Ben Stein's Diary/Rock Bottom
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY Rock Bottom by Benjamin J. Stein Monday M y beautiful but difficult neighbor T., the stunning blonde from Mississippi who works in the music business, made me promise I would go...
...Fatigue...
...My mother just got back from Israel," Jane said...
...It takes you away, amuses you, uplifts, makes melancholy, accesses that upstairs room of the soul that other forms of communication often cannot reach...
...Toys of misshapen creatures...
...I owned a few hundred shares of that stock in the early 1980s and it never went anywhere...
...Anyway, I watched President Bush's speech...
...Then I called my assistant Susan, who told me that a reporter from Channel 13 was on his way to ask me for my comic views of the State of the Union message...
...CI 52 The American Spectator April 1992...
...I turned on the TV and saw an interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...In concerts, you also get a form of communion with your fellow humans that ends loneliness for a time (and then makes you grateful for it when it comes...
...A visit with my devil boy...
...Friday Whenever I touch the Constitution of the United States of America in any real-life way, it's electrifyingly magnificent...
...There's a point to music, even rock music...
...We watched the pretty people come and go and ate our salads...
...Loss...
...I like the slogan...
...The girls behind the counter are pretty, sweet young women from Ventura County, not tough hags from L.A...
...She still cries when she talks about her baby brother...
...Then we wait in a community room that is used on some days for court, on others for Al-Anon, and on still others for the Book Fair...
...These folks went to Yale slightly after yours truly...
...On the other hand, he is a lead-pipe cinch to be bailed out by his opponents, none of whom stands over one inch tall as far as I can tell...
...It's a band led by my idol David Bowie, a true genius...
...You go to traffic school so the moving violation points get taken off your record...
...I was pulled over by a sheriff's deputy...
...Then there's the Clinton family...
...Loneliness...
...She was at Bergen-Belsen...
...Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...Trixie came along...
...Anyway, I am definitely going to save my pennies to contribute to George Bush for President...
...No one was afraid...
...The music was loud, and our ears hurt when we left, but everyone was smiling and happy, and we certainly wanted to hear the music, to hear Mickey talk about Zuma Beach (where I now live) and Wild Horses...
...Anyway, she was at this ceremony where they honored four Jewish girls who were partisans and somehow got into some gas chambers and jammed them up so they wouldn't work and maybe even destroyed some of them, and then they got caught and hanged...
...T. and I rendezvoused at 10:00 p.m...
...Sometimes I see hoodlums riding around here in Camaros with guitar cases in back and bumper stickers that read "If the music's too loud, you're too old...
...Al Greene, Bad Company, even John Lennon and the Faces...
...At camp, my mother and her sister would have two cups of water per day...
...There," he said, "now you have lots of moneys...
...Horrible, grotesque bikers...
...To get to the punch line right away, at the concert there was a mob of miserable-looking people all dressed in black, many young people with pins and rings through their faces, about half of them with leather jackets...
...The Gestapo came to pick her family up in 1940...
...T. and I left after about fifteen minutes, and after dropping her off, I called D., another friend in the music business...
...When did young people start to mutilate themselves...
...He was a very good boy and ate his pizza and his bread sticks...
...It was January 31 and a perfect, clear eighty degrees here in my America...
...She still has dye on her finger tips...
...But, and this is a big but, has anyone drawn the obvious point about that hair-controlling thing, that headband of jet black she always wears to keep her brains from exploding outward in rage...
...The mandatory wearing of condoms over the heads of the top officials of the National Organization for Women...
...She was all in black (rock style), and I wore my pink Brooks Brothers shirt and red sweater (Columbia College Class of 1966 style...
...Now it's up by 800 times...
...at my condo...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY Rock Bottom by Benjamin J. Stein Monday M y beautiful but difficult neighbor T., the stunning blonde from Mississippi who works in the music business, made me promise I would go with her to a concert by Tin Machine...
...There's something scary here...
...188 pages / $16.95 cloth "An American semi-resident and full-time aficionado of Hong Kong takes a close and gimlet-eyed look at the 1984 agreement . . . that paved the way for the 1997 transfer of power...
...I took him to dinner at a pizza place he favors...
...Big names...
...Then I remembered that I couldn't kill myself this morning because I have to be on a cable comedy channel, Comedy Central, to comment on President Bush's State of the Union Address...
...Is it some sort of overcrowding of rats in a cage phenomenon...
...Now, when I was in high school, I used to go to rock 'n' roll concerts at the old Uline Arena in D.C...
...It's like a sunset over Malibu with Mozart's Requiem playing and Cybill Shepherd in my arms...
...She went to a ceremony...
...Failure...
