sweet-faced Amy Quidley...
...I hate this f—king country," she said...
...ABC News, as always, reported that we were killing civilians and also making no discernible progress...
...I wondered how, if Tariq Aziz were writing the news, he would have made it any different...
...You could put in a coin and hear her talk about how the world owes her a living and a darned good one at that...
...I had a little nap and then dinner with some of the students and the college president, Dr...
...Probably pretty humid in the summer time...
...Bush...
...Hmmm...
...Fox News, as usual, reported that we were doing great and were kicking the Iraqis' butts...
...Your world" turned out to mean Hollywood...
...One thing we can do, though, is pay our armed forces a hell of a lot better and pay their families not thousands but hundreds of thousands or a million when they are killed for us...
...Cars are our gods...
...That's how friendly the people on the street were...
...I sure hope the government is getting ready to bail them out...
...I watched for a while and then I left my room looking for food...
...It was an idea greatly seconded by my pal, the famous psychoanalyst to the stars, Paul Hyman...
...My speech went extremely well, and I mean really, really well...
...Then we went through more darkness, punctuated—as all of America is—by sprawling car dealerships lit up like casinos, even when closed...
...Then I went for another major hike down to yet another gate, and a small jet took my fellow travelers and me to Appleton, Wisconsin, in the dead of night...
...They know that we're the good guys and the Iraqi government, the bad guys...
...On the one hand, I think people should be free to associate with whom they like...
...But when I see my beloved airlines laid waste, it breaks my heart...
...Greenville surpassed my wildest expectations...
...She then railed about how oppressive and sexist America is and how a decent country would just give its students money instead of lending it, and that's why she hates America...
...The Furman University students who picked me upwere cheery, and the ride from the airport was revealing...
...Museum of Liberal Thought...
...Hadn't Hitler already written that he planned to kill all the Jews because they were not humans, but tuberculosis...
...I sort of gagged when I saw the French flag and the Canadian flag and wondered just why they had become so hostile and jealous, but then that's the nature of jealousy...
...I flew in via a very circuitous route, or maybe I should just say a very long route that led me to have a four-hour stay over at the stupendously spread out Minneapolis/St...
...I was humbly grateful...
...I just love her...
...They know that there is no moral equivalence between the USA and Iraq, or between George Bush and Saddam Hussein, and that is made both explicit and implicit in all theydo (except for Greta Van Susteren, who is sort of a mystery to me...
...I have always liked him, and he's a charming fellow on TV and in person...
...We checked in and went right across the street to my favorite bar, the Tobacco Factory, to have oneof their uniquely great cheeseburgers...
...If commissions had remained high, the brokerages would have been making so much money they would not have had to resort to all that fraud about the high-tech stocks...
...I actually was not planning to ask her why on the theory (as revealed by a famous Czech writer) that if a man comes up to you and tells you he is a fish, it is not smart to ask him to show you his gills: you know he's crazy...
...The French are a brave people...
...The great bulk of the people are friendly, open, and cheerful...
...SATURDAY Washington, D. C. H ere I am in my apartment at the Watergate...
...Around the circular memorial are the flags of various countries that participated in the D-Day fighting...
...Almost all broke...
...After lunch I went to the local Confederate museum...
...What's that again...
...Are they less decent than an insurance salesman...
...This haunts me...
...I sat next to a lovely young woman who works for Amazon...
...Cloud, I was deposited at a hotel, placed in a room with a bathtub in the middle of the living room, and left to my own devices...
...I bought several comforters with knitted pictures of the South, plus a Robert E. Lee jackknife (made in China, of course...
...Not insane...
...Well, I went to a coffee shop and got some lovely snacks, and then I walked a bit and saw a small bar with a big popcorn machine...
...I mean, what do they think we'll do and how will business get done...
...Would my hero, Ronald Reagan, have been rejected because he was in show business...
...I learned the virtues of deregulation at my parents' knee...
...Then I had signed autographs for hours...
...Their service is amazingly good, amazingly improved, food excellent, truly rare in today's impoverished airline world...
...In the car on the way back from Furman to Greenville, I had listened to a series of war poems on the Hugh Hewitt Show...
...On the other hand, I don't like being thought of as subhuman and unworthy of membership solely because of my ethnicity and religion...
...I can still feel myself seething with rage whenever I drove by the restricted Chevy Chase Club in (of course) Chevy Chase, Maryland, and thinking similar thoughts when I walked by the (formerly restricted) Metropolitan Club in D.C...
...One of the men introduced me to a group of college girls who (according to the men at the bar) had been drinking there for about four hours...
...I awakened only when we came by the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia...
...I am beginning to wonder if deregulation of anything was a good idea...
...And as for me, after seething about it for a while, I turn it over to God...
...Thus, today, my travel day, I felt fantastically tired...
