Ben Stein's Diary/Rooked
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY Rooked by Benjamin I. Stein Wednesday H ere I am, en route to New Orleans on United Airlines. By the grace of God, I am in First Class. It's incredibly cramped and tiny. By pure...
...Susan Rook, the moderator, was completely incompetent, confused, antagonistic towards white people...
...At any event, the boy and his mother are dead...
...She had been a stewardess, then moved back to Naples and nearby Bonners Ferry to raise her family...
...Moffitt was demolished in a way that I, with my suspect white credentials, could never do...
...This is like the JFK assassination...
...It was the pilot, the captain, of our ship...
...That hasn't been the bottom line for sixty-two years or more...
...Down the highway to a little restaurant/bar called The Deep Creek Resort...
...I can't miss it...
...By the end of the show, I thought we had actually made some progress...
...Maybe it was just confusion...
...Along the road, families were picking berries, mostly gone but still available at this high altitude...
...When I reminded her that blacks had been greatly helped by whites in the civil rights movement, she insisted that I was "patronizing" her...
...I can't really buy jewelry the way I used to...
...I always felt we were a nerdy, weak lot...
...I don't have much sympathy for Mark Fuhrman...
...And, there it is...
...with my little angel...
...So, this is tech...
...An e-mail from the New York Times's Frank Rich, who sometimes has interesting things to say about TAS, but is a cheerful, intelligent fellow, about the verdict...
...I would not want to stay at that hotel again (far too dingy), but it was fine for right now...
...Even the young woman from MTV calmed down a great deal...
...Well, Marcia Clark, whom you also like, said he was guilty...
...If these folks had their stuff together, they would have books on political organizing, I think...
...We passed a small bridge where the feds had put up roadblocks...
...That's nice...
...I don't want to go any farther," Peter said...
...They feel as if they really have to stick together against white people, and they don't like to send their own race of people to jail because they feel like it's being too nice to white people and not loyal to black people...
...More like brown...
...I can diagnose better than any shrink and instantly, too...
...Can I use that in my column...
...He firmly believes O.J...
...Daddy, how can anything mean more than truth...
...Anyway, I got my tickets from the beautiful Maria Elizondo and headed off to pick up Tommy...
...The defendant was a much beloved, famous, fabulously rich black man...
...I hooked up my laptop and started communicating...
...Why do they come in...
...Maybe it was to make an example of someone far away from the news cameras...
...It's sad for them and for us...
...How much will it earn this year...
...It was an unfinished, dim room...
...If you give them guns and tell them they can shoot people, it really changes them...
...DISASTER...
...How I love to walk through Sandpoint by night...
...was innocent...
...I'm hereto speak to some insurance executives, and I have to do a good job...
...I killed a few million of them, then went back to sleep...
...Photography is such a great art form...
...But so am I with my cans of Raid, spraying hither and thither...
...A call from my pal Hilda, saying how bitter she felt, and how it was time to leave L.A...
...did it...
...It's a place where the relations between the governed and the governing were exposed in a particularly frightening way...
...Well, my boy, O.J...
...That's what counts...
...So...
...Tommy and his pals stood outside in a drizzle shooting spud guns at each other...
...Horrible topless and bottomless men's strip clubs (men stripping) next to women's strip clubs...
...This is what it means to be taken seriously...
...A call from CNN asking me to be on...
...Isn't the idea of a casino that it's supposed to be bright and cheery so that even if you lose your money, you still feel like you had a good time...
...Like ESP...
...Vast hordes of them have invaded my home, as they tend to do...
...killed his wife and some guy who was just bringing her her glasses...
...It also predisposes you to do bad things to members of other groups if you think that by so doing you help your group...
...How did the glove happen to be at the end of a long trail of blood drops...
...The back already has a camper shell...
...Many, many bars...
...Small wonder, painting is dying...
...The sure sign of a loser...
...I reminded Gertrude Himmelfarb of this long ago, and she has put it to great use...
...So was Marianne Love, the local high school journalism teacher with her two prize students...
...So he's in a room at school playing with little building blocks or learning art...
...Thursday W ait just a minute...
...Well, everyone is sad about the verdict except the blacks...
