Ben Stein's Diary/Comrades and Patients
Stein, Benjamin J.
art Werthback, head of German countterintelligence, recently told me that he had come to the conclusion that the Stasi were suffocating themselves in vast, unmanageable mounds of information they...
...80m away...
...I think she was flirting with me...
...Tell me the part again about the collagen injections...
...In an instant, I was asleep...
...IMs working with Kunze's wife Elisabeth were "to give Frau Dr...
...Comrade R. lives across from Kunze, and by opening the window can keep watch on Nr...
...But to take advantage of a woman who has MS: God help that man...
...Yep, I'm a happening guy...
...But the worst problems I have at this stage of my life—loneliness, general lassitude, worrying about money—are all so small by comparison with what happens to people in this world that I sometimes laugh out loud with gratitude when I think about the contrast...
...Naturally, others might have different views...
...This is a great day...
...She resumed work—at a job I had gotten her in a desperate effort to make her love me—and resumed her usual shenanigans of mockery and contempt, as if possibly they night help her treatment...
...The audience really roared, and the comedienne looked as if she might kill me...
...live, I woke up tired and with a sore throat...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...
...the Stasi continued its efforts to damage the author's reputation and professional standing by using "contacts in the Western media...
...Information recently uncovered in Stasi documents indicates MN agents were to place a poisonous substance, which would enter the victim's bloodstream on contact, on the door handle of Eigendorfs car...
...Why...
...Is this one of your uppity jokes...
...Now hold me upside down, Daddy," he said and laughed a laugh as sweet as salvation...
...John Kissell, Los Angeles Copley's Daily Breeze "Crackling entertainment...references to the Chandler family are scarcely veiled...
...In his cavernous waiting room, there 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 was a picture of some weird-looking Asian man with halos around his head...
...The role I play is of a big nerdy guy who is in line ahead of him at the airport, asking endless questions about bargain airfares and making everyone else in line crazy...
...Benjamin J. Stein is the author of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow...
...It was incredibly good advice...
...I drove home...
...It's only one scene, but I love it a lot...
...Ten thousand surtax on liposuction...
...Bumper to bumper...
...It's almost unbelievable how many of them there are in the City by the Bay...
...I wonder if there are any animal species who live by offering fraudulent comfort to other animals and then fleecing them...
...That, you see, is called being a humorist in modern Amerika...
...The girls were lively, bubbly, very lean and disciplined, often pretty...
...The patients looked lost, stumbling, pitiful...
...Saturday 'm up here in Oregon today with my I erstwhile bride of some twenty-three years ago and my handsome devil bat boy son, the sweetest bat boy on earth, terror of the Unichron, Tommy...
...N., my dinner companion, and in a righteous snit over something that had happened on the set, asked me about what I thought we should do about the terrible state of California's finances...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 29 smoking and drinking, and I didn't like that much either...
...Anyway, today we drove down to Ashland, a small college town where there is a summer Shakespeare festival...
...the woman from North Carolina asked...
...This one is really funny...
...It's paid by her insurance, which means you and me...
...This source informs me that the electrical work in Kunze's home was done by a certain M. . . . He could be used, through a third party, if we want to know what's inside the house...
...We had fish that was distinctly poorer than Mrs...
...It all reminded me of the very early Bob Dylan song about when he was first playing and singing in Greenwich Village and how the man at the place he played loved his music so much he couldn't stand it...
...First," I said, "let's have a tax on nose jobs...
...Za Stalin, I thought to myself, and I said, "I apologize to everyone on the show for not laughing hard enough at Comrade Susan's joke...
...Thesday T he first call I had this morning, I while Mike snored lightly next to me, was from my agent, the redoubtable Pearl...
...Mine aren't so great, either, but that's not what we were talking about...
...Well, maybe we could pay doctors to do it and make the taxpayers pay for that as well...
...He told me it had not gotten picked up, which I already knew, but that it might be a movie, which would be fully buff...
...It's fun having people stare at you and treat you as if you were somebody...
...As we walked down the hall, a narrow, dark hall that reminded me of the hall that the prisoner walked down en route to eternity in Darkness at Noon, I asked W. if we were going to see her neurologist...
...After I talked for a little while, the hostess asked the comedienne to tell one of her feminist jokes...
...My pal, Al, is a judge of the Miss Orange County Pageant...
...An ideal weight would be assigned to each such person, and then the state would weigh each citizen on December 31 of each year, or maybe quarterly, and each person could be taxed $100 per pound of excess weight...
...Because God told us not to kill," I said...
...Kunze to understand that her medical colleagues do not identify with the views of her husband...
...I went to 'Mich's, the world's most overrated fish house...