...However, I am told that this is not really a problem because there are a lot of girls' schools nearby and a lot of social life on campus...
...I gave her a large tip and thanked her, but no thanks would really be adequate...
...People are extremely sensitive about rejection, and if we people feel that we are being rejected because of something we were born with instead of some act we did or didn't do, we get angry...
...How about Jimmy Stewart...
...This student should really be in a glass cage at a Museum of Liberal Thought...
...Her name is Kelly Greene, and she is Southern hospitality at its very, very best...
...There we are, an island set about by hostile people who are jealous of us, ready to harm us in any way, and we are still so good-natured...
...He was amazingly smart and knew a lot, and he said that was typical of Hampden-Sydney...
...Look at what's happened to the stock brokerages—they have to turn to all kinds of shenanigans and tricks to make money now that the commission structure has been deregulated...
...We got a bit lost and had to go to the Poinsett Club, an elegant place in the heart of town, to ask directions...
...Cloud, where very kindly students had amused me all day until my speech by taking me to get various good things to eat...
...It was not really as good as it was the last time, but it was still plenty good...
...Just for the record, I, your servant, do not make any claim to any kind of purity at all about my behavior...
...I slept late, then had lunch at Fuddrucker's with the students...
...They fought with a courage in World War I that will last through all time...
...But the LACC and its ilk do represent a current in conservative behavior that turns off vital groups of voters...
...Why are the people who died in the World Trade Center, as precious as they were and are, any more precious than the ones who died fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan or Iraq...
...My son is away at boarding school for his own good...
...I asked him about the LACC...
...Anyway—as I like to say—I called a longtime pal who is a member of the LACC and asked him on his answering machine if he would care to recommend me for membership...
...Am I missing something here...
...The guys were all super patriotic and enthusiastic about Mr...
...Anyway, blissful sleep...
...I flew from Appleton, Wisconsin—which, by the way, is where one of my favorite political characters, Joe McCarthy, is from and where he is buried—to Cincinnati, and from there to Greenville, South Carolina...
...I had to borrow thirty thousand dollars to go to school here at this place, and now when I graduate, they expect me to pay it back...
...What if World War II had been reported only in terms of the casualties that the Allies were causing to the German and Japanese civilian population...
...That was just what the doctor ordered: nice salty popcorn...
...An amazing place where Richard Helms took my father and me to lunch years ago—may God rest their souls—and told me he had interviewed Hitler in 1937 and Hitler was not at all insane...
...It went something like this: What can we, the living, ever do to make it up to the ones who gave their lives for us...
...This place is booming...
...Hampden-Sydney is a stunningly beautiful campus, with rolling lawns and hills and immense trees, called, if I recall, Bradford pear trees...
...Downtown Greenville was charming too...
...Why not...
...If anyone is reading this who is a member of the Poinsett Club, Greenville, South Carolina, and would like to recommend me for membership, please let me know...
...It was well and truly stuck, plus it was very slippery with saliva (yuck) and hard to grasp...
...My student driver got me a bit lost—I hoped and prayed we would not wind up in a ditch—and then miraculously we were at the hotel...
...And how am I supposed to do that...
...Then off into the southern Virginia night for a drive to Richmond to stay at the lovely Omni Richmond...
...Or Martha Raye...
...My line of thought is that the main asset I now "own"—if "own" is the right word—is my time with my wife and son...
...I was planning to just hang out here, but I want to hang around with wifey, not by myself...
...the only problem is that they're all boys...
...Car dealerships are temples to the demigods of America, vehicles that can take us around at speed and in comfort...
...I flossed, as usual, but the flossing thread broke and got caught between some evil teeth in the back of my mouth...
...The whole idea that just as a blanket matter I am thought to be verboten because I am Jewish or because I am in show biz really upsets me...
...I first got to thinking about Hampden-Sydney in 1997 when a young man from that school really cleaned my clock on Win Ben Stein's Money...
...It was either that or go to the local hospital...
...He was also very friendly...
...The Confederate museum was tiny, but had a lot of documents, flags, photos, archival material, guns...
...There is a fine organization called the Folded Flag Foundation that takes in donations and gives the money to the families of military killed in fighting for us...
...He said he would, but offered no hope...
...How about Bob Hope who spent years entertaining the troops...
...This is mistaken but it has enough truth to it to be a hindrance to the party and to the nation...
...If we can give millions to each World Trade Center family, why not to the families of the fighting men and women who sacrifice their lives for us...
...I love a lot that Fox just says "we" when they refer to our armed forces and endlessly makes clear who the bad guys and good guys are...
...So I changed my reservations, made a few calls to people I had planned to see in D.C., and rushed to the airport...
...Bezos, the head of Amazon...
...It is too complex for little me to try to figure out what the exact rights and wrongs are here...
