Ben Stein's Diary: Testy Money
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Testy Money Thursday our Congress at work. Here I am in the Carl Perkins Room of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. I am testifying...
...I told him, "There is a special, secret neighborhood where the houses are great looking, have sweeping views, lots of trees, and they're reasonably priced, but because you aren't a member of the Writers' Guild, I can't tell you what it is...
...No federal money for "performance artists" or con men or con women...
...Mercedes Benzes...
...Federal funding for uplifting the human spirit of those in poverty by providing great music and art...
...But not a penny from the taxes of a fireman or policeman or teacher to pay for lesbian manuals and attacks on religion...
...They'll do better on test scores, too...
...Now I need never be lonely...
...By a mile, Carrie Fisher...
...How lucky, how fantastically lucky to be in America...
...I'm seriously considering going into bankruptcy," she said...
...No more Tommy...
...There were some hard questions, like what is the currency of Iraq, and some easier ones, like what is the Wolverine State...
...The struggle now is to create a totally colorblind America, without preferences and set asides and counting every race at schools and places of work...
...Hardly any checks at all from writing...
...The investment bankers certainly benefit more from the sacrifice of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and merchant marine than the bikers...
...I was the only customer in the place...
...I arrived early with my father...
...After the voice work, I saw that I was next to an animal shelter in Santa Monica...
...Just Kipkinn," he said...
...After Ms...
...I hurtled past the Lincoln Memorial, then across the Memorial Bridge and past the Seabee Memorial...
...Isn't that the way the market works...
...Alas, in this struggle, it's the people versus the government, but then that's often true...
...I have asked Staci, The American Spectator • August 199 7 59 my longtime occasional assistant, to come over to help me with my task...
...After sober soul searching scrutiny, we decided we should not criticize fellow conservatives no matter what...
...What is possible enough to do for their widows and children...
...I understand," Phil said...
...A flu-ridden Michael Jordan showed what the greatest athlete of all time can do...
...I try to imagine these guys clearing jungle and 44 She always had her little rules: Eat the jello on a separate plate so the hot food doesn't melt and run into it...
...The more exhausted you are after a trip, the worse will be your mail...
...Porsches...
...You want some grapes...
...When I left, I told him to stay well so he could help me with my income tax...
...Two years ago it was six hundred...
...That's about two-fifty a week...
...Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground...
...He is getting to be frighteningly good...
...There were only a few high school rowing crews there, unlike the usual mob...
...Plus, there are a lot of people here I do not know...
...That puts you in a category pretty much by yourself...
...That meant, "we're free people...
...Hairy, matted, gray, reeking of smoke even at a distance...
...Plus he's happy, and that makes us people look younger...
...Phil said that looking for houses in L.A...
...I know a star who made thirty some million last year and he's always bitching about how broke he is...
...He looks sickeningly healthy and youthful...
...Plus he has those strong Gaelic genes...
...He's my idol," the clerk said...
...She always had her little rules of engagement about eating brunch: eat the jello on a separate plate so the hot food doesn't make the jello melt and run into it...
...You don't have any children...
...Twenty-one years ago, when I first came here, I drove along Fountain to get to my "job" as a consultant at Norman Lear's Tandem/TAT...
...I imagine that this is the first time and place in 3,000 years, maybe ever, that Jews have lived in such freedom and security as we have here...
...No federal funding for obscenity...
...Now the principal is black and so is the head of the board of ed...
...You can understand that, can't you...
...At home, Tommy and I watched the Bulls-Jazz game...
...In my district we call them firefighters," he said...
...The impossible takes a little longer...
...Or maybe the bikers are smart enough to be grateful...
...I awakened early and rented a bike and rode it around the Potomac, by the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Memorial, and then past Arlington again...
...Wow, am I tired...
...I gave my speech and I told the kids who the coolest movie stars I ever worked with were: Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Nick Cage, and Robert Downey, Jr...
...Prices change...
...The pro-NEA witnesses were hilarious...
...That's my advice to you, pals...
...Mostly chocolate food...
...Phil DeMuth joined us for lunch...
...It has a phone that talks to me...
...Mother earth will swallow you...
...Then I had lunch with my father 58 August 1997 The American Spectator at the Acquarelle, the best restaurant in D.C., in the Watergate Hotel, overlooking the Potomac...
...Of course, I was only trying to be lighthearted...
...And I didn't know until a few years44 Photographers clustered around Alec Baldwin and took his picture hundreds of times...
...That's not even a really big house in L.A...
