Ben Stein's Diary: A House Divided
Stein, Benjamin J.
BENSTEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein A House Divided Friday T here is something about real estate that does not love a new owner. Property is different from stock or bonds or that best of...
...Sunday U h-oh...
...No, I'm insane...
...The worst I can do is yell at him and tell him he's under arrest and not let him play video games—and how tough is that...
...I who have been robbed and stolen from by every kind of home contractor, with eyes open, without coercion—JUST BY SHEER IDIOCY—bought a house that BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...Then room service of bottled water, all from the management as a gift...
...It's jammed...
...Tried again...
...But very comfy...
...Or how long until I'm accused of teaching witchcraft because I tell him to thank God for the blessings He has showered on us and how long for accusations of sexism for that use of the word Him?smidgeon of butter and canola oil, heat it to sizzling temperature, and then add the battered bread...
...The hero bought land and hired an architect to build his dream house and wound up losing wife and dreams and hopes to the architect and the ruinous house...
...At that point he appeared at my door...
...Her Mommy did not want Mommy to grow up to cook...
...There was a fine driver waiting for me, and off we went...
...If life is the measure of all things, if the ultimate value in this world is human life, then you do not fight wars unless it's absolutely necessary...
...No one can be a complete American unless he's struck fifty times a week with how blessed he is to be here, and I hope I'm on that path...
...Because they won't be around long...
...Now, all that awaits me in that house is the thought of how easy my life would have been if I had just stayed quietly in our little home in the Hollywood Hills...
...She wanted her to be somebody in the workplace, which is what Mommy became, as we all know...
...I have told you before and I'll tell you again: Pay attention to the kiddies when they're young and when they want you around...
...They're doing a colonoscopy on my plumbing in my house on #@3@##### Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills...
...He shrugged...
...Didn't her mother show her...
...Will he know that every inch of that house is paid for in blood...
...needed renovation...
...Then to sleep, praising God for my warm bed, my son, my wifie, my Dad, living in America, living in America, living in America...
...I have been feeling extremely ill, probably from a spider bite that has left me covered with red splotches, so I just lay down in the sun like a cat and went to dreamland...
...Then I had a great talk with a high honcho of AT&T...
...He talked and talked about all of the dirty jokes he heard at camp...
...Suffice it to say, the whole thing is insanity, pure and simple...
...It was cheap and unbelievably delicious...
...Slavery was dying anyway...
...Please remember this: When dictatorship comes, it always comes under the flag of protecting people and making their lives 50 September 1999 The American Spectator better, and so it will be here...
...It will horrify you and make you fall to your knees with gratitude for being an American...
...The house without Tommy would be like a house without oxygen...
...But leaning on the trunk did it, and we were off to the gate...
...In fact, my father made it far better than anyone else I can recall...
...But lately we have seen a spate of issues around which bad people have sought to build a government that is not limited...
...A little tile, a little paint, a little electricity upgrade...
...True, they are often stolen, but I certainly don't blame the gun makers for that...
...I have to add something...
...Yes, Reader's Digest and the old Luce-era Time gotit...
...As I watched Tommy eat his French toast, he noticed me looking at him...
...I learned from both parents how to cook and also from my gourmet cook sister...
...The driver, Fabrizio, was from Nicaragua, hates the Sandinistas, grew up on an island in the middle of a huge lake in the middle of Nicaragua, and now has just one day before he is sworn in as an American citizen...
...Then he was in the plane, and he was gone...
...No go...
...It's distressing...
...But he's really too old to spank now...
...But I hope I also learned to work hard and not to spend more money than I have...
...Yes, it's jammed, and now Tommy will never be able to go to camp...
...The gun does this somehow by itself...
...It needs new compressors...
...Uh-oh again...
...On the East Coast, of course, it's the Essex House...
...48 September /999 • The American Spectator When I looked at the house after the workmen left I had a thought...
...Finally, we got to the front of the American Airlines section where we pulled over to give Tommy's bags to a skycap...
...A few hours later, I had another call...
...We signed him in as an unaccompanied minor with the slowest clerks you have ever seen...
...Mommy has gone to bed and it's the boys' hour...
...But it's not easy to teach without fear, and I do not want him to even have fear in his life at all...
...He was holding his cat, Artemis, a huge black creature...
...The NAACP claims that it's the gun makers' fault for making a product that somehow finds its way into the black neighborhoods of America, makes black people pick it up, and then makes them use it illegally...