...In Greek and Roman mythology, didn't gods basically have the powers that ordinary Americans have...
...The current leadership of France is a moral disgrace to humanity, but of French courage there cannot be any doubt...
...A knot of people recognized me and shook my hand, especially the black men who worked at the bar...
...I had enjoyed a great reception in St...
...In a flash, she had grasped the hanging floss and pulled it out...
...It, JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...It is a large, ultraclean simulacrum of a beach, men climbing up a cliff and men dying in various gruesome postures...
...Well, can it...
...None of them were especially drunk...
...Alas, despite my request that he do so, my driver did not wake me up when we passed only a few miles from Appomattox, which I had really wanted to see...
...It sort of creeps up on you and eats you up...
...I don't have any idea of how long I will live, and in fact I could leave this earth at any moment...
...This pal took a very long time to call back but finally did just as I was getting made up for Star Search...
...Then I went to a lovely room at the Westin Poinsett Hotel to unpack and then to a nighttime tour of Furman, a startlingly beautiful school set on a lake with magnificent trees everywhere...
...The other side likes to paint the whole GOP as having that eau de LACC hanging over it...
...The local junior high is only a block from my house, and I notice more black kids there every year...
...Plus, I have been away from home for a week now, and I really, really miss my wife...
...We just continue working hard and making our way...
...You often see black people and white people eating at the same restaurants, but not at the same tables...
...It calls up images of mobs beating Jews to death with steel rods...
...The kids took me to a great restaurant called (as I recall) Soby's, where I had a fine meal amidst a throng of happy, talkative people...
...What a stinking mess this deregulation thing turned out to be...
...She sat and visited with me and then introduced me to her boyfriend, a bartender...
...My choice, again, but for his own good as even he now realizes...
...WEDNESDAY Greenville, South Carolina Now, this has been an interesting day...
...And it is a rapidly wasting asset...
...Sure enough, fewer than five minutes later, a pretty young woman appeared at my door...
...But I am a hell-raiser in many ways, so just be aware...
...Then you could hear her talk about her oppression and exploitation, and in the meantime she would be drinking and wearing designer clothing...
...Walter M. Bortz III, who used to be at GW, right near my apartment at the Watergate, and I have the distinct feeling that I know him...
...SUNDAY While we're on the subject of national purity and ideology, let's talk about Bill Bennett...
...I went to sleep wishing I had offered to help that woman move to Canada...
...I told my pal that this seemed like a rather flimsy pretext to keep out Jews...
...But isn't organized crime supposed to have something to do with drugs...
...It calls to mind images of Jews being rounded up and sent to gas chambers...
...So here I am...
...I love golf courses, love fresh air, and so I thought of joining acountry club...
...Paul airport...
...They were in closing mode, but they kindly stayed open to feed me a rare cheeseburger...
...It seems to me that forgiving a $30,000 debt is a small price to pay for getting rid of a complaining, antisocial witch...
...I do think that I should get a prize for walking about ten miles in the airport from gate to club...
...It can't happen, can it...
...And they fought very hard in Vietnam and Algeria...
...Are they somehow subhuman because they risked their lives to entertain our soldiers...
...Let's see, if we paid people to move to Canada, what a lot of problems that would solve...
...Truth to tell, it's depressing...
...Lots of applause, lots of teary faces at the emotional close, lots of people asking for autographs, and lots of people wishing me well...
...By the way, I don't buy that notion of the French all being cowards...
...He told me that even clubs like the famously "restricted" (against Jews and blacks) Los Angeles Country Club were now open to Jews like me...
...I know I say it all of the time, but I am getting to another point here, and you'll have to read just a little bit more to get to it...
...I seethed as I did about how mean-spirited ABC News was, but then that's an old story...
...FRIDAY Roanoke & Richmond, Virginia Areluctant goodbye to Kelly Greene, Greenville, and the kind people at Furman, and then a lightning trip to Charlotte, a change of planes, and then on to Roanoke, where a limo driver took me through southern Virginia as I slept...
...North and South, generally speaking, we Americans are just so cheerful it brings tears to my eyes...
...I switched on the TV to watch the war...
...And let's not forget that the French were decisive in the Revolution in helping us win the Revolutionary War...
...The only thing we are lacking is immortality, and faith takes care of that...
...Plus, this kind of smear at Hollywood and at Jews by a sort of prototypical Main Street Babbitt-like entity, filled, most likely, with Republicans, is keenly felt and understood by Hollywood—however intuitively—and tends to lead to a strong reaction against the GOP by Hollywood, by show biz everywhere, by Jews, and probably by blacks and Hispanics too...
...I want to spend as much of this time as I can with my wife, my best friend and best companion and support...
...The club looked lovely...
...I don't steal...
...But my wife is at home and I want to be at home with her...