...Everyone in the audience giggled a little bit, but I was still awaiting thepunch line...
...No traffic...
...Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back...
...You're kidding," I said...
...By far...
...There are still roughly 500 "top sources" of the old MN on West German soil, a number of whom have been taken over by the KGB, according to German intelligence officials...
...n the way down to the parking lot, la in the elevator of fools, I ran into L., who produced a pilot for ABC I was just in...
...This is sort of an object lesson in doing business with your friends...
...It was bitterly cold...
...It looks much the way America looked in 1958, which is how America is supposed to look...
...Twenty--five miles, two hours...
...Tommy asked again...
...I read about Isaac Singer's death...
...Tbn K per breast...
...a sweet, tense dancer...
...If someone had told me that I would have become so much a part of the California—make that L.A.—way of life, the abstemious life of very conspicuous ascetic non-consumption, I would never have believed it...
...In my whole life, no one else has ever been so sadistically cruel...
...I expect to get a statement with many charges from racetracks...
...These sad, lost people get sick, and then have nutritionists and toxin experts with turbans waiting to take advantage of them...
...Eigendorf died in a mysterious auto accident in 1983...
...Friday Off to Disneyland...
...He's 63 and the most optimistic, the most cheerful and well-adjusted human being I know...
...Paul's Fish Sticks, and not cheap...
...I'm waiting for the punch line," I answered...
...No," she said...
...Her doctor was not only a nutritionist, but also a Sikh, an expert on toxins, an acupuncturist, and a first-class ganef as far as I was concerned...
...Here in Hollywood, we don't believe in smoking or drinking...
...I refused to buy him a toy and took him—screaming like a banshee—to the car...
...I had a piece of pie at a new bakery, Kapulski, named for a prewar bakery in Warsaw...
...Amazing...
...Why...
...Probably so we wouldn't all be killing each other all the time...
...True, the first call I got this morning was from Moni, the incredibly kind Iranian woman at my bank, telling me I was overdrawn...
...art Werthback, head of German countterintelligence, recently told me that he had come to the conclusion that the Stasi were suffocating themselves in vast, unmanageable mounds of information they were often simply unable to process...
...the hostess asked...
...We hurtled up winding, terrifying mountain roads to a lookout high above a farming valley...
...You're having an attack of MS and you're going to see your nutritionist...
...The star, the hostess, is a genius of timing and expression, and if she just keeps away from the female comedienne we'll be all set...
...We flew up to Medford yesterday to explore southern Oregon, and today the bat boy ran through the forest and climbed over dead trees and stared at ants and squashed them...
...That seems very harsh," she said...
...Wednesday A nyway, let's forget about all of that whining...
...Then a tax on breast implants...
...Fate, gnarled McFate, that old nightclub stand-up act that no one can ever top, had it in for W. Two years or so ago, she was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis and was laid up in the hospital for about a month...
...He grabbed it and said, "Where's my toy...
...It paid almost zilch, which should have been a clue, but wasn't...
...He was asleep in his little bed, or so it seemed...
...But that's not what we tell each other...
...As far as I could tell, they were all available at any drug store...
...Yes, it would be easy to sneer at them...
...She's presently working on her acting career in San Jose, which is a lot like working as a congressional intern in Peru, but I can set her straight...
...We took him to a toy store where he selected a $20 book about spiders...
...There was also a pad under a chair with little ridges and ruffles coming out of it, just right for giving yourself a foot massage...
...The other patients in the tower, crammed into the tiny elevators—why do medical buildings and hospitals never have enough elevators?—looked literally demented with fear...
...and a woman comedienne, which is a sort of contradiction in terms...
...As far as I could tell, the crew from the show were the only Caucasian guests in the hotel...
...Long, long ago...
...But they are putting themselves out there, actually daring to compete, unafraid to show who they are, especially unafraid to show their bodies—in bathing suits, of course—which takes a certain amount of guts...
...There was also a chair that vibrated on command to give yourself a massage while you waited...
...that her husband's public stance does not do service to our state, and that it may have consequences for her and her medical work...
...I would have liked to tell him that the root word of "law" is "protection," not "means for tough scary people to get rich," but it was too early...
...Don't you think you might laugh just as a gesture of loyalty to the show...
...I truly hate his doing that...
...She wasn't...
...It was probably to protect us...
...Wouldn't the costs of weighing and measuring everyone be enormous...
...MfS boss Mielke was so personally incensed by the 1979 defection of soccer star Lutz Eigendorf that he put a contract out on Eigendorf in West Germany...
...It's about a man whose fiancee is kidnapped by a gangster because she reminds him of his departed wife...
...that she, as a doctor and humanist, must feel obliged to deter her husband from such unreflective and impossible activity...