...Where on earth did you come up with a number like twenty-five million a year...
...I have my Cadillac...
...More years of any kind of education lifts scores, because if they're taking another year of art, they're also taking another year of math or English...
...We bid seven fifty and someone else bids eight hundred and he gets it, and I don't think that's right...
...Hmmm...
...I have to search for quarters around the house...
...Without a moment's hesitation, Staci answered back, "Twenty-five million— a year...
...It's good, because that's America...
...We all talked about housing in L.A...
...I guess it's because we are so filled with shame and fear that we eat to suppress our feelings...
...I went in, looked for a German shorthaired pointer, saw none, and left a donation...
...It was humid and uncomfortable in D.C...
...When I started in junior high at 60 August 1997 • The American Spectator Montgomery Hills, world's most loathsome school, back in September of 1956, that was the first year schools were desegregated in suburban Maryland...
...with higher SAT scores...
...In fact, I have never said a word about the whole subject until today...
...Plus, you have to have a jet...
...What is the name of the Montgomery Blair mascot...
...Look, to live like a decent person who's rich, you have to have a $10 million house...
...I got a lot of applause on that line...
...I said it before and I'll say it again...
...With two N's...
...After lunch we drove out to my mother's grave...
...There are so many Mexicans on the boardwalk, usually families, looking happy, very well fed, glad to be here...
...If you want to work in a field, you have to be near where the work is...
...That man is all heart," I told Tommy...
...The NEA argument here is like saying that kids with Porsches given to them on their sixteenth birthday tend to have straighter teeth, and therefore owning a Porsche straightens your teeth...
...As I went through dusty stacks of paper, I asked Staci one of my favorite questions...
...It is interesting that there are no mobs of investment bankers and lawyers in madras jackets and green pants at the memorials, but lots of men in motorcycle jackets smoking reefer...
...Notices of vast quanta of overdrafts...
...Call your parents and tell them you love them...
...Good car to drive after a war, as Bob Dylan says...
...Reagan's eleventh commandment makes a lot of sense...
...The joke, in addition to the joke of having all the pro-NEA funding testimony sound exactly the same, was that of course more art education is correlated BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...As I think of it, the young will do it anyway.ing with an Israeli guy named Matty, and he's fun...
...Love it...
...Then we played Ping-Pong...
...A reminder to pay my estimated quarterly tax...
...We watched a movie about England and she knew44 asked Staci one of my favorite questions: 'How much money do you think you have to have to be considered rich?' about some fight between the king of England and the Pope a long time ago...
...Why not...
...I have to pay for my car and my car phone...
...Because from now on, I'm an elf...
...There are so many cute girls on the Hill...
...That's the problem, I guess," I said...
...He plays with his heart...
...We talked for a while and then she told me that her father, a millionaire, might bail her out...
...No one took mine, boo-hoo...
...On the other hand, this morning I have a voice-over to begin my show...
...Too expensive, ugly, in bad shape...
...More telling, school districts with the wherewithal to have a lot of arts funding probably will also have more affluent, better-motivated kids who learn more just hanging with their parents...
...I like it...
...I had the seat next to me empty on the flight, which was really lucky...
...They are both African-American...
...And, worst of all, there are the murderously good contestants some ghoul has chosen...
...Tommy said, "For next Halloween, I want to be an elf, and do elfish things...
...Then I told them that if they wanted the absolutely shortest route from here to a happy life, it was to appreciate the gifts God had given them...
...Now here it is 1997 and I am riding the same route to be the "star" of my little show...
...My father was obviously strained, clearly lonely, but being brave...
...Felton, the president of the Montgomery County School Board, Mr...
...I would like for Tommy to spend a summer or two here...
...Bike in the morning on the banks of the Potomac, at night on the shores of the Pacific...
...making landing strips while Japanese snipers with Erisakas and scopes—probably made by Nikon—are shooting at them...
...You look a lot like the young Carl Perkins," I said...
...He laughed but stayed out in front of the Watergate looking at my car until I disappeared up Virginia Avenue...
...Now that you say it, it's perfectly clear...
...Monday M emorial Day...
...At Arlington there was an immense crowd of motorcyclists forming to mark Memorial Day...
...Brunch at the Cosmos Club with my father and my sister...
...But they obligingly recognized me and shouted "Clear Eyes" as I cycled past...
...I'll visit him often...
...Yeah...
...We went into the majority offices and schmoozed with some student interns and a few staff members including the man who asked me here, Mr...
...It seems to me we are about the same age, but he looks much younger...
