Ben Stein's Diary / My Private Idaho
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY My Private Idaho by Benjamin J. Stein Monday N ow, this is like old times, or the good old days, or something like that. Staci, one of my two original Valley Girls, now a...
...It showed her wearing a sash that identified her as Miss Idaho Teen 1993...
...As soon as I do, I'll let you know...
...Canada is another country...
...This is going to really, really make you happy...
...Tommy...
...No skinheads...
...I haven't seen any Nazis...
...Staci, one of my two original Valley Girls, now a grown-up 30, has come over to visit her old pal Ben as he searches in musty files for papers...
...Thursday H ere we are, Tommy and Daddy, heading back through Seattle to glorious Los Angeles...
...The girls were from California...
...Oh, sure...
...I asked...
...I see boys Tommy's age who can ride their bicycles into town without Mom and Dad having to stand guard with shotguns...
...she asked me...
...I got so sick of her telling me about her compulsive interest in black men that I told her I didn't want to ever have her work for me again unless she could do so in total silence...
...When they pull me apart with wild horses...
...It's sort of a joke...
...Do you, Mr...
...I haven't heard one racist remark...
...The trip back was even more beautiful, with that post-rain glow hanging over the lake and the river and the mountains...
...I'll stay at it until it gets to the Supreme Court...
...Still, it had been a close call...
...No McDonald's, no Burger Kings, no car washes...
...Whose kids are these...
...Well, anyway, it made me uncomfortable, and I was talking to a lawyer who told me that anything that has anything at all to do with sex that comes up at work that makes you uncomfortable is sexual harassment...
...It also had a lovely blonde sandwich-making girl who said she recognized me right away from "The Wonder Years...
...She and her husband are saving to own their own business someday...
...That's the only thing that lasts...
...The other boy belongs to my friend here...
...This was a bluff, but N. bought it...
...The only American besides us was a young woman from Boise who asked me for my autograph...
...I just wanted to see if you had any more work for me...
...You kept talking about sex and I kept asking you to be quiet and help me file...
...For her trouble, I gave her the chance to sell Tommy many pieces of maple candy, and then we headed across the lake...
...No, Daddy's tired," I said...
...Do their moms know where they are...
...I had hired her for one day of helping me file...
...2. Subsidies to the laziest, most violent people in society to produce more children...
...You're dead...
...If you'll recall," I said, "I never even mentioned sex...
...I reached for the book...
...We could see little houses by the water, tucked into the trees...
...On the other side of the lake, at the ferry mooring, we could see down into something like a fjord...
...This is my fourth trip to northern Idaho in a year...
...It was a small...
...Tuesday / ittle Mister Perfect and I are out on Lake 4 Pend'Oreille, in a jet boat...
...And anyway, who even knows who Napoleon was...
...Behind her, on the pine paneling behind the cash register, was a photo of the selfsame woman...
...The people who have been there know better, and I keep wondering how much of what people think they know falls into the same category—imaginary places, imaginary people, imaginary threats, the special, private, imaginary Idaho of the media...
...It's pretty early, so there's no one on the beach except one couple out for a walk...
...To my shock, she chose Madrid...
...This is amazing," she said...
...I told her she should go to Yale and not Harvard, and to Williams as an undergraduate, and I offered to help her, and then we drove back through the night to Sandpoint...
...Peter's nine-year-old son Alex...
...They're both named Napoleon...
...You're going to Idaho...
...When they put burning bamboo under my fingernails...
...There will just be less health care...
...What's that...
...This perfect boy...
...The lake, about a hundred miles long and only about five miles wide—the direction we were going—was covered by low gray, black, and white clouds...
...My estranged wife and I went through hell to get this boy...
...There was another underlit mountain, a family of deer grazing, and the biggest, most vivid rainbow I have ever seen arching over the trees...
...All right...
...Remember how you told me that if I could find a script for you in your files you would buy me a Cadillac...
...I keep looking back to see if Tommy's there, and he keeps shouting "Faster, Daddy, faster...
...This perfect day, and I the inheritor of it all out on a jet boat on Lake Pend'Oreille...
...Your talking about how you needed to exercise a lot because you hadn't been having enough sex made me uncomfortable...
...But a pot of gold," Tommy said...
...On the way, in my little coach seat on Horizon Airlines (another truly great airline, whichsives you adorable delicious little basket dinners of turkey and grapes), I am catching up on my Wall Street Journals...
...He was just a big name...
...I'm already being audited...
...I think people know," I said...
