Ben Stein's Diary/Laughing All the Way
Stein, Benjamin J.
Laughing All the Way by Benjamin J. Stein Saturday A perfect late August day on the north shore of Lake Fend' Oreille in North Idaho. Today, I'm taking a sailing lesson in a fourteen-foot Holder...
...closing time...
...Gangsta's lawyer," I said...
...Out stepped a jaunty, fit, confident fellow in a dark double-breasted blazer and a five o'clock shadow six hours past due...
...His companion was a goofy-looking, much older man in—of all things—a loose-fitting sailor's outfit, including bell-bottoms, T-shirt, and cap...
...Then, when we left, two more clerks who had heard me talking to Tommy said, "Good luck fishin', Tommy," and then they let us out...
...Tuesday L -ttle Mr...
...Then I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant with my former assistant Mimi...
...I went looking for Tommy and found him staring at an immense display of tackle, hooks, weights, floaters, "l0000rs," and flies...
...The American Spectator November 1994 61 "Stasia...
...another police cruiser arresting the men who had apparently been inside that car...
...What would his life be like if it extended only to Los Angeles's west side, Lake Pend'Oreille, his cousins in Philadelphia, and his grandparents in Arkansas and Washington, D.C...
...He was in charge of a place they called Mount Weather...
...What if Richard Nixon had been business partners and the recipient of large personal loans and gifts from a man who was then indicted for looting an S&L (and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity...
...The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses...
...If we respond, they pay us back beyond our wildest dreams...
...When he comes back he tells me he wants me to buy him a sailboat...
...My brother-in-law was doing something funny up here," the guide says...
...I asked...
...I th _night of it all night until I fell asleep, also alone, in this lonely town...
...The real estate agent and I are getting a tour from the late owner's brother-in-law...
...What if Gerald R. Ford had been accused by his police guards of using them to procure women on a regular basis when he was minority leader...
...My father was supposed to go there in the event of The Big One when he was a honcho for RN...
...I just seem strong to you because you're seven years old...
...We have to leave at once, Tommy, my boy," I said...
...Two days ago, I visited this place with Wlady, who kept me company while his family was still in Poland...
...Ihave bought diamond necklaces at stores, bought suits and cars and furniture at stores, and never been treated that well...
...If they all got killed before they could get to Mount Weather, my brother-in-law would be president...
...Back to a far better reality...
...The house is a large Cape Cod style that looks over the hills and valleys and off to the Blue Ridge Mountains...
...I think that the best way to make a person mad is to make him compare himself unfavorably withothers and their lives day after day...
...The princess from Germany...
...After the sailing, my son fishes from a weather-beaten dock, and then he and his pals Alex and Rachel stroll into town over a covered bridge, to buy sour bubble gum at the Candy Cottage...
...She talks to me and skitters around on my hardwood floors and sleeps next to me...
...They address us with bottomless reservoirs of unmixed love and hope...
...They just came from the fights," a waiter said...
...What if a Republican president's home town critics were turning up dead and badly beaten...
...He proudly took it to the cashier, a red-headed fellow...
...I liked it so much I came back today to see it again...
...Maybe...
...It's short for Anastasia, the princess from Germany who was murdered by the Nazis when they took over," the woman said with a smile...
...Let's see, when I was Tommy's age it was the summer of 1952 and I could ride my Schwinn from our rented house in Rehoboth Beach, Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu, California...
...That's a rare kind of name," I said...
...Thursday W alking the dog, just walking the dog...
...Just a hint...
...We won't let them lock you in, Tommy...
...62 The American Spectator November 1994...
...I went to look at my current obsession, stereo headphones, and Tommy went to look at their vast sporting goods department...
...Thus distracted, they no longer paid attention to the long, slow slide of their great Republic into consulship and The American Spectator November 1994 59 then dictatorship (although the worst happened after Juvenal's death...
...She was laughing, too...
...Someday, watching "American Gladiators" will probably be mandatory...
...Stacie," she said...
...What if a Republican first lady had openly flouted a federal court order to open hearings of a commission she was chairing with congressional approval...
...a homeless man bathing his entire body in a fountain in front of a company that does audience surveys for new TV shows...
...0 n the way back, I drove along the wide, beautiful, stately Orange Grove Boulevard...
...It's on rolling hills in the southern end of the hunt...
...Sunset is always like this," said my optometrist's assistant...