...Friday Aspecial day trying to clean up some of the vast mess in my apartment/office...
...My sister and I are visiting, and my father is taking us out to his usual stomping grounds...
...But twenty-five million a year isn't even that rich," she said...
...and I felt really sad...
...But you can't defeat the market...
...Sad about the dead soldiers, sailors, and airmen, sad about my lonely father, sad missing my mother...
...After dinner I stayed up reading a book of Jewish short stories of how horrible life was in the Russian shtetl, about the horrible atrocities visited upon the Jews by the "White" armies during the civil war between the Reds and the Whites in 1917).919...
...This is America at work...
...That's not a lot...
...A late night call from a friend in Maine who used to be a lawyer and then became a dentist and then decided she wanted to be a singer...
...Big mistake on the Hill...
...After it's gone it's too late...
...What honor can possibly be enough for them when they live and after they are gone...
...Hell is not understanding or even thinking about how good we've got it...
...I could not figure out what that meant...
...Russia...
...It's one of the only things you can do that you will never regret...
...Twenty-five million a year sounds right to me," I said...
...Each one of them read prepared text, and I would bet that a good chunk of it was prepared at the NEA...
...We talked for a while about squabbles within the conservative movement...
...There was only one black teacher...
...Pam, the manager, came over to us...
...I hugged and squeezed him...
...Of course...
...ago that having my son at my side was the only fun way to travel...
...I mean, I can barely pay for parking...
...I asked...
...I was so wired by the horror stories that I could not sleep...
...It was hard to leave my father alone...
...Or business fighter...
...Life is a freeway, says DeAnne Barkley, my brilliant Louisiana pal...
...I told the kids that they would make their lives a lot easier if they turned their lives over to God, admitted that they were just extras, and that God was the director...
...Or maybe food just tastes really, really good...
...That's about a million a month...
...But not all food...
...She just knows everything...
...I have had a lot of so-called luxury cars...
...It adds up really, really fast...
...Even a woman with full Mongolian ceremonial headdress (Alex recognized it from National Geographic...
...I'm so broke," she said...
...There is just no singing work here in Maine...
...My husband and I keep getting outbid on houses," Staci said...
...GM has really gotten its act together...
...I love food...
...My mother's rules probably will never make it into Corpus Juris, but to her little family, they meant something and I really miss hearing them...
...This is progress, Mr...
...It is remarkably sad to be there without her...
...Everybody in the world has come to L.A...
...We had a little trouble finding the site, since a stone will not go up for another eleven months, and the ground was a bit muddy...
...Matty says he wants the opening to make people think of Shylock...
...Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground...
...Alexander finished, photographers clustered around Alec Baldwin and took his picture hundreds of times...
...Not an old jet, but a newer model Gulfstream...
...Thursday H ere I am on the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C...
...Just great judgment about everything, especially about where a photo of the Mona Lisa with my face on it should go...
...Not bad at all...
...The rest is an interesting mixture of white, Hispanic, Asian, and what have you...
...Wow, are they scary-looking...
...Amazingly, considering that it's the day before The American Spectator • August 1997 57 Memorial Day, there is hardly anyone at the cemetery, either the Jewish part or the Gentile part...
...He was a great writer who was tor-hired horribly by the Czarist forces during the civil wars, then joined the Reds, was happy in the fools' paradise of Marxism/Bolshevism, saw the truth of it, and then was killed by Stalin...
...There is the national will for one thing, and the strength of individuals...
...Wednesday I am back from D.C...
...Sunday B ack in D.C...
...The blacks and whites mill together in great numbers and get along fine...
...Russians speaking Russian...
...I want more questions about my childhood and fewer about Iraq...
...She asked me how much I thought she would need to get by once her debts were manageable...
...Most of the congressmen were fine, although one poor soul from Hawaii, Patsy Mink, gave a long, rambling speech about how arts funding was necessary because each child was unique like a snowflake...
...Deval Patrick...
...And also, why are so many razor-sharp contestants on quiz shows overweight...
...These men died so that Tommy Stein could play in peace...
...Take lots of brownies back to the table, and bring a napkin so you can wrap up whatever you want to take home with you...
...Much of our universe is our family and much of our legend, our rules about brownies, comes from our mothers...
...Not only is lovely Jane Alexander, the chair of the NEA, here to testify (in a huge pink dress that does little to hide her lovely face), but so is Alec Baldwin and he's a stahhhh...
...No federal funding for the religion of anti-religion...