...Tax credits for those who employ really good-looking Scandinavian nannies...
...When did human beings decide to exert themselves to look ugly...
...After law school, I had a girlfriend who worshipped Mick Jagger...
...People talked about how happy they were that they were alive and not sticking a needle into their arms...
...He could not have been more polite...
...The passers-by threw back their heads and laughed in the sun...
...Yes, I have noticed it, and it worries me a lot...
...I love being interviewed, so now I can't kill myself until after that interview, the State of the Union address, my comments on it, and then dinner, and it's very possible that, after all that, I'll be too tired to even load my gun...
...The Shirelles...
...When I took him home, he ran to his room and got his dinosaur bank, which I had given to his mother so many yearsand tears ago...
...He asked me how fast I was going and so forth, and then apologetically gave me a ticket...
...To have law school classes taught at state mental hospitals...
...In Los Angeles, you do not just pay tickets...
...It was my mother's job to cut them down...
...She's been a beautician in Queens for forty years and now she's retired...
...Her brother was a baby, so they just shot him so they wouldn't have to transport him to camp...
...Not as bad as Clinton...
...What better channel for the energy and craftiness of the demented than law school and the eventual practice of law...
...Jane started to cry in the dazzling Los Angeles sunshine...
...Now, what shall we do with all this money ?" "Buy me toys, of course," he said...
...told Tommy he could only have a very cheap toy because Daddy was poor and didn't have any money...
...I like it a lot, but there is much more that needs to be done: •A federal grant to develop a truly good domestic bottled water...
...That'll be at 6:30 our time, and then I'll kill myself...
...They would drink one and use one to bathe...
...You got it, Jack...
...Off to a show I am taping at Universal City Studios...
...Instead, they would sue people, get entangled in civil procedure disputes, and actually become self-supporting...
...I don't know if this is why I studied for all of those years at the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...Back and forth along Sunset, the Camaros and Porsches roared...
...So, off to court this morning...
...When Britain agreed to allow the People's Republic of China to take over Hong Kong in 1997, British officials explained that the Communist Chinese were reforming and would allow the colony to continue its dynamic capitalist ways...
...We all talk to him as if we were old pals, and he gives us either eight- or fourteen-hour traffic school...
...The Platters...
...Was the Defense Department doing some kind of secret test by spraying PCP in the law library after 1970...
...Fifteen ninety-nine...
...Thank you," I said...
...We sit on folding chairs...
...I play a teacher in one part and a producer in another...
...The music was beautiful, bewitching, even if sometimes anarchic...
...Then we went across the street to the Tehran Rexall, as I call the drug store in the Beverly Center, It's a huge store, and obviously many a mosque in Qum was emptied to fill it with its usual clientele...
...Maybe so...
...It's a kids show pilot for Saturday morning television...
...It was our law, all of us together, whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, men, women, Hispanics, rich, poor, middle-class, writers, actors, carpenters...
...He brought it to me while I was watching MTV, and emptied its contents on the bed...
...Horses for courses...
...His well-wrought and inarguable conclusion: perfidious Albion . . . more or less sold out Hong Kong to the dictatorship in Beijing...
...I'm also starting to get a little concerned about something else...
...I have to wonder: When did toymakers purposely start to make toys ugly...
...Then I went to a meeting that I now call "Voyage into Self-Obsession...
...I drove into town and met my pal Jane H. for lunch at an outdoor cafe on Sunset Strip...
...So now I won't kill myself at least until dinner time...
...On my way home, I heard that Bush was going to repeal the luxury tax on yachts...
...I got dressed and read some correspondence, including a cryptic note from Michael Eisner sending back the Christmas card I sent him a few weeks ago...
...Killer pig toys...
...Tommy ran for the toy department and started to paw through the inventory...
...We went to Rolling Stones concerts at RFK Stadium in Washington, at Madison Square Garden in New York, maybe somewhere in San Francisco, too, as I think about it...
...Did Yale start putting LSD in the water fountains of Sterling law dorms...
...That way, schizophrenics (you can see it's on my mind) would be so fully occupied that they would have no time for writing their names in feces on their cell walls...
...I was taking my sister to dinner at Granita and we were late...
...All of us traffic culprits file up to a counter to beassigned a room...
...McGurn—formerly a reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal—examines the 1984 Joint Declaration, Britain's failure to enforce it, and the resultant plight of Hong Kong's 5.8 million citizens...
...This is what leads people to suicide...
...I lay, in bed hugging Trixie, wondering if I should take pills, shoot myself, or what...
...Horrible-looking mutant turtles...
...In college, I went to concerts at the Lincoln Center featuring Bob Dylan and Joan Baez...