...Tommy smiled at them, and then smiled at me, and then picked up a fly-fishing kit...
...He is bitten by cruel insects...
...Now, this is really sweet...
...What's your name...
...a truly beautiful red-headed hooker walking down Sunset near Stanley with a short skirt and no underwear, giggling at the passersby who gawked at her...
...It's in the middle of a field of maple trees, and it's got a little fishing dock that probably hasn't been used for twenty years...
...What if George Bush or Ronald Reagan had been accused in sworn court papers of sexual harassment...
...I always wondered what was in there...
...Good-naturedly method-acting all the way, my Tommy starts to whine about how come he doesn't have a boat or a submarine, how come he has to go back to school soon, how come he doesn't have more lures for his tackle box...
...Shapiro gave an autograph...
...They evoke all kinds of thoughts about life and mankind...
...She was Alex's, but when Trixie entered immortality, Alex gave me the right to take Ginger for an unlimited time...
...Wednesday B ack in L.A...
...Perfect and I are heading back to L.A...
...He has to work from before dawn to dusk...
...For Clinton, it would mostly have lots of girls...
...he asks, and then he begins a familiar litany of things he wants—more fishing tackle, a motorboat, a one-man submarine...
...He looked at the kit carefully and said, "You'll catch a lot of fish with this...
...When you're seventeen and lifting weights, you'll think I'm not strong at all...
...What would his life be like if he only had to interact (to use a horrible phrase) with reality itself, not with the gross, overblown, overviolent alternative world of mass culture...
...I walked on and turned a corner...
...Well, you seem very strong now," Tommy said...
...Delaware, to the beach in front of the Henlopen Hotel, where we pitched camp next to Senator Estes Kefauver and not far from Justice Vinson...
...I have never seen anything like it...
...The palm trees are stupendous, and the sidewalks are immaculate...
...Maybe Tommy would like to live here...
...You can lift up my whole body with one arm...
...He has no father...
...The brother-in-law has just showed us a hidden fishing pond that Tommy could use for his own...
...I probably can't afford it, but I want to try to see if I can...
...You take your time...
...In the parking lot, an attendant said to me, "How you say it...
...Why not now...
...I had heard of Mount Weather for years...
...The dog is Ginger...
...Right...
...Two middle-aged women sales clerks appeared at the display...
...He's a man in his eighties in work clothes...
...I think the people at Universal who made that show must sense malaise upon the land and know that we crave only cheap, fast food and spectacle...
...We headed to the K-mart and slipped inside the doors just before the 9 p.m...
...At about 10:30, just as we were getting our check, a vast, indecently large white Cad limo pulled up, much more de rigueur for Spago than for Morton's...
...First, as to what I was thinking before Tommy distracted me with his clever compliment, I notice that after he's been watching a TV show or a movie with violence, he acts violent...
...Young minds of all ages...
...Don't you worry," they said...
...I'm at a farm in the Hunt Country...
...His mother has TB...
...Bob Shapiro looked as if he were ready to go five rounds with Marcia Clark (and lose...
...I heard a man singing "Summertime Blues...
...This city is the playground for young minds, I thought...
...He's leading us through a field of high harvest grass...
...He's from an old Los Angeles family...
...Bob Evans sat at a table waiting for his date, looking slightly sad and still smiling that confused smile...
...It's nice to dream...
...His life is miserable...
...What if a Republican commerce secretary had a business partner connected with someone who had been actively looting S&L's...
...Maybe there still is a Mount Weather...
...Bill Clinton would have a good time here altogether...
...My son Tommy is taking a lesson in a Laser...
...He was standing on his balcony singing, but singing really well, into the night air...
...Mimi's grandfather was a famous inventor...
...It was a hollowed-out mountain that they were going to use to hide the president and the cabinet and the Congress in the event of a nuclear war...
...Monday arshall, Virginia...
...I think she would understand his explanations of what he was doing when he took money from a federally insured S&L and never paid it back...
...Stasia...
...Then he looked around for other fans...
...Gangsta's lawyer, not gangsta," he said, and then he laughed...
...It used to be owned by a man who was in the State Department for fifty years...
...What would he do...
...The guy looked at the kit, looked at Tommy, and said, "This is a lot of equipment for this price," he said...
...I drove 60 The American Spectator November 1994 out to the grand neighborhoods near the Arroyo, looked at heavily forested, lovely streets and fine homes...
