Ben Stein's Diary: Time After Time
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Time After Time Monday M y cable TV service is broken again, right after getting "fixed" and working for all of twelve hours, and it's making me think some...
...Had I ever called her...
...What...
...Mobbed, as I say...
...The American Spectator • August 1998 55 "Well, you had better stop," the detective said in a scarily threatening voice...
...It's a good night...
...At this she gave a long, disgusted sigh...
...She and I parted ways over a year ago...
...I waited half an hour to go through metal detectors at New York's Kennedy Airport last weekend, and seethed along with hundreds and probably thousands of others...
...That means you have to get cable and have a system that has our show to evenhave an opinion about whether or not we should beat 'Jeopardy.'" "You mean fewer than half of the judges have even seen our show...
...As he told me about it, he began to sing it in the front seat of the Lincoln and every word of it came right back to me...
...WRONG...
...Of course, they keep sending me bills anyway...
...Then our heartaches began...
...Look, I don't care what the law says," she said...
...Keker called and said that no further action was going to be taken about Mary Muff Maguire's complaint...
...Obviously, the monopolies will not suddenly give us good service just to be nice guys...
...I met a cute child named Megan from the town of Darling, Mississippi...
...I think you'll be fine...
...The next time you're in trouble, I thought, don't call alawyer...
...Then I talked to the Rev...
...Sorry to bother you," I said, "but I am a bit puzzled...
...Nationwide, as one bank swallows another, the constant sequel is closing branches, fewer banks, and long, long lines...
...There's not even an allegation of a crime!' "I don't have time to argue with you about the law," she said...
...Police above the law...
...Very, very coolly...
...So, every week or two weeks or sometimes less often, I would call and leave a message, telling her she was smart and articulate and pretty and could be anything she wanted...
...He is a handsome fellow of 53 who lives in 54 August 199 8 The American Spectator Waterproof, Louisiana...
...And God bless John Keker, my sword and shield...
...We're up against "Jeopardy," "Wheel of Fortune," "Pictionary," and "The Price Is Right...
...Standing room only...
...I haven't done any of these things...
...Fewer clerks, fewer banks, and fewer and worse-trained operators mean lower costs and more black ink on the bottom line...
...I moved my seat again...
...I'm so glad they could make use of it to save lives...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Time After Time Monday M y cable TV service is broken again, right after getting "fixed" and working for all of twelve hours, and it's making me think some Deep Thoughts About Time...
...He had fought in Nijmegen, the famous battle of A Bridge Too Far, and then in the Battle of the Bulge...
...Then to bed, ready for a long flight back to Los Angeles...
...I felt as if the air had been let out of my tires...
...I talked for a long time to a doctor named Gil Campbell, a dashing rogue from Charlottesville...
...As he drove me home, I talked to him about his life...
...The ceremony is mercifully brief—as usual, the people at Eden Isle have good taste—and then we are all sipping champagne and talking small talk...
...Then, a party for the Warner cartoon people at "21," and then a party for us at a less-well-known, fairly desolate spot...
...Friday H ere we are in New York for the Emmies...
...I need to believe someone else believes in me...
...There is only one local phone company and only a few airlines, all of which have the same long waits to make a reservation...
...44 'This is crazy,' I said...
...Then I had a talk with Larry, the son of Col...
...Alex Trebek sat looking very uncomfortable a few rows ahead of him...
...That woman detective was impossible to talk to," he said...
...A man laying tile in our living room broke the phone jack...
...We had to take a Chevy Malibu (a great car, it turned out...
...Now, you might think that once a plane is airborne, its air-conditioning would automatically work, right...
...We have had a BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...But this is the big one: Best Game Show...
...Now that I think of it, I knew of a clothes designer named Dorcas Hardy, in Georgetown, I think...
...To my great amazement, there was a message from a woman detective in the West Los Angeles Police Department saying she had to talk to me about a report she had taken about me...
...L ater that night, Alex and I sat in a bar at the Red Apple Inn and drank...
...It was brutally hot on the runway...
...I am not being burned alive by Cossacks in a synagogue...
...No doubt about it," I said...
...She's the one who used to make threatening phone calls to me...
...Amazing...