...In the Idaho I know, a tourist never hears a driver honking at another, never sees anyone giving anyone else the finger, never sees threats to life over a parking space...
...How fast does the Concorde go...
...I asked...
...Sometimes I want to just take him out of the car and kiss him until he turns blue...
...Staci, you may recall, was the Val who—when a junior at S.C.—had a choice of going for a semester to Madrid or to London...
...Staci," I said, "this is Napoleon Hill...
...Then she married her high school sweetheart, and then he joined the Marines and she followed him from base to base, had two babies, and then came back to Sandpoint when his hitch was up...
...We have all the money, and when push comes to shove, we always get our way...
...Count on it...
...Scratch a member of any, and I mean any, self-help group, and I will show you someone totally devoid of a sense of humor...
...He didn't mean to buy it at K-Mart...
...But the light is sparkling off the waves in millions of little diamonds, and the sun is behind a thin cloud over the Cabinet Mountains, and there's a large sailboat in the distance towards Hope...
...Behind it there's a green, grassy park...
...I'm being audited for the millionth time, and I have to find out how much I paid for a stock literally six or seven years ago...
...But there is a huge lake, Kootenay Lake, whose fingers run almost to the border, massive forested mountains—the Selkirks, I believe—scary huge cliffs down to the Kootenay River, which feeds the lake, and an occasional picturesque bate along the side of the road...
...In the Idaho I visited, when a driver looks bewildered, locals stop and ask him if he needs directions...
...The thing that's scary is that I really don't want to take that bet...
...It's about fifty miles north of the border, which is itself about fifty miles north of Sandpoint and about twenty-five miles north of Bonner's Ferry...
...No murderers...
...The feminist cadres were probably already writing big-character posters and preparing to demonstrate outside my house and denounce me to the Superior Court...
...Bill and Hillary shall now have the power that only Caesar once had: in peacetime, they can decide who shall live and who shall die...
...How fast does the Space Shuttle go...
...Who was Napoleon...
...she laughed...
...Well, all right," Staci asked...
...The family was from Bonner's Ferry, a small town north of here...
...Now The American Spectator November 1993 59 she gets up at five in the morning to work the breakfast shift, picks up her kids from day care, occupies them, and keeps house...
...Now she's visiting me and she went out to get the mail as the ocean breeze was wafting through my jacarandas and palms...
...She always has crayons for Tommy and a smile and stays to talk about what's new in town...
...my friend from Connecticut said to me over the phone before I left on this trip...
...There's a dock where someone rents aquacycles and two girls are pedaling them through the water...
...Now, if some elderly guy needs a gallbladder operation and there's no money left for that kind of surgery, tough luck, bubby...
...On one side of the curve there's a marina of sailboats gently bobbing in a light swell...
...She's 16, and her name is Jan...
...She plays basketball and volleyball, and also works after school...
...Then, there was heavy rain on the mountain sides just a few miles away, and a slightly under-lit black-and-gray cloud cover over the water...
...Did you bring in any firearms...
...Tough...
...You know how us white men in suits are...
...I love it when that happens...
...As we strolled in, we saw a capable-looking young woman in a waitress's uniform...
...He took my son and me to his carpentry shop, drew a template outline, and then, out of a block of wood, cut out a pirate's pistol, attached a clothes pin, and then took Tommy out in the back yard and taught him how to shoot rubber bands...
...Suddenly she gasped...
...By the way, if you scratch a vegetarian, an organic farmer, a peace etusgraih-e• 58 The American Spectator November 1993 activist, a nutritionist, an exercise trainer, an interior decorator, or a jewelry designer, you're going to face the same problem...
...You're going to Idaho...
...Monday 0 ff to Kootenay Lake, Canada...
...He was Emperor of France...
...Remember...
...I knew the day would come when any crank woman could simply make up anything and then threaten the power of the law to get whatever she wanted...
...Daddy," Tommy asked, "how fast can a twenty-speed bicycle go...
...It's bigger and better than price control—it's life-and-death control...
...How fast does a bullet go...
...In the local newspaper, the Bonner County Bee, I see a stoiy about a middle-aged woman who, with her teenage daughter and retarded son, gave a lift to two girls on a nearby highway...
...I hung up as she was giving me her number, and I thought, oh, yeah...
...Let's see: 1. No-win war in Vietnam...
...At the café of my hotel, the waitress for breakfast is a stunningly beautiful young woman named Nicole...
...under a quote from Napoleon," she said...
...my relative in Brooklyn asked...