...Who should we see as soon as we walk in but Bob Tyrrell, looking jovial and cheery with a number of friends including one beautiful woman lawyer...
...Then we all went to Santa Monica, rented bikes, and zoomed along the Strand...
...That seems pretty basic, doesn't it...
...He's another smart fellow...
...Max, and a man named Norm Singleton who reads the Spectator, God love him...
...Al has amazing discretion about how the opening should go...
...I like being here...
...Blair was a great spot (among many other reasons) because there was almost no racial animosity of any kind...
...But why was life so bad in Russia...
...Not so fast, Ms...
...My name is Kipkinn...
...Luckily, there are a lot of factors keeping the Civil Rights Division in check...
...Plus, I have a chance to visit with genius Al Burton at the sound studio...
...Heaven is appreciating what you've got...
...Of course, the "multiplier effect" is much debated within economics, but if it applies to arts funding, it applies to funding of any kind—especially nuclear weapons funding...
...They should ask that on every show...
...Alexander...
...Look...
...If you know where you want to go, eventually, you'll get there...
...Then I told them they couldn't win if they were not at the table, a line I heard from Joan Didion long, long ago...
...That leaves about thirteen million...
...Now I get it...
...No one took mine, boo-hoo...
...is the worst experience of his life...
...Staci and I went out to lunch to Morton's...
...Rain started to fall, so I headed back home to the River Inn and took a long nap...
...So I have thirty thousand in debt on my credit cards, and I feel I can't breathe, so I'm thinking of going into bankruptcy...
...But there certainly were no blacks on the school board and no black principals in the county...
...You don't think two hundred and fifty thousand a week is a lot...
...She is a stunningly beautiful Italianate goddess now married to a prosperous small businessman...
...No residuals...
...When I arrived, Alex and Tommy were at the gate...
...Heaven," as I told my father when I called him from the plane, "is appreciating what we have here in America right now...
...On the way back for more filing, Staci asked if she could borrow a hundred dollars until pay day...
...It's my own fault...
...That meant, life isn't terrible...
...For some reason, this made Alec Baldwin angry at me and he started talkingabout how I had made a crusade for years of fighting the NEA, and blasting Robert Mapplethorpe...
...What does this mean...
...Afterward I rented a bike at Thompson's Boat House and rode along the Potomac for a while...
...I read more of the Jewish short stories...
...Did you think there would be singing work in Maine...
...Notices from credit card companies of immense bills...
...I am seated next to a Mr...
...Then Alex...
...Like my husband gives me an allowance of a thousand a week and I'm broke all the time...
...At Blair, a great spot, there were no black teachers and only about twenty-five black students...
...What do I have waiting for me though when I return...
...On a thousand a week...
...Life was fixed by quotas and government orders...
...Then we found it and stood by it and felt sad...
...Then you have to have a ranch...
...Anyway, I like Alec Baldwin so I am not going to quibble...
...I am," he said cheerily...
...There are too many shrieking babies in the crowd, but otherwise, people are behaving well...
...Where else on earth has any kind of social justice revolution come so far, so fast, with so few casualties...
...Thursday B ack in Hollywood, on the sound stage at KTLA, right across from Metromedia Square, there I am with my posse, rehearsing "Win Ben Stein's Money...
...It adds up...
...Well, I'm also doing some bootleg dentistry, but it still doesn't pay much...
...A very different approach to conflict resolution, to be sure, but certain similarities in the world view...
...He smiled and showed me a tattoo of Carl Perkins's signature on his forearm...
...That is sad," I agree...
...I hope you're joking," I said...
...Cleave to your family while you still can...
...But this is my first Caddy...
...I made a joke about how much I loved Carl Perkins and how his version of "Blue Suede Shoes" was even better than the King's, but a congressman without a sense of humor interrupted me to tell me I had the wrong Carl Perkins...
...How much money do you think you have to have to be considered rich...
...People in Maine don't have a lot of money...
...I am workThe American Spectator • August 1997 61...
...Beemers...
...I am testifying before two House subcommittees considering whether or not to renew funding for the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Maybe so, but there were s000 many pretty girls on the Hill...
...Anyway, he looks great...
...Half of it goes for tax...
...They look so fresh and sweet, like corn-fed beauties ready to take on any challenge with a smile and no percent resolution...
...Well, I'm near Bangor and there's regional theater here...
...But I have to take my girlfriends to lunch...
...A lot...
...When I actually began to testify, my little speech urged that federal spending be confined to endorsing and promoting the works of artists we already know are great like Mozart and Beethoven and da Vinci...