...No wars...
...My point about him is pretty simple: Nothing the war achieved was worth 700,000 lives or even close...
...Then suits against makers of sports cars, then against SUV's...
...I just did a stupid thing and I am paying for it...
...A war where I am paying for both sides in the conflict...
...He was tan and fit looking, although apparently he did not sleep a lot because he was not allowed to put himself to sleep while listening to his Walkman...
...It's flooded with light...
...Liberator of the planet, liberator of souls, magical place where serfs and slaves and the despised of the earth are transformed, redeemed, stand tall and live out the potential they did not even know they had—glorious America whose San Francisco lights shine up into my room at night...
...Why did I do such a foolish thing...
...Then the campers began to board and Tommy was on the runway walking to his small plane, playing on the runway with his new companions, without looking back...
...It's often too busy when he's there, but it's far too quiet when he's gone...
...The money is flying out as if a tornado had picked it up and was sucking it out of this earth...
...I wonder how long until I'm charged with child abuse for letting him eat potato chips and hamburgers made with hormones...
...How stupid can anyone be...
...I learned from the example of my Dad how to feed myself and prepare food...
...So I learned because my parents showed me how by example...
...It's a war zone now...
...Then it was a new garage and office above it...
...And then maybe it's collapsed...
...I am happy you're enjoying your meal," I said...
...And this is with a highly regarded plumber that I would trust with any job at all...
...I think a tree root has blocked it...
...All needing permits and inspections...
...Think of The Forsyte Saga, and Galsworthy's tale The Man of Property...
...What a ridiculous idea," I said...
...Tommy read his book...
...It's heaven just being here...
...I won't even tell you how much it costs...
...Plus the boys will love you because you're such a joker...
...Here's why: The Constitution of this great country, the creation of which ranks as the greatest event in man's history, is predicated on self-reliance and self-restraint by the citizens...
...That's all...
...I flew up on United...
...That's why it's so damned expensive, and I hate it...
...While I was waiting for my plane in L.A., I had a tiny little Thai Chicken pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen...
...But the addition of that little five feet of blond angelishness made a house that seemed empty quite full...
...I especially enjoyed talking to a man who grew up very near the site of the famous battle of Franklin in Tennessee...
...You do not throw away a young man's life, subject him to pain and terror, unless it's life or death for the nation...
...Artemis wants some more French toast," he said with a huge smile...
...Lawsuits to make fast food places, donut shops, makers of bacon and Crisco liable for atherosclerosis will be next...
...He brags to his friends about how his Dad, his love slave, will do anything for him at any hour...
...What ?" he asked...
...So did one of the greatly underrated magazines of the 195o's and 1960's, Human Events...
...They're tools, like knives or hammers or saws...
...Why is a car so cheap and renovation so expensive...
...We had a good little natter about Abraham Lincoln...
...Then it was demolishing the old garage...
...They whisked me to the head of the line, then brought me to my favorite suite, which I get for a bargain price, and anyway, Comedy Central is paying...
...I was so happy to see him, the little angel...
...Don't you have a satellite flying around in space the way Cadillac does that can open it with a radio wave...
...Because renovation is hand individual work, taking almost no advantage at all of mass production...
...Not to Idaho with me...
...And that's really the point...
...Why have the media never gotten it...
...Will he grow up to take revenge on the people who thought up school busing and thereby mined almost all of the public schools in West Los Angeles, forcing anyone who wants good public schools to go only to Beverly Hills and making the land there cost as much as caviar per ounce of surface soil...
...There we rendezvoused with some other parents and some other kids...
...Then he asks me about what life will be like in Junior High...
...It goes by like lightning, and they're out of the house, and you're wondering where the time went...
...I see on TV and in the newspapers that the NAACP is suing gun makers...
...Sunday I am lying in bed reading one of the most compelling books I have ever had the honor to read: The Russian Century by Brian Moynahan, former editor for the London Times...
...The trunk will not open...
...It's bliss...
...I am here at the airport with Tommy and Alex in Alex's monstrously huge Beemer...
...It's a lavishly and horrifyingly accurate description of how brutal and vicious life in Russia—especially under Lenin and Stalin —has been in this century...
...Why...
...Then a speech at a little tiny restaurant called the Cypress Club to a group of cable executives...
...It's scary to think that one incident, horrible as it was, can make some people so readily toss away the Constitution...