...I was madly in love with her a few years ago, and she was staggeringly mean to me...
...Six hundred dollars for the pilot," Pearl said, and laughed...
...I also loved the contest...
...I stayed in the new San Francisco Hilton...
...I mean scared stiff, twisted, out of their minds...
...ISBN 0-9627297-0-1 —Noy ALLEN A. KNOLL, PUBLISHERS INC...
...We bought some yogurt, played in a park where men wore Birkenstocks and women were overweight, and Tommy demanded a toy...
...He asked me to come and keep him company...
...Comrades Mr...
...The man goes flying off after his fiancee...
...The tab was three hundred bucks...
...This is my nutritionist...
...H. can also use his wife when he's at work...
...Scary, violent-looking Mexicans, and desperate-looking Caucasians...
...I know her through a Chinese friend of a friend and she called and made cooing noises and begged me to be a guest on the show...
...Me sock you, Daddy...
...Or being grossly overweight...
...Al cheered me up...
...A lot more than I have, anyway...
...She would really be impressed if she saw my apartment, which has dog hair and dog drool on every surface and even inside the refrigerator...
...A sucker getting sick every minute, and two nutritionists to take him...
...The audience really laughed at that, and when the show was over, the comedienne would not speak to me and insisted that a different limo take her to the airport from the one we were supposed to share...
...But, when in Rome, as they say —and now I've been in Rome a long time...
...The physician in question was in an unnamed hospital in another part of town...
...On Sunset, mobs of young people yelled and screamed...
...They would like for you to tape another one with the possibility, just the possibility, of being a sort of Ed McMahon-type character and making wisecracks as the show goes along and then just sitting quietly part of the time...
...Then maybe we could have the state of California weigh and measure every taxpayer and child...
...Anyway, I wrote for a few hours about my old pal Michael M., one hell of a guy, and then I had a call from mypal W. She is a beautiful woman of about twenty-nine from Mississippi...
...The reigning Miss California wanted my advice on how to get ahead in Hollywood...
...W. was in the office for two hours, while I read legal cases against Michael M. What a world...
...I think I can live without it," I said...
...Like the idiot I am, I bought it for him...
...Hollywood," he wrote in Lost in America, "is an insane asylum...
...The man there says he loves my songs, says he's wild about the way I play my songs...
...I rolled down the window and a blessed breeze blew over me and Alex...
...F. . . . ca...
...W. showed me the bag of vitamins her doctor had given her...
...lime, it's raining in I the middle of July, in Los Angeles, California...
...They say things like "My ambition is to become President and also to be a really great snow skier" and "I plan to travel around the world preaching peace and also to open a chain of low-overhead fashion outlets and also be a great snow skier" and "My goal is to be Jacques Cousteau's lawyer...
...N. looked thoughtful...
...and Mrs...
...Daddy," he sighed, "a book is not a toy...
...A smart girl, at least she thinks so...
...Comrade H., . . . 68 years old, a pensioner, [also] lives across the way and has denounced Kunze in my presence...
...A December 1972 Stasi report reads: Regarding the individual H. . . . he could be used for operative tasks in Leiningen...
...Although Stasi materials must be considered damaged assets—some files were spirited off to the Soviet Union, others were deliberately falsified, and many, of course, were destroyed—from them flow a rich, textured documentation of one of Eastern Europe's most successful totalitarian projects...
...A little boy at the next table asked me for my autograph, which I liked...
...I was the last "up," as we say...
...I don't know why," I said...
...Three years later, frustrated that "the current political situation [i.e., detente] does not permit us to legally bring Kunze to accountability for his literary activity," the Stasi decided to move against him under Guideline 1/76, by initiating the "systematic organization of failure, both in career and socially, with the aim of undermining the self-esteem of the individual...
...65-70 years old, live directly across the way...
...That's humor, Comrade Susan...
...And from them one begins to grasp why it will take the East Germans quite some time before they are free to leave the past behind...
...Here, verbatim, is the joke: "You see, we girls tell men that size doesn't matter...
...Just as I did, he socked me on the jaw, and laughed joyously...
...H. can see Kunze's property from his home . . . ca...
...Yes, Disneyland...
...It was the only time I have ever slept by the side of a road...
...Like the way the Chinese make execution victims' families pay for the bullets...
...M.'s sister is married to a comrade at the police station in Greiz...
...And the waiter lost my credit card...
...Kunze first became a problem for the East German regime when he expressed his sympathy for the Prague Spring in 1968...
...Kunze may consider himselflucky, though...
...She seemed so little and scared and terrified and wasted that it was hard to believe she had ever had such power over by Benjamin J. Stein me...
...This is a new thing for me, turningdown offers...