...Then, when he falls asleep in the housing project, he has another dream—this time that he is awakened in a ratty school bus that has been converted to a traveling "home" for migrant workers in Florida...
...This makes me wonder: What if he never saw TV or movies at all...
...Daddy isn't really very strong," I said to him candidly...
...He starts to kick me with karate kicks after he's watched "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," likewise with "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," and pretends to shoot me after watching TV ads for "True Lies...
...Bob Evans was bobbing on his feet, wearing an inexplicable smile, hovering at Shapiro's elbow like a slightly tipsy wife afraid to be left out of the action...
...Today, as I drove over to my optometrist to get my glasses fixed, I saw: • a police chase of two Hispanic youths into a gas station where the kids were handcuffed and put against a police car...
...I told him that maybe when he's twelve I'll buy him a small sailboat...
...What if a Republican attorney general had closed down narcotics-trafficking prosecutions...
...I am sure that some day I am going to have an actual stroke after hearing something like that...
...Bitchin'," he thinks to himself, "Daddy Bueller is listening to some cool tunes...
...More "l0000rs," as he calls them...
...She's an elderly German short-haired pointer...
...I pity the poor immigrant, Who wishes he would have stayed home, Who uses all his power to do evil, And in the end is left so alone . . . It's Bob Dylan song about The Godfather...
...The Nazis killed her father, the Czar of Germany, and some people thought she survived, but she probably didn't...
...Short for Stasia...
...He's got his own insurance business...
...Now Tommy and I have to fly a thousand miles and drive a hundred miles from the airport to find a place where children can play safely...
...To him, I'm strong, rich, powerful, the ultimate boss...
...What would the life of the ordinary American be like if he did not have someone from the telescreen shouting at him night and day that he has to compare himself with immortal, inhumanly brave billionaires on TV...
...Then he might find himself in a refugee camp in Guantanamo Bay...
...Daddy, you should be an American Gladiator," Tommy said to me, "because you're so terribly, terribly strong...
...But in fact he is listening to the music from the hallway of his beaten down housing project in south side Chicago, where he lives with his mother, a 25-year-old heroin addict with three other children, in an apartment where roaches and rats roam freely, where machine gun bullets carom off the walls...
...During our walk, I came across a lovely woman walking her Pomeranian, a breed one rarely sees anymore...
...For dinner, Tommy refused to come with me to Pasadena...
...Oh, well...
...But here on top of it, it's a perfect day with maples all around, fleecy clouds far to the south where Stonewall Jackson marched his cavalry from to save the day at Bull Run...
...One night, after he's thrown a particularly wicked fit about something likedemanding his own season tickets to the Raiders, he falls asleep and has a dream, which he does not realize is a dream...
...In my car, I was listening to some cretin say that the whole Whitewater affair was a Republican vendetta against Clinton because Republicans were jealous of what a great, youthful President he is...
...Make our own lives seem small and petty and not violent enough...
...It was an exceptionally quiet Monday, in D the sacredperiod between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur...
...My parents loved the name...
...Since I no longer have a messengerette, I do my own little errands...
...We had dinner at the Pizza Hut here in Sandpoint with Tommy and his pals, and then Tommy wanted to buy more gear for his tackle box...
...What does it tell us that the media basically treat all of this as if it were not happening...
...But what I'm really thinking about is an idea I have for a movie...
...She has gray hair and a way of screaming, literally keening for attention when she wants to have her stomach rubbed...
...Monday inner at Morton's...
...Flocks of white butterfly-like insects fly behind the grasshoppers...
...He had to prepare for his fishing trip to Catalina...
...The store is closed, so you won't be able to get anything this trip...
...It's funny, but after I had this idea for a movie, I kept thinking of how the really good movie would be about an upper-middleclass American man or woman (I would prefer a woman) who has the same kind of experience...
...The next thought I had—all the while looking out at the lake and then trying to find Tommy's clothes—was of how amazingly different a seven-year-old's view of his father is from the father's view of himself...
...Maybe under that dock is a secret passageway to Mount Weather...
...They would have a lot to tell their friends back in Lodi...
...Yes, from a part of Germany called Prussia...
...I think they'll be happy...
...But by then, I have just zoned out into the pure Rocky Mountain air...
...I like it here...
...Generally, when I hearthat kind of trash about Clinton, I try to mellow out by playing a game of "Political What If': • What if a Republican surgeon general had recommended legalization of narcotics and then it had been discovered that at the same time, her son was a drug dealer...