...You might say it's because Hitler was such an anti-Semite and the media is largely Jewish...
...Monday I love this...
...I who was moved to carry a gun by the renovators of our house in the Hollywood Hills...
...I am worried about his extreme super laziness...
...Gigantic...
...Or will he just go on playing his video games...
...I have never known them to get up and dance around and move from place to place...
...I ignored my own rules...
...And I am sad to say Henry Hyde and some other GOP colons were totally ready to throw that precious document away a few weeks ago as it regarded freedom of speech, and they were also waving the bloody shirt of Columbine...
...If we had a nation of wild savages who could not control themselves, we would not have a Constitution with a government of limited powers...
...He marched right to his computer, turned on Everquest, a computer game he plays over the Internet, and next thing we knew, it was as if he had never left...
...The best hotel in the luxury class I have ever stayed in, the best luxury value, the best service on the West Coast...
...They would have to DIG UP MY @@@###%%%*" used-brick inlaid patio, dig up the footings of my garage, and take out the line and then put in a new line, and then cover it up again...and then put the brickwork back, after finding matching used brick...
...SIX MONTHS to get a permit to build a new garage...
...Love them and be with them...
...How come you know how to make all this food...
...And I don't blame the gun makers for the observed truth that bad people like to use guns in bad ways...
...So, little angel that he is, he stayed up at night thinking about his kitty, Artemis, and his special friend, who shall be nameless...
...The girls will all love you because you're so good looking and so smart and have such a good sense of humor," I always tell him...
...If we invoke the high school where two crazy kids killed a lot of innocent people with the help of the most incompetent local police force in worldhistory, we can take away all limits on government...
...He is such a good boy and such amazingly good company, but wow, is he unmotivated...
...No, they might eat fatty food, or salty food...
...Then it was new bathrooms, tiles from Italy, heavy duty electrical upgrades, a new pool, new deck-work around the pool...
...Maybe because I put so damned much stuff in it...
...Remember that any time you think I might have something of value to say...
...The airport is mobbed, as always, and we barely got to the gate on time...
...Many of them, apparently, taught to him by his bunk counselors...
...The Pharisees have to protect them...
...It's huge...
...He looked like a handsome young man...
...By the way, I don't blame anyone but myself...
...I walked through it and felt as if I was going to fly into little pieces from the sheer pain of seeing it in such an expensive mess...
...Or that the antique tile roof will need repair...
...When I am dead and buried at Forest Lawn or wherever it is, killed by the stress of renovating, will my son think that I gave my life so that he could go to the public schools...
...I have known Korda for many a year and he The American Spectator September 1999 53...
...The Pharisees of the Bar and the Bench...
...Why did I buy that house...
...Whaaat the EL@Ev...
...I, who vowed never ever in a million years to have a home renovated, who was driven to insanity by contractors there who simply stole our money and left us with a house without windows...
...And if Lincoln wanted to end the vicious, anti-God practice of slavery, why didn't he just buy the slaves...
...Well, I asked my mother how to make it when I was a student at Columbia, and she told me, and I asked my sister and she told me, and then, as to French toast, my father used to make it...
...And there is no substitute...
...The first two flights were canceled...
...And paying and paying and paying....But what choice did I have...
...The personnel department at American Eagle must be desperate...
...Alex and I were silent for a long time in the mighty Beemer on the way back home...
...he asked...
...The first thing he did when he got into the terminal was grab me and say, "Daddy, can we go to Idaho this summer...
...I wonder how long until I get sued for letting him play his video games or letting him eat chocolate...
...If I ran the schools I would have every student read the history of the rest of the world every year until he finally go what that Ronald Reagan and countless others got right...
...The NAACP suit, of course, is not really about guns...
...We laughed and pretended we didn't mind, but we knew we were kidding each other...
...But Mommy hardly ever cooks...
...I grease the pan with a little The American Spectator September 1999 51 about the homework or your school work," I said...
...Maybe you could try just leaning hard on the trunk while you try to open it," said a polite man...
...I asked...
...There was obviously some price at which they all could have been bought and freed, and that price would have been a lot less than the cost of the Civil War in money, riot even measuring the cost in life...
...Did I mention that the air conditioning—which the inspectors said was fine—is also broken...
...They were a likable group...
...Man, this country is the greatest," he said...
...I notice that you have not asked me Thursday T ommy's hungry...