...Mass-culture vouchers for the elderly, to be used for movie admissions, to bail out Hollywood...
...I ducked out of the meeting to listen to my saintly father talking about the State of the Union message on my car radio...
...Even the judge, who is called a commissioner, sits only on a battered chair behind a bridge table...
...The judge issued a gentle warning to one man who had failed to appear for a prior hearing, and that was it...
...Booklist Available at bookstores or through National Book Network, 1-800-462-6420 ISBN 0-89633-162-8 ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER The American Spectator April 1992 51 "Faute de mieux," for those in Cajun country...
...All sparked by a story in the Wall Street Journal about some stock called TCI that's gone up by an incredible factor of 800 since 1975...
...Ear plugs...
...Wednesday Up in the middle of the night, comme d'habitude, to worry about my future and my past...
...There was deafening, indecipherable waves of noise from the stage, and, right behind where T. and I were standing, a man selling ear plugs...
...Of course...
...His mother was next to me, and she asked him what he was doing...
...The man who ran the restaurant made her a salad of bread and chicken, then brought her a bowl of water...
...Still, is it just coincidence that George Bush and Michael Milken have the same publicist...
...Actually, it was pretty good, even if it didn't incorporate my proposals...
...Slime toys...
...People wear ear plugs all the time at concerts," she said...
...A young man with cut-off jeans, a shaved head, and a series of rings through his eyebrows (which were shaved, too...
...Sort of a kids' version of Candid Camera...
...Here's my point...
...Now, everyone has noticed that she's a maniac control freak...
...As I studied this merchandise, I also noticed the folks buying it...
...It's a drug, but in moderation it's no worse than the occasional Chardonnay...
...She was there most of the war...
...But, now that I think about it, what an idea...
...Is it Hillary Clinton...
...Is it the Iranians...
...Tuesday D oo-doo happens...
...The recent Yale Law School grads who have been put on display have a certain intense, peering looniness about them...
...My main role is to stare into the camera and say "QUIET—NO TALKING" in a very aggressive way...
...I love music...
...My own particular favorite is Bill Clinton, who looks so disingenuous, so schizophrenically divorced from his real feelings, has a face so utterly disconnected from genuine emotion, that he makes Jimmy Carter look like Abraham Lincoln...
...I could tell T. was humiliated at my not wearing black, but she bit her lip and we went over to The Palladium...
...We knew we had broken it, and we knew that punishment would be fair but friendly...
...Or maybe if the music's too loud, it's not music...
...I mention this because about two months ago, I was speeding, and I mean speeding, along the Pacific Coast Highway in my battered Acura...
...I counted it," he said in his adorable four-and-a-half-year-old voice...
...A young woman of substantial girth with tight denim shorts and red, dyed hair and at least five earrings in each ear...
...What is the point...
...Morning at my house in Malibu...
...otherwise your insurance kills you...
...Show me a member of the House committee staff that impeached my beloved RN, and I will show you a man or woman who lives by ambition and hate...
...When I worked at the Wall Street Journal, covering pop culture, among other things, I went to dozens of rock concerts...
...Is it the collapse of education in the late 1960s...
...The audience was rapt...
...They giggle and laugh as they give us our paperwork...
...But ear plugs...
...Yale is not supposed to be a synonym for Camarillo State Hospital or Willowbrook...
...50 The American Spectator April 1992 •National recognition that America, and not just Malibu, is a shared human-dolphin environment...
...Likewise, everyone has noticed that she's got a look of rage and strain on her face...
...In 1962, when Dylan turned music upside-down, I can recall sitting so close to him that I could see the spittle coming out of his harmonica as he played "It Ain't Me Babe...
...He obligingly got a bucket of slime and a slime-thrower...
...Their child (yes, their child) with one of those horrible biker-child haircuts where the hair falls down the back of the head while it's fairly short on top...
...It's monumentally perfect...
...Little Richard...
...The Moonglows...
...So, even though I had not been to a rock concert in fifteen years and had not missed them one bit, I agreed to go...
...Besides, they said, by then Hong Kong would have a working representative government...
...Or that George Bush's history teacher at Andover was fond of saying, "Ahh, Poppy Bush—one of the worst students I ever had...
...I felt glad about it, too, and my mood started to improve...
...Anita Hill, Susan Hoerchner, and John Doggett are the ones I was thinking about at first, but there werea few others whose faces appeared during the Thomas hearings who worried me...
...Thirty-three moneys...
...It really makes you wonder why they bother to go...
...Screamin' Jay Hawkins...
...PERFIDIOUS ALBION THE ABANDONMENT OF HONG KONG 1997 by William McGurn foreword by William F. Buckley, Jr...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