...Right," said the beautiful blond girl...
...I went and talked to Bill Cockerill, another friend of Dale Denman who had been in the 82nd Airborne...
...Please call and tell me I mean something...
...But what we see now is the exact opposite of free markets: there are only a few banks, and they are almost all crowded...
...Maybe the most terrifying...
...He commanded an M-48 tank...
...She bought the day after the crash in 1987, the day after the big 500- point correction in 1997, and has made out like a bandit...
...A phantom health club that seems to exist only on my wife's credit card bills and nowhere else in Los Angeles keeps billing us every month for a membership that never existed in a club that never existed...
...Friday yeah...
...We were happy...
...Right," said the beautiful blond girl, "and I'm Marilyn Monroe...
...He sighed...
...It was stunningly hot...
...We have an uphill battle here," he said...
...They obviously watch the show and some of them apparently read The American Spectator as well...
...A good point, I had to agree, and the other phone was ringing anyway...
...All of these men, and their wives, of course, sat quietly, sipped bourbon and ate roast beef sandwiches, and never bragged at all...
...Maybe I shouldn't have even made the trip...
...We commiserated row to row, and then I wanted to leave...
...Soap opera fans—of whom there seem to be a more or less endless number, mainly women in formal dress — clustered around the velvet ropes and chrome stanchions...
...That is, even more coolly...
...I was born in Scotland but I'm Irish, and who wouldn't want peace...
...This is standard, and I just moved to a luckily empty seat...
...You look really famous," she said...
...Now bear in mind, our little show, "Win Ben Stein's Money," already won two Emmies last week...
...They don't have any of the characteristics of a crime...
...Well, she had turned in a report saying that I, Ben Stein, had been making annoying phone calls to her, thereby committing a crime...
...I feared that a certain single mother I know on the West Side had suffered a traffic accident, so I called right away...
...This is not a case of "all's well that ends well," though...
...He plays Ben Stein on TV...
...I played my messages while I seethed...
...The ceremony was in Radio City Music Hall...
...With a curt nod and a wave of the hand...
...To make a long story short, or at least shorter, she wanted to know if I knew a Mary Muff Maguire...
...As for Dean, he's driving his Lincoln, playing in the occasional club in L.A., still sounding great, and a little thing he wrote when he was 23 might help give peace a chance...
...I was an upstanding citizen...
...That's what I would guess...
...The only problem was a fantastically fat man behind me who got drunk and was nervously kicking the back of my seat...
...Maguire considers them annoying...
...After a few minutes he excused himself to go exercise his new Labrador...
...I imagined the fear of the Amirault or Fell's Acres or McMartin innocent victims...
...The flight crew is nowhere in sight and the maintenance people are on the plane, indicating some sort of problem...
...I told them of course if it helped for peace, I was all for it...
...The police woman who does not care what the law is...
...How great life is when we have a soul mate...
...She saw my show on the satellite...
...But I'll call you tomorrow...
...Can you make a note of that on your report...
...It's hot and smoky and there are too many people here...
...No, it was still hot and swelteringon the plane...
...Then the program started...
...What did you say to them...
...And there are hundreds of tables of men and women from "Days of Our Lives," "General Hospital," "The Young and the Restless...
...Then, treading a well-trod path, he lost his band, could not get another recording contract, and came to America to start a new life...
...We are seeing now something a lot like what broke nerves in Moscow and Vilnius and Bucharest: monopolies, just as bad if private as if they're run by the state, just as contemptuous of the customer, just as ready to squeeze out profit by stealing from us our most basic commodity, our lifetime...
...The worst nightmare of the libertarian come true...
...Jeopardy" won...
...He told these stories in a manner so self-effacing you would be hard pressed to believe them...
...He thanked Jesus Christ for winning, and I thought that was good...
...What a great situation where a private citizen can have his own lawyer, beholden not to the state or to the party, but to the good of his client...
...Of course...
...The guard at the NBC Bob Hope Drive gate was apparently a work-release prisoner and she said my name was not on the list and so she would not let me onto the lot...
...Ever since I have been writing, I've been the most determined defender of the police, and I still am...
...Well, I just got a call from my publisher in London...