...Wow...
...We drove over to Wendy's instead...
...The TV is showing them literally jumping up and down...
...Simpson case...
...I'm late for a tech rehearsal...
...A car and driver took me to my hotel in the French Quarter...
...Anyway, by coincidence, the owners of the shop had moved up there from Orange County fifteen years ago...
...I paid it no mind until I got rid of the crushing burden of fatigue and awakened...
...Thank you, God, for putting Idaho into my life...
...He did not seem to feel like a prisoner...
...An equity waiver play on Santa Monica Boulevard," he said...
...Another sure sign...
...was let off because of pure racism by the almost all black jury...
...Chazzy Boy still leaned forward and cried...
...A great meal of chicken livers...
...I used to work for the government, doing statistical work and legal work...
...Then, off we went for more exploration...
...Then we came to the infamous "Y" The American Spectator December 1995 59 where the feds shot and killed Sam Weaver, the 14-year-old son of Randy Weaver...
...There was a small sign that invited us customers to visit the upstairs of the store...
...Yuck...
...This was an interesting place that sold food, clothing, books, toys, postcards, and also . . . something that Tommy loved more than me, a Spud Gun...
...CNN has sent the promised truck and now I am about to be hooked up to Atlanta for a long session of "Talkback Live...
...Wednesday lam out here at my home in Malibu, fighting a death struggle with the ants...
...In fact, Geraldo is almost unbelievably smart and on target...
...Literally up and literally down, doing some kind of African dance...
...You mean more to me than truth...
...None of us had guns...
...Then a visit to a lovely photo gallery to look at some huge photos of swamps and woods in New England...
...No, probably not...
...Of course, some people make it really easy for me by wearing ten earrings in each ear (obsessive-compulsive disorder withfractured ego system) or by wearing a ponytail if they are male and over fifty (severe delusional paranoia...
...Show me a human of any race or ethnicity and I can tell you his or her state of mind...
...he answered...
...My end of it there in Sandpoint was like a Frank Capra movie...
...Yummy...
...Very creepy...
...In any event, Tommy was happily playing with his connecting plastic pieces...
...verdict and race things...
...But," I said, "look at the case...
...This little item shoots pieces of a potato fast and easily...
...If I were Harrah's, I might want to rethink this one...
...Then the phone started to ring...
...Among the book's many good points, Wilson notes that one of the main causes of ethical behavior is feeling that you are part of a group like white people or black people or Jews or Gentiles...
...My mother has always been a contrarian, but on the other hand she's often right...
...But when you give weak people guns, somehow it changes them...
...We did it out of a tiny, and I mean tiny, shoebox studio in Culver City...
...O.J...
...I mean, this place is really remote...
...It is a dump...
...Then I hiked over one block to Bourbon Street...
...Well, anyway, off to Idaho in the a.m...
...I think we should all just ask God to take all this hate out of our hearts...
...The crew strapped me into a chair, and the show began...
...Bang, and it's done...
...I had a nice talk with the owner and she gave me a copy of her 100 rules for happy living...
...The deputy prosecutor was a black man...
...He'll be found not guilty," I said, "and if he is, then the whites will riot by The American Spectator December 1995 57 going to Idaho and voting for Newt Gingrich and voting to cut off the blacks' Medicaid...
...Scary...
...I am to be on talking about the O.J...
...56 The American Spectator December 1995 "But that's not the bottom line," I said...
...Every so often, he has a talk and then a laugh with the man sitting next to me, who's a big businessman in New Orleans...
...But we dump on them constantly and deprive them of their dignity...
...A call from my mother...
...I want to rehash the trial endlessly," I said...
...I am on the phone with my wife as we wait and watch...
...No matter what I said on behalf of the notion that this was a great country and that the racism of the past was gone, she was all over me with her bogus facts and bogus arguments...
...I have things to do, too...
...Your Starburst commercial is so great," a pretty young woman said...
...He stays after school in a series of play and teaching groups...
...I have to prepare for my retirement...
...It's hard to blame them...
...By pure chance, I am sitting across from a man named Mark Morial, who is mayor of New Orleans...
...If we stop, you'll find out," he said...