...On the streets of Sand Point, I see merchants who remember my name after I've bought two pairs of cotton trousers and remember Tommy's name, too...
...Have a good time...
...The Cultural Revolution—it's here, comrades...
...Not one...
...But who even thinks about him anymore...
...Not the world-famous one...
...But anyway, if you decide to sue, I'm going to counterclaim against you for your sexually harassing me...
...I knew it had to happen...
...I bet ninety-nine out of a hundred people today don't even know who Napoleon was...
...And, of course, there won't be better health care...
...I'm in front, maneuvering it with a stick like an airplane control, and as I pull the red trigger of the thing, it shoots forward like a rocket, rocking and bucking, then finding its plane above the water and simply hurtling forward like a hydroplane...
...60 The American Spectator November 1993 "About five hundred miles per hour," I answered...
...What's the difference...
...There's an unobstructed, 20-mile view across Lake Pend'Oreille to the Cabinet Mountains on the west...
...My old pal, and a very smart guy, John Coyne, says that we tend to make policy mistakes and think we knew they were mistakes, and then, wham, a few years later they're institutionalized as standard policy...
...Well, it made me uncomfortable," she said...
...In the Idaho I know, a new friend offered to get my son a rubber-band gun...
...I'm really not kidding...
...Remember a few months ago I told you what people from my vintage (and Bill and Hillary's) were like at Yale Law School...
...He fathered the Code Napoleon, which codified all the laws of France...
...One day the mother took them shopping with her son...
...She routinely picked up Tommy's thrown french fries, brought him new vanilla milk shakes, as he spilled his, and nodded and then greeted by name every person who came in the door...
...I like it...
...If there's excessive spending by hundreds of millions of Americans, as determined by Bill and Hillary, then Bill and Hillary will just order the spending to stop at a certain point and not go on...
...I wasn't threatening to sue," she said...
...A fter Staci left, I had a call from N., a woman whom I met several months ago when I was still going to Journey Into Self-Obsession, my self-help group...
...There was a small hotel, the La Chance...
...She was a high school girls' basketball star...
...The mother, in northern Idaho, which you've now been thoroughly warned about, said, "We're Christians, and I guess we didn't spend enough time with these people to get our point of view across to them...
...Who even knows his last name...
...I'll give you some work...
...Sunday y 6 6 ou're going back to northern Idaho...
...Ave Caesar, nos morituri to salutamus...
...The air is so clear that I can make out houses on my side of the lake that I know are four or five miles away...
...Oh, by the way, the name of the lovely sandwich-maker girl was Fleur de Neige, which means "snow flower...
...Well," N. said, "I didn't think it was a joke, and I thought you meant you would give me a Cadillac if I had sex with you...
...The police found the car, thoroughly trashed, and then found the girls, who were traveling with a crack dealer with a long arrest record...
...It's like a jet-ski, only it's a boat, and, man, it really goes...
...The passengers were almost all Canadians, readily recognizable by their polite manners, their earth-toned clothing, and their distinct, slightly Scottish accents...
...Fertility clinics, crooked lawyers, actually criminallawyers who forged our names on papers, another lawyer who wanted $5,000 to make sure our baby was "all white," as he said (and this lawyer was in Beverly Hills), and we walked out of his office, and I still am ashamed I didn't report him to the bar (as if they would have done anything...
...The friends from Brooklyn and Connecticut and Hollywood who think they know a terrifying, TV-movie version of Nazi Amerika have never been to Idaho...
...Life, what a wonderful choice," the ads on TV say...
...That's what I see...
...There were even steeper mountains rising out of the lake, and an occasional osprey diving for fish...
...We drove in the late-summer darkness down routes 95 and 2, along the Pack River, past an old sawmill, and past long trucks with rows of lights along and under them...
...No...
...He was one of the most accomplished strategists of all time...
...Daddy, Daddy, let's pull off the road and try to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Tommy screamed...
...At the Safeway, I see checkout clerks who remember that I like red delicious apples and that my son will, if given a chance, try to break their scanners...
...A driving rain came up while we were eating our sandwiches...
...You're quoted here right Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...Bonaparte," I said...
...Haven't seen one racist gesture...
...Ours...
...Bone Apart...
...Don't you know it's full of Nazis...
...Aren't you afraid they'll kill you when you walk down the street...
...then soaring to its nest by the shore...
...Out the window of my modest hotel room at The Edgewater Inn, where I am staying with young Genghis Khan while Mommy is shopping in Hong Kong, is a long, sloping lawn...