...After that, there was total silence from her and everyone else while we sat and sweltered on the runway in that sardine can bus...
...Our gang from "WBSM" is also here: Al Burton, Andrew Golder, Terry McDonnell, Byron Glore...
...The most interesting talk comes from Col...
...I asked the origin of the name...
...Alex and I flew to Dallas en route to Little Rock...
...A few hardy fans asked for my picture and autograph, too...
...When we complain, they just laugh at us and say they're busy...
...While we have it, we have the precious gift of life...
...When time is over, our lives are over...
...The fans screamed as soap stars passed by, just yelled their lungs out, and took photos...
...Then a beautiful young blond woman walked by and stared at me...
...It's a helluva big place, and the contestants and nominees were complemented by thousands of fans and seat fillers, who screamed more...
...The parting had to do with her endless demands for money—she claimed she should get paid a thousand dollars for every pound I might lose over the next three years as a result of the eating advice she gave me...
...You don't know what evidence I have," said the detective...
...But if you're in the toils of the law, a lawyer is what you need...
...I suppose that if you cornered a phone company board chairman or a banker from one of the major national mega-banks, he would say it's all being done in the name of efficiency...
...I thought for a moment that probably in that woman's book, having a bad attitude is also a crime...
...My father reads me your diary every month," he said...
...I never threatened her—that's not my style—or called her names or did anything other than what she had asked...
...You have a great show...
...It was too much trouble for them to reverse a clearly fraudulent charge over the phone no matter how many times the fraud was pointed out...
...My fans seem to be mostly police lining the route...
...As noted, heaven help you if your phone breaks...
...Once out of the airport, though, the going was good...
...In America, we now have chronic line waiting, maddening and endless, while we wait not for scarce goods, but for purposely made scarce bank service...
...You know the peace initiative in Ireland," he asked...
...After dinner, Al, Alex, Andrew, and I walked along a long red carpet from 53rd and Seventh to 51st and Sixth...
...Airports have become hellholes...
...I am not being blown up by an artillery barrage in the battle of the Golan Heights...
...Denman is standing there with Sue Johnson, his pretty, jovial fiancée, and Reverend Ed Smith is presiding...
...Not alone...
...Maybe so, and I am all for capitalism and free markets...
...A steady trail of waiters, bartenders, and customers paraded by the table asking for photos with me...
...His musical career did not flourish as he would have wanted...
...Mary Muff asked me to make them...
...Ed Smith...
...I know the law on annoying phone calls...
...In Russia and the other Iron Curtain countries, waiting in lines for scarce goods was one of the main grievances that led to the overthrow of the system...
...And if she calls you, hang up...
...She was so angry, she'd been thrown out of a 12-step "Anger Meeting" for the most angry souls for being too angry, or so she told me...
...So, we could have 70 percent of the people who have seen our show vote for it, and 'Jeopardy,' a show that's on in every house in America could have 40 percent of the people who have seen it vote for it—and we'd lose...
...He told me about working for racial harmony in rural Mississippi in the summer of 1968...
...By z z The American Spectator August 1998 53 total chance, I ran into my old pal and employer Lew Harris there...
...What possible right did this detective have to upset me without any evidence at all against me...
...We got it, lost our great phone and bank and air service—and now we have monopolies again, with no service at all...
...The cable company, Century Cable, repeatedly promises to show up and then does not appear, keeping me or my wife waiting for a day for them to come...
...Thursday W e're back in Los Angeles, and today was one of the most terrifying days of my life...
...And, of course, these are just the tiny items of my tiny life...
...They want to play my song while they talk about how they can make changes to get to a place of peace...
...This morning, this Thursday morning, I went off to NBC to be in a comedy special with Cindy Crawford...
...They also were cruelly disappointed in the results of their categories, and with good reason...
...Isn't there a market for a phone company that actually keeps your phone in good repair...
...He told about getting shot at with RPG's, running over mines while looking for COSVN, of getting his tracks blown off...
...State power is really, really dangerous...
...Wait a minute," I said...
...Hollywood is changing rapidly...
...I don't really drink alcohol, but the others at the bar more than made up for me...
...She loved me, she said, and I went back to my room...