...Why isn't he broke...
...I just know that thirteen is a low number," he said amiably...
...Back at my hotel, I awoke in the middle of the night with the worst bedbug bite of my life...
...He had made a huge chair and was trying to take it apart when I got there...
...I keep trying to persuade Mommy to move to Idaho...
...Really stunningly smelly, dirty, and tawdry...
...Not guilty on all counts, so say you one, so say you all...
...His best lines were about how blacks had been persecuted by all white juries for decades and no one had ever complained...
...the woman in line behind me said...
...We had a great meal and I felt tip-top by the end of the evening...
...A furiously angry black woman from (and I'm not making this up) "MTV News" seemed to have gone to the same school of bogus "facts" as Attorney Moffitt...
...He laid out fifteen reasons why O.J...
...Yes, Daddy, but aren't you forgetting something...
...Years ago, I foolishly bought jewels when I should have been buying stock...
...phenomenon...
...He also was wearing stringy, tattered shorts...
...As I slept peacefully listening to Victory at Sea, my favorite soundtrack on earth, I was awakened by a little nudge...
...Now, this guy must have been on the moon somewhere...
...Then I went for a long walk out past the empty Windbag Marina, past my boat in the Sandpoint Marina ("Good-bye, little Thompson, I'll see you in June...
...I did...
...If they choose the truth over what will win them happiness, peace of mind, and safety in their communities, maybe they too are fools...
...It's really a pretty small place, not a resort the way we normally think of a resort, but it had a beautiful waitress manager named Cheryl...
...After more than nine months of trial and after a whole three big hours of deliberation—if that...
...Maybe I don't like being on TV all that much after all...
...Why not, Daddy...
...Anyway, first class was so dim and packed that I took my little Sony Discman, the best invention since air-conditioning, and went back to coach, where it was far more spacious and brighter...
...at any given moment...
...What a joke...
...So, off we went on this rainy morning...
...This is a spooky, desolate spot...
...We're already way up Ruby Ridge...
...I learned it from my Mom, and I am an expert in it by now...
...I looked down at his feet...
...I want to buy it with the money I won playing poker with you...
...He bragged for a long time about his stock picks...
...and then into the south end of town...
...I keep trying to persuade her to move to suburban Washington, D.C...
...Then I re-read my speech and prepared my soul for bed...
...I'm the pilot...
...The chief defense lawyer was a black man...
...Now it's time for a new spiritual revolution in our troubled age...
...I would swear that the businessman says he is involved in a casino project on the river in New Orleans with the mayor, but can that possibly be right...
...That's when ordinary citizens get scared...
...Then the thought flashed through my little brain: These people are filled with hatred...
...Amazing...
...This predisposes you to good behavior towards other members of the group...
...Who cares...
...Plus, he is sick of swimming in his pool...
...Then there was a woman who was just out in space...
...The man who shot the mother has taken the fifth and refuses to testify about it...
...So why don't you believe her...
...He was one of only three kids in the room, along with a teacher's aide...
...He put in a mattress on the back bed...
...W hen I went to my email after the show, I had a long message from my brilliant cop pal Ray Wisher...
...It's the night before Der I Verdictentag...
...They just always want to make themselves different, victims...
...Iasked the boy for whom I wanted a peaceful, quiet life...
...It went extremely well except for one man who vigorously—and without the aid of facts—defended Fred Carr and First Executive, very bigtime Drexel players who made the vast expansion of Drexel possible by buying their bonds, with insurance policyholders' money, which then were seized and cost policyholders billions...
...Tuesday 0 ooh, I am really, really nervous now...
...1 The American Spectator December 1995 61...
...I walked down a shady street past Mark Fuhrman's house...
...I was steaming with anger, but then, a miracle: who should come onto the show but Roy Innis, the former head of the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE...
...How do I get out of this...
...Our lives would be miserable and primitive and filled with fear and violence if we did not have them...
...And there are no parks near our house...
...Benjamin .1...
...No, thanks...
...We turned off at a tiny sign that said "Naples" and went to the Berwick's General Store...
...Now," she said, before the show began, "Ben, what do you want to begin with...
...Lunacy...