...When I came back from the men's room and saw him talking to Mommy, he The American Spectator • September 1999 49 looked like a grownup...
...Then he said, "Daddy, can I see American Pie...
...They had done the exploratory surgery...
...He looked happy...
...It's about a large and powerful group of Americans who do not trust other Americans yet who crave discipline and restraint on themselves and therefore inflict it on others...
...Tens of thousands in architects' fees...
...The airport oval here is mobbed...
...Now we have a new word: Columbine...
...A call from the contractor, who was working at our house...
...The next step will probably be food...
...This is an endless puzzle to me: Why did Hitler rightly get blasted as a mass murderer when Stalin is simply forgotten...
...If decent people use them, they're used decently...
...Then he sometimes asks if I will make him a steak, and if we have one that's fresh and Mommy is still asleep, I make that for him, too...
...If criminals use them, they're used criminally...
...Well, how do we fix that...
...Then I slather it with maple syrup—Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin, not anything special—and then I put on butter and place it before Milud...
...Note that slavery did not persist in any industrialized nation for more than a few years after the Civil War...
...Just at the part with Lenin, there are already millions of deaths of innocents...
...There is no more important reading...
...It scares me that he is so unmotivated...
...Then, today, the coup de grace...
...It comes out crisp and black and brown and yellow, and it's fabulous...
...Guns are not shamanistic items with magical powers unto themselves...
...It looked as if there were a couple of places where the sewage line had collapsed...
...I jumped out and put the key in the truck lock...
...In the name of children and freedom from racism and Columbine and lean food, we can lose the Constitution...
...But the staff helped me get on a third...
...We called the BMW Help Line...
...It'sjammed...
...Saturday G osh these two weeks have flown by...
...Everybody just out making money and having fun...
...I had my rules: no renovations, no old houses, just move-in condition...
...But Stalin was a terrible anti-Semite, too, and killed many a man simply because he was a Jew—and was said to be readying a genocide against the Jews when he died...
...Think of Gatsby, who tried to mold his magnificent North Shore mansion with gaudy lights and parties and flowers, tried to make it an extension of his imagination of himself, and instead wound up floating face down in its pool...
...Maybe, just possibly, Tommy will learn those things from me...
...Of course it's not cheap...
...Guns, you may be sure, will only be the beginning—and by the way, I don't see why people who own guns should not have to pass a background check to own them, I just don't want the NAACP or any other private group deciding what the law should be, or letting the law-making process assume criminality on the part of the ordinary gun buyer...
...Wow, is he funny in his observations of how vain, pitiful, foolish, and self-deluded we all are—including him...
...But by and large, the media just pretended as if the worst mass murders in history never happened...
...Or, think of Ben Stein and his imbecile idea of owning a house in a ritzy-neighborhood in Beverly Hills...
...Spend a few afternoons reading this book...
...What a surprise...
...Why do we rightly think of Nazism as the devil's handiwork while Communism is thought of as a great ideal that went astray, tut-tut...
...I can see that it's preying on his little, but powerful mind...
...The only problem you'll have is that the boys whose girlfriends fall in love with you will be jealous...
...The other part is that guns, like cigarettes, now belong to a class of goods which, though legal, is having the law applied to it in a way that is extremely subversive of the Constitution...
...as if it were just an incidental matter to policy...
...The Constitution needs better friends...
...Yes, I who was tortured beyond endurance by the criminal builders and renovators of our house in Aspen...
...I've gotten really good at wake-boarding and I want to show you and get some practice...
...United really has some pretty good personnel, and in fact, the whole United air thing has greatly improved...
...It'sas big as a railway car...
...By then, the government will be running everything either through the legislature or through the courts...
...They didn't...
...It has a character of its own, and it resists control and balks and frustrates those who try to bend it to their will...
...Then maybe against the makers of alcohol...
...The powers of the government, as every school child once knew, are limited by the Constitution in the belief that the individual can be trusted not to run amuck and harm others or himself...
...You do not take away a family's hope cnd reason for living, make the mom and pop grieve forever, for anything less than vital issues...
...No go...
...So far, he's pretty much fearless, except once or twice a year when he thinks I might spank him...
...And meanwhile I get to see a phenomenal portrait of the San Francisco Bay, with lights and clouds of blue and gray and hillocks in the far distance and a large bridge, in fact two of them...
...And he's going off to summer camp (for two weeks) without me...