...And in a flash I had my old classmate and pal, John Keker, lawyer extraordinaire, on the phone...
...He was belittling himself and being modest in a way that we Hollywood folk almost never see...
...Mary Muff used to make hundreds of obscene, threatening phone calls to me in the middle of the night...
...Bank of America makes us call every month—or did until we canceled the credit card—and send them a letter with every statement...
...The problem is that everyone in the TV academy is eligible to vote, and Comedy Central didn't send out video cassettes of our show...
...She was the woman who made clothes for Jesus," said the woman...
...We're all in the sun room of his fiancée's lovely house overlooking Greer's Ferry Lake on Eden Isle, near Heber Springs, in northeastern Arkansas...
...I'll call her...
...I went back right away and did a rather funny "bumper," as you might say, a little stand-up bit about how Republicans make better lovers, and then I returned to my casa...
...I'm telling you that I have a complaint and I'm going to write it up...
...I felt my stomach fall...
...That was lucky indeed, because he cheered me up considerably...
...It was smoky from the Mexican fires...
...No, really," said a nearby customer...
...Denman's late wife, Hutch Moss...
...Lonely is a very bad word...
...I'm going to write up what a bad attitude you have and the city attorney can go from there...
...But I held my tongue and said nothing about that...
...It sounded scary and I was impressed at how brave he was...
...As airlines were deregulated and passenger growth soared, no real provision was made for accommodating the passengers...
...You're a criminal if one woman tells another woman that you're a criminal...
...I'm a lawyer...
...Thursday ell, this is perfect, speaking of w service...
...As you may recall, she was my nutty but very clever nutritionist, former dancer, former friend of wealthy men...
...What great good luck for me that I have a smart, self-confident pal like Keker I can call in this situation...
...Right," said my informant...
...Start with Mary Muff Maguire...
...The result: long, interminable lines at ticket counters and at metal detectors...
...He's Ben Stein," said a waitress...
...Campbell sat on a little bench and for a while would not talk about his heroism...
...There's just no crime here...
...No, no," I interrupted...
...Maybe that's what you call a rogue cop...
...Isn't your job all about the law...
...Alex and I, in our glad rags, are at a pre-show dinner at the Sheraton along with thousands of other nominees and their pals...
...The woman detective came on the line...
...Maybe the days of my youth, when there were no lines at banks, when airports were pleasant, relaxed places, when the phone company actually could fix a phone and tell you the right number, are gone forever...
...My wife said it was still a good event, what with the screaming fans of the soaps, so we stayed, and she was right...
...Call the Cato Institute...
...Campbell were rescued by U.S...
...Later on, as the crowd thinned out, I watched Col...
...This conversation went on for a short while, but then when the blond girl decided that I might be Ben Stein, she launched into a long conversation about how she was madly in love with Joe Bob Briggs of TV fame, and could I possibly introduce her to him...
...Look," she said, "Ms...
...She's giving me her stock market history, and it sounds awfully darned good...
...Its air conditioning did not work either...
...Those are super cartoons...
...Guess what...
...There is only one cable system and I can only switch from there to satellite dish (which I am going to do—at great up-front expense...
...Col...
...But do they have to be...
...fighting men...
...That detective should not have called me in the first place with no evidence of any misconduct by me—with her knowing very well that I had not done anything wrong...
...That's police," he said...
...I have had a lot of them and I have had to go to the Sheriff about them and have looked up the law about them on Lexis many a time...
...By a cold coincidence, we were sitting right behind a crew from Warner Brothers cartoons, specifically "Animaniacs" and "Pinky and the Brain...
...I am Ben Stein...
...I went down to the pool for a swim...
...I took the call...
...I usually left these as messages on her machine, because conversation with her was often impossible owing to her uncontrollable anger...
...So far, so good...
...I am not in the Lubyanka...
...But I bravely walked down a few rows and congratulated Alex Trebek...
...The one bank I know without lines won't even accept any customers with less than a hundred thousand to put into a CD...
...Maybe an airline that did not charge super low fares, but did provide great service would have customers...
...I am not in a trench in the Battle of Ypres...
...He was happy to see me and had a story to tell...
...Denman's sister-in-law, Mary Evelyn, Alex's aunt...