...Still, it was not a bad discussion as talk shows go...
...When Byron DeLay Beckwith got off after killing 58 The American Spectator December 1995 Medgar Evers, there was an immense outpouring of rage and anger by whites committed to justice...
...What is that...
...A rehearsal for what...
...Daddy," he said, "do you think O.J...
...His wife, however, a true pal, said they lived in Baltimore and love my TV commercials...
...Daddy," he said, "can I get Mortal Kombat II...
...It was a hookup to New York...
...Even if O.J.'s blood and Goldman's blood and Nicole's blood were dumped everywhere in the Bronco and in O.J.'s house, how did so much of O.J.'s blood get on Nicole's front stoop before Fuhrman and Vanatter even got to the scene...
...A call from someone on Fx asking me to be on...
...Sunday T his morning my other hero, Peter, took his truck and child-conditioned it...
...The whole thing is a story about how America is not racist, not sexist...
...That's how bad I feel...
...This is a guy with impeccable credentials...
...But how do you know what the stock is worth if you don't know how much it earned last year or hope it will earn this year or next...
...I think that Ruby Ridge is destined to be as famous some day as Selma or Chappaquiddick...
...I feel sure that if I had met Randy Weaver, we would never have been friends, but I am also sure that when the government starts killing members of The Church of the American Promise, it's only a matter of time before they start killing members of Temple Israel...
...Roy Innis just tore Moffitt's head off...
...How, in a police force as big as the LAPD, could a conspiracy possibly have been kept silent this long...
...You're a classic...
...Just so you know, I weep for him in this situation...
...Hi," he said...
...Like a miracle, people started to calm down...
...It was tightly shuttered, but a large, barking dog ran back and forth inside the fence...
...The best ones were about not complaining too much or being around people who complain...
...Well, that's it for me," he said...
...It has all kinds of neat fatalities," he said...
...I was just looking for peace...
...Really," I said, "many things mean more than truth...
...Some young kids from a university in Hattiesburg recognized me and asked me for my autograph...
...Herb Gold, a fine writer whose work I have followed, once told me that if a man chooses the truth over his father, he is a fool...
...did it...
...I told the woman from CNN that I would not be able to make her Sunday show because I would be in Idaho...
...That's someone imitating me...
...Someone a lot smarter than any of us had the answer a long time ago: Love thy neighbor as thyself...
...Monday am nervous...
...Plus, dozens of other people, black and white, were screaming in the studio audience...
...I love appearing on TV...
...I am lying here in bed watching the jury verdict in the O.J...
...I don't care...
...Why bother...
...Then to a jeweler to look at a big emerald I saw in the window...
...As I was getting my ticket from the beautiful Hispanic ticket agent, Maria Elizondo ("I just met a girl named Maria . . ."), a loser came running in...
...Good questions, huh...
...Yeah...
...I do, my boy, but he probably will not be convicted...
...I just do not understand his let-ting down the prosecution so badly...
...But I can take these measurements down to very fine tolerance, and I am never wrong...
...Why would the feds bother coming way up here to the middle of nowhere to arrest this innocuous man...
...The road is just too bad...
...Sorry, chump...
...The problem is not Geraldo...
...Don't they know I'll kill them...
...Unfortunately, my boy, that does not count for a lot anymore...
...But I had given up on trying to educate anyone...
...She is one of the only white people I know who thought O.J...
...Best of all, he firmly believes O.J...
...Poussaint said he thought it all had much to do with the fact that one of the victims was a white woman, and I think he's right...
...I'm reading a book by James Q. Wilson called The Moral Sense for a seminar I am going to participate in with David Davenport, the president of Pepperdine...
...I really like K-mart right now," he said...
...If we keep treating them like dirt, we'll get an America of pure lawlessness, and we will deserve it...
...even more beyond the pale...
...This isn't that complex...
...Now I have to prepare for the day when no one wants me to act, and I will creep to my cabin (that I don't have yet) on Lake Pend'Oreille and spend all day remembering what it was like to live in safety in a city...
...The problem was a couple of guests in D.C., including one man named Moffitt, an absolute terror, who would not and did not want to hear the truth...