...Property is different from stock or bonds or that best of lovely assets, money in the bank, neatly ticking away earning interest without fuss or muss...
...Life is the ultimate goal, the ultimate good worth protecting, and Lincoln actedbought my first two books...
...I wish you could see this hooch...
...Monday I am in San Francisco to give a tiny little talk to a group of cable TV executives...
...Now, never mind that I have had many guns...
...It's insane...
...I don't know...
...I am not even up to Stalin yet...
...But on the other hand, I do want him to be able to occasionally elevate himself to do some work...
...My "favorite" part is how the Western press relentlessly praised Leninism even as it was revealing its brutality...
...Far, far too quiet...
...Don't even think of asking about the cost of the tile or of the building of the garage itself—and this is with a highly ethical, decent, smart contractor...
...Wait...
...Mark my words: The San Francisco Fairmont...
...The years of saving, of working three jobs, of not having decent furniture —all made up for in a few months of renovation...
...Guess who we're picking up at the airport this morning...
...A Stalinist," he said, and from then on, we were pals...
...Then room service of fruit...
...Instead of an America based on trust in the individual, you have an America where the individual cannot be trusted at all, because he's become a pawn of the totemic, self-willing gun, and where new law is necessary to make the magic gun, that tool with a mind of its own, disappear...
...Do you know that you have a blockage in your sewer line leading away from your study bathroom...
...And so still does my fave, Pat Robertson...
...Dammit, he's going off to camp without me...
...He did tell us very softly that he would miss us...
...And he also made pancakes, like Peter Feierabend used to make, and he also made bacon...
...Perfect, Tommy Stein himself, world's cutest human...
...Say the words "child" or "children," and you can watch the most insubstantial allegations, the most farfetched nonsensical allegations by psycho parents and criminal "social workers," turn into to life-ruining government inquisitions...
...Anyway, buy The Russian Century...
...He talked about archery and sailing, and then, whaaam, he fell asleep...
...The stories are so scary, so brutal, and so endless that it simply overwhelms the human imagination...
...The way that Lenin, Trotsky, and their ilk purposely murdered innocents by the millions, starved totally blameless children to death, bragged about it, knew full well what they were doing, used a level of mass savagery against civilians never before attempted—it's disturbing in the extreme even to those of us who learned about the terrors of Stalinism and Bolshevism at our parents' knee...
...It's not cheap," I repeated...
...And, after a few moments of nervous waiting, there he is, the little angel of my life, Tommy Stein...
...In fact, I had to really lean on it to get it closed...
...God bless him, he was asked by a woman nearby what he thought of Hillary...
...So now from scratch I'm making him homemade French toast at midnight...
...They have to put a line in there and have a TV camera attached to it, and then they send a photo back to a monitor above ground and see where the blockage is...
...That's one little part of what's bothering me...
...I put my boy to sleep, but I did take some comfort from the incident...
...Because after all, human beings are too pathetic and dangerous to themselves to be trusted to decide for themselves what they want to eat...
...All done at glacial speed...
...I know it backed up pretty badly in your office...
...I am making him French toast from bread and eggs and milk, although I am lacking a dash of vanillin, which I like to put in if it's available...
...The trunk is stuffed with Tommy's immense duffel bag, his sleeping bag, and many other bags...
...America was set here between the oceans by a special Providence that has protected us all along and protects us still...
...Wave a wand and say the words "Columbine" and "guns" together, you suddenly and completely make the Constitution disappear...
...I must have been insane...
...I purposely have raised him so that he should never feel much anxiety about anything...
...Camp without me...
...But the project seemed like very little at the time...
...He was tired and when he awakened, we were at home...
...Then back to my magnificent suite and to read Michael Korda's screamingly funny new memoir, Another Life...
...He eats it and asks for more...
...Thank you, God...
...It's not cheap...
...It has a long living room with windows from floor to ceiling on one side overlooking 52 September 19 9 9 • The American Spectator the bay and the skyline, then a large bedroom with immense windows looking out over the bay and Alcatraz Island...
...We have become convinced that racism is such a bad thing that mere use of the word "racist" can throw the idea of limited government out the window and result in giant new criminal categories of "hate" acts where ordinary small crimes or even acts that would not normally be crimes at all become felonies...
...Because the tree trimmers dropped giant palm fronds on it...
...He barely talked to the other kids...
...The people at the Fairmont were wonderful...
...And to feel some eagerness to do it right...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