...For the past six weeks, the cable service bringing TV to our home has been broken for all but a few days...
...52 August 1998 • The American Spectator But we were supposed to get deregulation...
...Friday H ere I am at the wedding of my father-in-law, Colonel Dale Denman, Jr., U.S...
...I felt terrible...
...This is crazy...
...Denman and his lovely, lively bride walking toward their car together...
...Not us...
...This is scary...
...Can't the free market figure out something...
...I sit by my bed and play them over and over again," she said...
...I told him the story...
...I did...
...A young man came up to me and told me how much he loved The American Spectator...
...Finally, I dragged out of him that he had won the Silver Star for heart-stopping courage in the Korean War...
...We arrived safely in Eden Isle...
...Then, at Little Rock airport, the air conditioning did not work...
...And I'm Sharon Stone...
...I lay there and imagined the Gestapo at the door...
...I know very well what constitutes an annoying phone call under California law...
...Time is the one absolutely limited element of life...
...A good day...
...When our immensely, terrifyingly overweight driver—wearing Bermuda shorts—got us to our plane, she said, 'Well, I have some bad news and some worse news...
...The people behind the proposal want to use `Reflections' as background to commercials urging people to vote yes on the pro-posals...
...Clearly, I had not done anything even remotely illegal under the law...
...Well, so much for him...
...She was super drunk...
...She pleaded with me to come back and promised she would have someone at the gate to meet me...
...Instead, I said, "I am just trying to find out how you have the right to call me and torment me without any evidence that I have done anything wrong...
...Likewise, as one phone company swallows another, operators are cut, pay is held down so that skill levels are also held down, and the phone operators cannot tell you a number correctly to save their lives...
...As I did, I thought about how I did not like that woman detective pushing me around...
...As we drifted apart, she called to say she really would miss those reassuring messages...
...The Dallas airport was mobbed, and that's standard as well...
...You don't care what the law says...
...He took to driving a car as his day job —and did it well —driving fast and straight and always in command of the best route...
...He greeted me very coolly, to put it mildly...
...I agreed, but she wanted the money before I lost the weight...
...I don't play Ben Stein...
...In the abstract, it's fine to hate lawyers...
...He refused to do so, and stayed with them until the wounded and Dr...
...Now, he is just a pleasant Southern gentleman...
...Meanwhile, I was chained to the phone...
...You're a police officer...
...But what a terrifying scenario...
...I don't have time for this," said the detective...
...We were always facing long odds, and we were lucky to be nominated in the first place...
...I'll make a note that you said you were going to fabricate evidence," she said...
...Campbell, age 27, dove into the water and grabbed the floundering soldier while shells zinged around them...
...The driver, really I should say the musician, was and is Dean Ford, a native of Glasgow, who went to London to play, and became rich and famous...
...I hit the ceiling...
...We stopped at a small restaurant in Quitman and many nice folks asked for autographs...
...She used to leave me dozens of angry, threatening, wildly obscene messages night after night . In return, I would try to reassure her that her life need not be meaningless, that she could turn it over to God, and that she could be anything she wanted to be — lawyer, writer, teacher, investment banker, anything she wanted to be—and that her body was not her sole asset...
...The song was played constantly on TV and on radio for the weeks leading up to the historic vote on May 22, ushering in—everyone hopes—a new era of peace, Dean told me...
...With his guitarist, William Campbell, he had been the composer of one of the main British invasion, non-Beatle, non-Rolling Stones hits of 1970, a wonderful song called "Reflections of My Life...
...Army (Ret...
...Tonight, Dean met me at the airport again after I returned from New York...
...Behind my wife and me a mother and her daughter coughed loud, deep, painful coughs bringing up vast sprays of germs...
...Howie Mandel read the category of Best Game Show...
...We struggled a while with the problem, but then I gave up and went home...
...It was amazingly hot and stuffy on the plane...
...Things were so bad, I sent my wife and family away because I thought my house was going to get bombed," he said...
...This has all been coming to mind lately in a big way because here, today, in our new "golden age," I've been witnessing a lot of time getting stolen from me and people around me...
...A few days ago, I had to make reservations to get to Little Rock, Arkansas, where my widowed father-in-law is getting remarried...