...Now we know what the TV powers-that-be read...
...When my turn came to speak, I said, "Hey, it's pretty amazing that all these people are talking about moral problems and no one has mentioned God...
...There are about ten million of those plays going on in L.A...
...Years and years ago, I read that England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had avoided bloody revolution because of a spiritual revolution...
...He was unusually silent...
...Thursday I slept very late and then went over to Mister B's for lunch...
...Lunacy on the tube...
...I met Al, the pilot, for dinner at a place called Mister B's...
...Tommy and Alex got one each and immediately started shooting me and Peter...
...Not for little me...
...Maybe I really don't like it if I have to be on talking about racial matters with a lot of crazed people...
...I gave my speech...
...Back in town, the kids played with Peter while I slept...
...But Attorney Moffitt didn't want to hear it...
...We put Tommy, Peter's son Alex, and their pal Jake in the back along with Peter's dog, Chazzy Boy, and we headed north on Route 95 to Ruby Ridge...
...A call to an editor in Washington...
...I often think that he and his pals do the dirtiest job in the country, working as cops, fighting crime...
...The judgewas an Asian man...
...Wallace put us all at our ease by telling us she was sick, and in a bad mood, and "warned" us that she would not let us just rehash the trial endlessly...
...Saying he's late for one is like saying he's late for flossing his teeth...
...By twenty minutes into the show, even the satellite truck crew were laughing at how incompetently the show was being run...
...My ankle was screaming, and then it was time to get up...
...My main mission in life, besides getting Tommy all the toys any child could ever want, is determining people's psychic state by what they wear and their general appearance...
...After lunch we headed down a smaller road that quickly turned to county road...
...What a dismal spot...
...The road got muddy and washboard-like...
...Well, you're great," she said...
...Then an e-mail from Frank Rich to the effect that he is using the quote and how did I want to be identified...
...Like him, she explained that the reason so many black men were in jail was a conspiracy by white people...
...Dark, dirty, drab, absolutely blank...
...You're hot...
...I don't know...
...My pal Gina told me that "news" people shined spotlights on the house occasionally trying to make Mark Fuhrman come out...
...I asked...
...Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Hollywood, Malibu, and Sandpoint, Idaho...
...Where are O.J.'s gloves if the ones the D.A...
...It put a spell on all of us...
...T hen, back to The Edgewater...
...It's really true that when we ask God to take the hate out of our hearts, He really does...
...She was absolutely unable to make the conversation flow...
...He's very friendly and seems quite relaxed...
...to jail for life...
...Isn't that the one that has people's heads getting cut off and has blood and guts spilling all over them...
...A call from Geraldo asking me to be on...
...is a black man...
...The trees were turning yellow...
...Race means a lot more than truth these days...
...I am not about to get out of line for you...
...How is that for an amazing coincidence...
...Wow...
...What did I think it would be...
...That's sort of how I feel about Wisher and his colleagues in the police forces of America...
...Smart, thoughtful . . . in a word, he agreed with me...
...I like that," Frank e-mailed back...
...Hey, no problem," she said...
...But I now have an idea of how all of the problems we have in race relations today can be solved...
...They are everywhere...
...Then he talked about how when black civil rights leaders were killed by white racists, all-white juries let off the killers and no one in white America ever complained...
...We drove up a better road towards a beauty spot called Roman Nose lake...
...If the blacks just insist on painting themselves into a corner as perpetual victims," he said,"they'll never get anywhere...
...Cry the beloved country...
...That's why I take him to Idaho so often, so he can see what a decent childhood is like...
...Anyway, there was one very, very good panelist, a black man with a bushy beard named Michael Meyers, who is the head of some group for civil rights and obviously a learned guy...
...He has a soulful look...
...It's going for about thirteen dollars a share...
...But he has kids and a wife, and they deserve a life...
...What happened to O.J.'s black bag...
...That's pretty horrible, if true...
...In fact .. . Off this afternoon in a limo to be on something called Jane Wallace "In Perspective...
...All because of that one little quote in Frank Rich's column...
...Wisher is my new pal...
...Then there was a shrink from Harvard, also black, named Alvin Poussaint, who was off on a cloud somewhere sometimes, and startlingly on target at other times...