...I start thinking about when I was a child in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...The store was quiet...
...Tommy and what he says and does are my Proustian tea leaves...
...Tommy genuinely looks up to me...
...When Shapiro came back, they looked lonely together, celebrities without fans, hungry, so to speak...
...What a nightmare...
...For that, we were treated more like family than like customers...
...this afternoon...
...It's in fairly rough shape, but it is approached by a gorgeous lane of dogwood trees...
...Today, I'm taking a sailing lesson in a fourteen-foot Holder boat...
...By that, the satirist meant that the Roman people had once been concerned with civic virtue, but had been bought off by free grain—brought in cheaply from the provinces and especially North Africa and Spain—and the also free daily spectacle of circuses...
...Monday L et me tell you how retailing should be...
...On the beach and the grass, families are on blankets and towels, eating fried chicken, watching their young ones in the water, occasionally tossing a Frisbee back and forth, then a ball, and then settling back into the routine of a perfect North Idaho day...
...I'm falling in love with Ginger...
...Anyway, when he awakens from this sleep and finds himself back with his upper-middle-class parents, he is wildly grateful...
...For Hillary, it would have . .. ah, why bother thinking about it...
...The people who thought it up must have been acquainted with Juvenal's great comment upon the Romans even in the days before Augustus...
...Isn't that what TV does...
...Then he talked to a woman from Lodi in a strapless dress...
...Finding none in the restaurant, he headed toward the bar and shook the hand of a black man in a porkpie hat...
...Then I could ride over to the grocery store, to George's Lunch French Fry Palace, then to a little bay, and then back to the beach—all in perfect safety...
...This is it," he said...
...Now, here's my point: In that visit to the store, we spent maybe forty bucks on fly-tying equipment and new stereo headphones...
...She's about to marry a wonderful guy named Greg...
...The place was deserted except for a few couples who had lucked into getting the kind of tables they would not normally get even if they were walking in with stacks of poker chips...
...And movies...
...What would she do...
...A tennis-playing, complaining plutocrat who awakens one morning 58 The American Spectator November 1994 to find himself or herself a homeless person on the streets in downtown Los Angeles, with no money, no connections, no credit, and mentally ill besides...
...Well, have a nice night...
...To me, I'm just another shlepper with a weird voice who occasionally happens to get lucky in Hollywood and who has made some incredibly poor investment decisions...
...We parents have to know that to our kids, we are gods, at least when they're six or seven...
...Tommy's given it to me...
...I see," I said...
...It's life...
...It used to have all mansions, and now it's all apartments...
...Almost immediately, there was an announcement that the store was now closed, and people had to leave...
...He actually invented tin foil, I think, or something else at the Bell Labs...
...If you don't, you bring it back and I'll show you how to tie them so they do catch fish...
...Three M o'clock in the afternoon on a magnificent Labor Day with just the slightest hint of fall in the air...
...I said to her after we had discussed our dogs...
...They talked to a light-skinned black girl for a few minutes...
...Gangsta...
...a car that had crashed into a bus stop, leaving shattered glass all over the street...
...As we are getting dressed, he's watching his new favorite show, "American Gladiators," a truly inspired work of genius...
...In the dream, he is awakened by the sound of loud rap music...
...He recently asked me a question about how paint gets its color and when I said I didn't know, he said, "But you know everything...
...Still, Little Perfect is obsessed with the "games" where scantily clad men and women shoot foam arrows and balls at each other, pull each other down from high places, and hit each other with pugilsticks...
...At least that's what I remember...
...But they're nice, spacious and bright...
...He is beaten up on the way to school, has no money for lunch, is always hungry, and fears that his mother's pimp will kill him if he bothers them while they snort drugs...
...On the way back, a laughing, grinning policeman was arresting the red-headed prostitute with no panties...
...At every step clouds, yes, clouds of grasshoppers flyinto the air in front of us...
...The idea is for a movie about a ten-year-old middle-class—well, maybe upper-middle-class—boy who is always bitching and moaning about not having his lilies completely gilded, about not living like The Last Emperor...
...I tried to imagine Bill Clinton talking to the woman named after the murdered princess from Prussia...
...The last few shoppers were paying at the cashier's station and talking with the cashiers as purchases were rung up...
...Someone at the Sandpoint K-mart is doing something very right...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