...The only thing that's being fabricated here is that I did anything wrong...
...Well, the law is concerned with whether there's criminal intent on the part of the defendant, not on the part of the witness...
...04 56 August 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Then one of my colleagues, who shall be nameless, told me something that did not make me feel good...
...Exactly," said my friend...
...I know what calls I have made," I said...
...Isn't there a market for a bank that charges a little more and gives good service...
...Our luxury Avis car was not ready for us...
...To fall within the law, the calls have to be obscene or threatening or made with the intent to annoy while concealing the caller's identity...
...One woman who asked was named "Dorcas...
...He was in the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam...
...Man and wife...
...There's just no evidence of a crime here...
...I called her back and in a minute she came on the line...
...That sure put a sobering spin on it...
...He acknowledged me the way one might acknowledge a beggar who happened to pass by while calling out a request for a few pennies...
...Then, back to the Red Apple Inn to have a reception for the lucky couple...
...As the enemy shot at the man, Dr...
...When someone steals our time, he is taking much more than money...
...The very first award was to that young man for best young actor in a soap...
...This is a truism, but oh is it true...
...I have never made an annoying phone call to her," I said...
...But I'm not fabricating evidence...
...When I threaten to buy a satellite dish, they say, "So...
...The changes...from sunlight...to moonlight," and I suppose anyone who is 40 or over remembers it as well...
...phone company man at our house five times and still the jack doesn't work...
...It was from the Cindy Crawford producer...
...About a half hour later he called back...
...He had been the lead singer of a highly popular English band of the late 1960's and early 1970's called Marmalade...
...Saturday About two months ago, I was met at LAX by a driver with a fantastically quick walk, a neat, well-tended look, and a charming Scottish-Irish burr...
...We sat on the plane for another forty minutes or so and then took off...
...Once, he was with a group of soldiers who were pinned down by North Korean fire as they were crossing a river...
...Another time, he was treating a group of wounded men when they were overtaken by Chinese forces...
...The lake is covered with smoke today from the cursed fires in Mexico, so we cannot see clearly how lovely it is, but the sight is still pleasant through the trees...
...I am not sure what the solution is...
...The men were crossing by moving hand to hand over the water via a cable when one fell into the river...
...Nahh, I'm calling a lawyer...
...We're all here hoping to win...
...But I talked to her boss, and I think it'll be all right...
...He had been a musician, a singer, and a composer...
...Many of them asked for my autograph, and that made me feel good...
...I believe that Doctor Campbell may well be the only doctor to have won two Silver Stars in one war," said my father-in-law...
...But a bad apple like that woman detective can create a lot of doubt...
...It really happened and I even wrote it down in some articles while it was happening...
...Forty long minutes later, we were allowed on the plane...
...I was just young, that's all," he said...
...They're all kind, non-obscene, encouraging calls...
...The little bus that takes us passengers out to the American Eagle Flight was packed...
...We took our seats...
...I was so jacked up and angry about being tortured for this non-event, non-crime by a woman who had obvious contempt for law, yet wore the badge of a detective, that I could hardly sleep at all...
...I felt bad that we did not win, but that's where the consolations of history come in...
...Don't call her...
...God bless Thomas Jefferson and the other fine people who knew to put limits on it...
...I politely thanked her for her trouble and said good-bye...
...Campbell was told he should leave and leave the wounded men behind...
...I ran into my rival, Alex Trebek, in the lobby and greeted him warmly...
...It took the clerk at American Airlines fifty-one minutes to make the reservation...
...She's the one who used to make threatening phone calls to me.' "I'm also going to write up that you have a bad attitude," said the woman detective...
...The theft is of time—the basic building block of life itself...
...After the call, I thought about how commentators often mock lawyers and make fun of the legal profession...
...My pals—the boys in blue...
...She has a habit of buying on corrections...
...But shouldn't you have the assurance that all cops at least care about the law and want to only enforce what the law is...
...When I asked her what could possibly have taken so long, she simply refused to answer...
...She sounds crazy and if she's that crazy, maybe you shouldn't be talking to her...
...I advise you not to call her though," Keker said...
Vol. 31 • August 1998 • No. 8