...After I drove her there, W. sort of shuffled along, and I had to hold her up...
...I Ask for it at B. Dalton Booksellers, Waldenbooks, and fine independent bookstores I Or order directly from the publishers by calling: (800) 777-7623...
...Or eating animals...
...Not only do I get to play against Nicholas Cage, an actor I like, but I also get to shoot the scene in a sound stage right next-door to the set that was (so I am told) Tara in Gone With the Wind Oh, happy day.Friday A trip to San Francisco to be in a pilot of a new talk show...
...SL Martin's Press...
...I was so scared from the drive that I pulled over and closed my eyes...
...As we talked about my career, W. looked at me with an almost indescribable melancholy, as if she were already across the river Styx and had just had her first sip of nepenthe, but still wanted one last look at the land of the living...
...Don't laugh...
...Determined to make it in the TV business, and makes up in toughness and aggression for everything she lacks in intelligence...
...W.," I said, "I'm just going to assume that you're kidding...
...This epic of the private demons of the people who helped build the City of Angels is as fun as a highminded gossip column...
...With the patients on wheels...
...The harassment did not cease when the Kunzes finally emigrated to West Germany...
...Publishers Weekly 600 pages hardcover...
...Only moments later, I got a call from my commercial agent, asking me if I would do a commercial for a large national chain of shoe stores for $300...
...I was I on with a famous English actress whose sister is involved with all sorts of Bolshevik and pro-Arab causes...
...I think it was lying in a meadow in Santa Cruz, long ago, also with Alex, while another breeze came up...
...You know that talk show you did in San Francisco...
...Thank God for the trust fund that came with Itixie...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY COMRADES AND PATIENTS Thesday isa great day...
...I have the terrible feeling that there are...
...Ten minutes on one set...
...In casing their victim, the MIS was amply assisted...
...I think so," Pearl agreed...
...It's fun being famous...
...Almost everyone around us was Buy One Book For Only $23.45 Nothing more to buy EVER THE PAPER DYNASTY THEODORE ROOSEVELT GARDNER II The explosive story of the most remarkable family in America, The Paper Dynasty is a thrilling, monumental, four generation saga...true as only fiction dares to be...
...Blowin' my lungs out for a dollar a day," goes the song...
...And I did...
...I bent over to give him a big kiss on his little three-year-old cheek...
...When I got to LAX, I drove over to see my son, the world's handsomest devil bat boy from heaven sent by God, Timmy Stein...
...I've . . . used him often as a source...
...The Stasi carefully outlined behavior for its IMs...
...The wife is the sister of H.F., who works for the MIS in Gem...
...I blew that one off, too...
...Hookers stared at passing cars...
...Timmy," I said, "I just bought you that book...
...he asked...
...Dollar a day's worth...
...Yes, and he's also going to press my pressure points to determine if I might have some elevated levels of toxins in my system which might require a high colonic...
...asked the comedienne...
...A real one...
...So I agreed...
...It was a cutthroat drive...
...Anyway, we love Oregon, and plan to move there very soon...
...Timmy looked at me like Bob Bork used to look at me in my Constitutional Law class, with mixed pity and contempt...
...Insults, belittlements, rejection, every kind of mockery, and other bad stuff...
...He's often at home and in the evenings can watch Kunze's front door at all times...
...I learned about it from none other than the greatest agent in Hollywood, or at least the richest, Michael Ovitz...
...Why aren't you laughing...
...What am I? The Ford Foundation...
...I got another part in a movie...
...When you have a reasonable position," he said, "just stay with your position...
...It all broke my heart...
...I love it...
...Of her two hours, W. spent twenty minutes with the doctor and the rest with assistants...
...I can hardly recall thelast time I knew such peace...
...I stopped him and told him he was not to kill things unless he had to...
...Not at all...
...Don't tell Captain Doolittle, but the Asians havetotally taken over San Francisco...
...How much do I get paid...
...A student at the university of Jena was to raise questions in dissident circles about the authenticity of the author's anti-socialist beliefs by posing questions like "Why is it that nothing ever happens to Kunze...
...He looked really pained...
...The "nurses," if that's what they were, wore turbans and long white dresses...
...T he next day, we did our show...
...The only calm people were the little children, heading for Disneyland...
...Maybe a few hundred for collagen in the lips and cheeks...
...I was solicited for this by a woman named N., a sort of pretty woman of about fifty from North Carolina...
...Five thou per nostril...
...She was calling, in tears, to tell me that she was having a bad relapse of MS, and that she could not drive but needed to see her doctor...
...An older Miss California—probably as old as 25—took off her high-heeled shoe and put on my huge, battered, pathetic old one, to show everyone how much bigger my shoe was than hers...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