...Look at what has happened to the phone companies...
...The word is Democrats...
...Well, anyway, we Jews don't demonstrate or picket over such things...
...So I am off on my merry way to be with the most important person on earth, my wife...
...It was never a great idea...
...And it has saved his life and ours...
...Then again, maybe I am wrong...
...This is really, really rare in Los Angeles or New York...
...As I said to one of my favorite friends recently, "There's a word for people who are always bitching and moaning about how bad America is...
...I pointed out the problem and opened wide...
...In Greenville it seems to happen a lot...
...The kids look smart and alert...
...Never have I had such a sense of relief in such a short time...
...The food is only fair, but I noticed something fascinating...
...There are other clubs and there are fine pay-to-play courses open to the public all around here...
...I had a full day of travel the next day and I was worried...
...That means he was helping to fight against drugs, not for drugs...
...My time with him is limited in the extreme...
...Then, a kind alum and father of a student invited me down and offered to pay part of the fare...
...Well, the problem is," he said in a matter of fact way, "the club doesn't take people in your world...
...Still, I ended the evening with ice cream from the Marble Slab and felt as if I had lived there my whole life...
...The buildings are old and lovely...
...How on earth do they think that we business people are going to get around if the government sits on its high horse and won't bail out the airlines...
...I think I'll just sign on now and give them some money and then I'll be back...
...It's been four years now and my parents are still dead, and everything I see at the apartment reminds me that they are dead and this really is making me crazy...
...I do know that racism stinks, and there seems to be a big, green, leafy swath of it just a few blocks from my house...
...One of them struck me like a sledgehammer...
...It did not really compare with the fabulous museum at the Franklin Battlefield in Franklin, Tennessee—the best small Civil War museum I have ever seen, for the power of its exhibits—but it was still impressive...
...Actually, I spent most of it at the Northwest Club, and it was a nice place except for a few drunk people talking too loud into their cell phones...
...None at all...
...And their bitterness almost always takes the form of feeling a wildly exaggerated sense of entitlement and an infantile belief that the world owes them a living, and a damned good one at that, whether they do anything at all constructive or not...
...None...
...Not that this will stop me for a minute from being a Republican or loving George W. Bush...
...Anyway, after the trip to the D-Day Memorial I got back in the car and fell asleep...
...I don't see why I should be away from her another night...
...Then there could be Carol Moseley Braun next to her and Howard Dean next to them, and they could all be talking about how horrible America is while living off the fat of the land...
...I have managed to do so for some years...
...Well, in any event, he's a true gent and the school generally seems to me to be a school for elegant Southern gentlemen...
...But it hung down into my mouth and made me crazy...
...And what about that...
...And it so happens that the Los Angeles Country Club is a very short drive or a long walk from our home in Beverly Hills...
...But let's think about this for a minute...
...It really shows you all sides of the French and is fascinating, if heartbreaking...
...Then my speech, which went very well indeed, and then back to my room, where disaster lurked...
...They are close to bankruptcy...
...They just did not have good leadership and were wildly out-maneuvered and out-weaponed by the Germans...
...Great speed, ability to move through time and space almost instantly, ability to conjure changes of situation...
...It took awhile, but maybe I can boil it down...
...But it does hurt, in the year 2003, to have a club nearby where the members think they are better than I am for no good reason...
...There is a funereal air about American Airlines these days, by the bye...
...Alas, I don't really drink alcohol, but I did drink soda and ate popcorn...
...They are just a highly morally conflicted people, not really sure of which side they are on and very much infected with jealousy about us, the New World hegemonists...
...She was the bartender from the bar in the lobby...
...WEDNESDAY L ately, I have been wanting to take up golf...
...Then, a big social moment...
...I am paraphrasing a bit...
...She had a pair of tweezers in her pocketbook...
...Through some more lovely Virginny countryside, and then on to Farmville, another town of Civil War significance, and then to Hampden-Sydney College, where I am to speak...
...Wow, I hope not...
...I have a long history of ambivalent feelings about restricted country clubs...
...Oh well...
...She seemed happy altogether, and that was a pleasure to behold...
...She was extremely enthusiastic about her employer and especially about Mr...
...If you want to seea movie about what the French are really like, try The Sorrow and The Pity...
...We Americans worship our cars...
...Then I was picked up at the Appleton Airport (modern and immaculate) by two students...
...What to do about it I will leave to someone else...
...They drove me through the Minnesota night to a McDonald's (also filled with friendly people) styled like a 1950s McDonald's...
...But as I say, she told me anyway...
...I want to be a teacher and teachers don't get paid enough to pay it back...
...Taking a stand of holier-than-thou purity about the free market while the airlines collapse is probably as close to the ultimate in idiocy I have ever witnessed...
...They fought hard and took immense casualties for a short war in World War II...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