...The challenge now is to make racial preference as obsolete as lynching...
...To live free from fear...
...Those things cost money...
...There were fights and bomb scares constantly...
...Asians, constantly getting in the way of bike and roller blade traffic...
...I guess his rigorous exercise has something to do withit...
...Tommy was looking for me so eagerly that it melted my old heart...
...It has something called an Onstar that talks to Michigan and tells me where I am at any time night or day...
...I am the graduation speaker for Montgomery Blair High School...
...Lay your body down...
...Why even try...
...I wonder if some smart fellow at George Mason has ever studied the similarities between the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division recently and the Czarist Okhrana or the KGB...
...The lives of my ancestors were so utterly precarious, uncertain, difficult, out of anyone's control...
...I picked up Tommy at school, and then we rode our bikes...
...Still, theirhearts are obviously in the right place as they thunder along on their Harleys...
...Who was the least cool...
...I feel like the guy in the old "Show Us Your Lark Packs" ad...
...Because that house isn't worth eight hundred," Staci said...
...That puts you on the high end of the scale in terms of opinions about being rich," I told her after I caught my breath...
...Another song by those "well known" anti-war musicians, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and probably the most poignant short tribute to America's fighting men ever written...
...It is really dusty...
...After my nap I walked over to the Borders on i8th and L, talked to my pal, Priscilla Witt, a lovely redheaded employee of the bookshop, and then went to Brooks Brothers and bought some shirts...
...Gainous, the principal of Blair, and guess what...
...I just wanted to have a good time en route...
...Come to think of it, there are a lot of every kind of person here...
...Lucky, once again...
...She has been in Congress for about forty years and it shows...
...The most terrifying part is the note about Isaac Babel, author of two touching stories in the volume...
...What is a really good thing to do this afternoon or tomorrow morning...
...Kipkinn it is...
...I think that there must be a giant escalator from Tijuana to Santa Monica, with about fifteen lanes...
...The contemplation of death is exhausting...
...So is about half of the student body...
...But then that part of his remarks was not scripted...
...By the way, I rented a Chevy Lumina this time and it's a great car...
...Anyway, I had to leave early to catch my plane back to L.A...
...The man who waited on us had tattoos all over his body and a familiar haircut...
...Just one more note on my graduation speech...
...Yuck...
...Still, I won the day, and I went back to my apartment by a route that took me along Fountain Street...
...The difficult we do immediately...
...This is an all-star day...
...Bike around the world...
...All of this back and forth is just about doing me in...
...Sometimes I try to imagine how many brave men it took so that I could ride cheerily along the street on my bike...
...But that must not be enough to support a mosquito...
...Another congressman, a nice guy, said that I was wrong to mention "firemen" and how their taxes should not be taken away to pay for performance art...
...I told you burial of the dead was a business...
...Kipkinn...
...Several of the folks there offered condolences on my mother...
...I keep thinking of my mother standing in the living room of my parents' Watergate apartment, holding out a bunch of grapes and shaking them at me to get my attention...
...Plus you have to have nannies for each kid...
...I notice that this is an iron law of travel...
...Then I went over to pick up the Cadillac I have been wanting all of my life...
...I guess because people were not free...
...A thousand a week is not enough...
...Very well," I said...
...Why am I overweight...
...You were who the government said you were, not who you could be...
...Their basic points were that federal funding for the arts made students smarter and it had a multiplier effect on local economies...
...The kids are cheerful, excited, smiling...
...This isn't Russia, you know," my mother used to say when we were kids...
...We are on what must be the darkest, dustiest, dimmest stage ever 56 August 1997 • The American Spectator made...
...Your wife, Alex, is so smart...
...No need to imagine what heaven will be like or would be like...
...Then my father, sister, and I ate brunch...
...Down the road, at the entrance to the cemetery office, was a sign offering 30 percent off on vaults and memorials for Memorial Day...
...Yoo-hoo," she would say with a smile...
...The scenery is great...
...I am not kidding...
...America's young are so ready to turn to God, if the government did not stand in their way...
...Then you have to have a yacht if you live anywhere near the water like in California or Florida...
...But I never knew where I wanted to go...
...Sometimes I think that America is actually heaven...
...But here is another little bit of providence...
...Have a good life, Alec, and I'll live mine, too...
...I am excited...
...Then a snack, and then a visit to the Guitar Center to buy headphones for my Dad...
...My father said that the testifying process was like ships passing in the night...
...Because there are men and women fighting fires...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