...But that's not the law...
...So I believe him...
...The woman from "MTV News" just screamed more...
...The best ones had to do with the blood evidence...
...I need to get my ticket right away," he said...
...The chief prosecutor was a woman...
...Through the haze of Morpheus, I could hear the phone ringing, ringing, ringing...
...A call from a close family member...
...I'm Al, your neighbor on Pacific View Drive...
...It was excellent food and fine service...
...It's sort of a gift...
...Then we passed a house with a bunch of dogs, and then up several twists and turns while the rain fell...
...It sold camouflage outfits, camo make-up for "hunters," field rations, and lots of little booklets on hand-to-hand combat and maintenance and use of various kinds of weapons, especially automatic rifles...
...Amazing...
...It is for me," he said happily...
...think the place we were in when we turned around was the most out of the way place I have ever been to in my entire life...
...Why, Daddy...
...did it, makes no bones about it, firmly believes it was a major miscarriage of justice that O.J...
...I'll have to put him together with the man who liked K-mart and didn't care about their earnings...
...He doesn't look black," Tommy said...
...Then he put on a big quilt...
...Too much money for me...
...He stood up in court and said he was innocent, so I think he is innocent...
...Well, because black people or brown people feel as if they have been really badly mistreated in this country...
...I sat in my arm chair at the Edgewater and thought, "Wow, I am in with a lot of nutcases...
...Actually, I have not lived on Pacific View Drive for about nine years, but I remember Al, and we had a long, pleasant talk...
...Peter seemed sad...
...They're our heroes, not the villains...
...Then, a race (so to speak) across town to Burbank to be on "Rivera Live...
...It's a good system, because he really cannot play outside our house because there are no other little kids in the neighborhood...
...This is what it means to be in Frank Rich's column instead of Ben Stein's column...
...When the poor little black girls were killed in Birmingham in 1964 (I think it was '64), there were huge demonstrations by whites expressing genuine outrage...
...seem like Idaho) a few blocks to a converted municipal auditorium where my pal DeAnne was once a debutante, and which is now a Harrah's casino...
...got off...
...His situation, a bird in a gilded cage, is not normal for a child...
...She was happy...
...It is just a big room like a bus station with hundreds of slot machines—I never once heard one pay off—and a few dozen sad-looking women, mostly black, shoveling quarters in...
...Not a chance...
...Then we took a cab (no one, and I mean, no one, walks in New Orleans at night—it makes D.C...
...I like him," she said...
...I still don't want to ever be on a show with Susan Rook again, and I probably won't be...
...Tommy, Alex, and Jake had all fallen asleep in the back...
...Ruby Ridge was a desolate spot in every way...
...This little section of The Moral Sense is really the key to the whole O.J...
...Long ago, someone, maybe Lady Astor, asked Winston Churchill why he was fighting the Nazis so doggedly...
...That's not me," I said...
...He also had "statistics" to prove that blacks were in jail at a rate about four times that of whites because they were unfairly persecuted by white prosecutors...
...Did that help...
...The bottom line," he said, "is buyer beware...
...Then he put in sodas and a cooler...
...After the show, I went out to dinner at Ivano's with Peter...
...I guess that's the way it is for juries, too...
...Sure enough, he was wearing sandals...
...I went back to my large, dim room...
...showed in court were not his...
...So were Gina and Tom Emory and their son...
...He said the verdict was a disgrace to black America, that blacks had abandoned the moral high ground, that they were now as bad as their Klan oppressors, and that they constantly blamed others for problems of their own making...
...Before I went to sleep, I checked my e-mail...
...Really, really nervous...
...It makes O.J...
...I went to American Airlines this afternoon to buy a ticket to see Maw and Paw...
...Well, he's a brown man and most of the jury is brown or black and they probably will not want to go back to their neighborhoods and tell their pals they sent O.J...
...He also said it was the worst day since JFK was assassinated...
...Peter Feirabend was there along with his son...
...Then the rain got heavier and we went back...
...Very strong smell of dried vomit and horse manure...
...What is the solution for hatred...
...We'll send up a satellite truck for you...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