...She waited on us, and told us of her life...
...I offer that to a lot of people...
...town, so the nearest merchant knew who the boy belonged to and returned him to the mother...
...Since then, Staci has dated any number of famous men in this town, including some very muscular ones with Austrian accents (long before his marriage), some stars of big-time sitcoms, some major producers, and, well, you get the picture...
...asked my neighbor here in Hollywood...
...But here's some of what I have seen...
...Daddy," he said as he leaned forward to me, "do you see how everything is a color...
...and I all stopped at the border at Portknoll, and were questioned for about twenty seconds by a Canadian woman border guard...
...Well, my son's Mom is shopping in Hong Kong, but I think she trusts me with him, and the same goes for my friend here...
...I like it more every time I think about it...
...You don't have to tell me what choosing life means...
...It was eerie, with light coming from the middle of thewater, as if there were an alternate sun under the wavelets of the lake...
...It was mostly a heading for the ferry that crosses over to Balfour on the other side of Kootenay Lake itself...
...While Mom was running into a store, the California girls stole the car, abandoning the boy a few blocks away, alone and bewildered...
...CI The American Spectator November 1993 61...
...Tommy never fell asleep and never stopped asking questions...
...When I asked why, she said, "Well, I've been studying Spanish for two years now, so I know it pretty well, and I don't have any idea what language they speak in London...
...Or, maybe it'll work another way...
...Sure enough, there was a quote from one of my own self-help books, Bunkhouse Logic, right under a quote from Napoleon Hill, the famous self-help author...
...The lake was glowing...
...In the back seat, little Juan Fangio is shouting, "Faster, Daddy, faster...
...Braino, even know his last name...
...W e got to Bonner's Ferry at about eight and stopped into Maier's Fine Dining, which advertised its excellent chicken-fried steak...
...Her unpretentiousness was fantastic...
...Daddy, how fast can the fastest propeller plane go...
...It's a perfect day, with a hint of fall, fleecy clouds, a vivid greens and my angel near me...
...Now why didn't anyone else think of that...
...Her father is a logger...
...I vaguely remember it," I said...
...she answered energetically...
...Then, a great lawyer, and a lovely, smart Mom who chose life...
...How big a pot...
...Don't you know about the Aryan Nations and how they murder people up there...
...The girls said they were hungry, so the mother took them into her home for a few days and cared for them...
...The spray of the water is coming in and we're both getting wet...
...I asked her to go through it, and she paused for a long time at a self-help book my friend Kim had sent me from Albuquerque...
...She wants to be a lawyer, "and go to Harvard Law School," because she and her father love to argue with each other and with other people...
...Maybe Bill and Hillary will set a ceiling, and by some magic process, all of the billions of medical transactions that year will come out to be exactly what Bill and Hillary said they should be...
...A self-help guru, that's all...
...We continued our drive until we came to the tiny hamlet of Kootenay Lake...
...Well, I think I forgot to add that they don't know much economics...
...Oh, sure," I said...
...3. Penalties on working, middle-class people when they produce children...
...Just above Creston, we came to a turn in the road...
...Just tell me...
...Oh, boy...
...Isn't that where the Skinheads are...
...We should be grateful...
...On the other side there's a swimming beach inside a "swim line" of logs...
...It had a tiny sandwich shop, selling tiny sandwiches and souvenirs...
...We boarded the ferry...
...Comes from an old song about buying a hillbilly singing star a Cadillac and putting him on `American Bandstand.' " I knew it was a losing battle trying to explain to her what a joke was...
...I love this item about how Bill and Hillary have finished their thinking about health care with an incredible idea: they're going to put ceilings on howmuch they'll allow people to spend on medical care...
...He was an incredibly important person...
...It means the sweetest moment imaginable among a father, an angel son, and a perfect day...
...my pal Peter, who made Tommy's rubber-band gun...
...It leads to a white, sandy, curving beach...
...We went under the Long Bridge into town, and then past the home of a friend, whom we could see on his lawn by the lake, and then by a home I'm thinking of buying, and then back across the lake to the swimming area...
...The little blond angel is my son...
...Amen and amen and amen...
...Boy, am I glad that Hillary and her pals never met Tommy's mother...
...I don't like talk of causes of action at law," I said...
...About thirty or forty miles per hour, I guess...
...What a name...
...When I brought up the violence in Los Angeles, she said, "I hope that those people can get some peace in their hearts...
...And now, life-death/wage-price controls in medicine...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
