Ben Stein's Diary: Our New Plumbing
Stein, Benjamin J.
Our New Plumbing BY BENJAMIN J. STEIN WEDNESDAY To begin at the beginning, this morning my wife told me that her bathroom toilet was running and would not stop. "I jiggle the handle," she said,...
...My son, darling boy, makes friends at camp or at his video game parlor by making people laugh (often by imitating yours truly...
...19 Constitution Lithograph...
...So much for Lincoln's claim at Gettysburg that he was fighting the war to provide "a new birth of freedom...
...At the end of the day, when Alex and Tommy are asleep, I usually take out one of my Civil War history books and read it...
...The ones who are already here choose the ones who join and succeed them...
...This extends even to some fairly small details...
...Because my father had been doing it on TV and in person while discussing taxes and deficits and budgets for time out of mind...
...Fred Thompson, Sen...
...It provided a guarantee that slavery could not be changed and Lincoln sponsored it...
...We also played at being Davy Crockett in a log house behind Barry Kalb's house...
...But they surely will know how to Most kids can absorb the example of their father's competence in an area and more or less by osmosis come to believe they can do it, too...
...But how does he survive psychologically...
...To the "Today" show, where I saw Sally Quinn, Sen...
...This is real trouble...
...They even chanted "Ben Stein for President," which I liked...
...Maybe they never even happened...
...They call it an on-line service, but can it bring you a drink...
...He does have a lawyer who says he's selling things, but the checks never come...
...At first I did not like his writing style, and I still don't...
...Well, partly because I got an allowance from my parents, but it was a small allowance, and mostly because I knew my father and mother had gotten married while they were still in school, and that was during the Great Depression...
...They have been through so much and yet are so open and loving...
...They don't count pennies...
...he asked...
...That is a good feeling...
...I have been dreading this moment, and here it is...
...Why did I have no hesitation about it...
...He is often so funny that he gets free games out of it...
...I knew the daughter of John Von Neumann, inventor of the computer...
...Thanks for all your help, Ben," he said...
...They were amazingly friendly...
...And I am eating crow...
...asked my interlocutor, to whom I was speaking in New York...
...I figure if he could do it, so could I. Many people ask me how I began as a writer who got paid for his work...
...But it's been years since he sold anything...
...That battle was poorly run because the men had eaten green apples and suffered from indigestion...
...He has learned that he can get somewhere by doing something I do, and he believes he can do it because I do it...
...He or she is beaming, grinning, holding up two hands clasped like a winning prizefighter...
...But then there is the appalling mistreatment of the blacks...
...He has no agent...
...My show has started...
...A young woman beat me badly...
...Same with the TV...
...I don't see Jack Nicholson putting up his own money...
...We've been sleeping and going to parties ever since...
...Bush said, "Thank you, Ben...
...I get cheered and cheered by the audience, get away with jokes and gibes and merriment, and then, whaaam, I get asked who the author of the "Harriet, The Spy" books are...
...111 Living Resources Press...
...Maybe I should take my marbles and go home...
...They have something called a "turbo flush" mechanism (I'm not kidding...
...Why did I think I could do it competently...
...94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 He's a friendly, amazingly witty man with a staggeringly lovely wife...
...His knowledge of every site, of every hillock and ridge, of every tree, is amazing...
...I feel as if something amazingly important has happened when I am there on Stage One, win, lose, or draw...
...He's too much of a gentleman, too much of a Princeton man, too much of a prince, not enough of a shtarker (tough guy...
...67 Greening Earth Society...
...To the Inaugural Parade, where I was trapped next to thousands of demonstrators...
...But what I wonder more is this: Why do some people make it in Hollywood and some not make it...
...I am endlessly struck by how often the outcome of a battle depends on the health of the men and the generals...
...Unless there is some major disconnect within a family (and that surely happens), I believe most kids can absorb the example of their father's competence in an area and more or less by osmosis come to believe they can do it, too...
...He blundered into the war, and then he sought a rationalization for all of the deaths...
...American Spectator Online...
...I've always had sympathy for lost causes," says Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca when he's asked why he helped the French and the Republicans in Spain—or maybe that was Rhett Butler, or That rationalization made ethical and moral sense...
...I'm yakking on my car phone (a hands-free model) to my pal, D. He's a genius of about fifty who comes from a distinguished Midwestern family...
...Let them see how you gather the material for your taxes...
...Graham, publisher of the Post, who seemed to be a bit unwell...
...Life is better for me when I do not feel very important...
...That rationalization made ethical and moral sense...
...He hated to pay a plumber, so he learned what the basic machinery in back of a toilet is, and he learned to fix it...
...49 Romeo y Julieta cigar...
...My son, age thirteen, while amazingly uninterested in most calculations, can in his head figure out the California sales tax (eight and three-quarters percent) on everything he buys...
...Because I had seen my father write essays and send them in to the Journal, which published them for years, and so I figured I could too...
...He had been a sociologist at a university in the Midwest, but he came out here to try his luck as a writer of screenplays...
...22-23 Rose Pendant...
...But when it breaks, I can almost always fix it, too...
...If not, they stay apart...
...I keep going back to the men and women I know who made it big and those who fell away...
...The Hollywood business is not like applying to college...
...But for Lincoln to claim he was always fighting to end it— as he later did—was a cruel hoax...
...I dutifully pressed the flushing lever and sure enough, the thing flushed...
...He has a great wife and he has faith as a Christian...
...Graham, still looking under the weather...
...Americans, despite being on the winning side in history, feel sympathy for lost causes...
...How did I do it...
...It's staggeringly lovely country But for open, loving hearts, take me down to Dixie...
...On the other hand, children without a father seem to me to have less confidence in what they can do...
...Or maybe be grateful as heck that I have a show at all, and that I have a big house and a son and a wife and live in America and enjoy the best society of all time...
...This is far more trouble than a broken toilet...
...33 Forbes...
...The children of Mario Lemieux might not automatically become great forwards on the ice...
...I have often said, and I'll say it again, Hollywood is like a park where the dogs go up and sniff the other dogs' rear ends...
...I still have not figured it out, but it mostly has to do with luck, connections, extreme, extreme, extreme ambition, but also something else...
...It ain't fittin', it just ain't fittin...
...The more competent the father, the more sure the son or daughter is of having some similar competence...
...It's totally different from what I am used to, and it's also housed under some kind of drum...
...But I love careless people...
...As he left, he said, "You have to come visit us real soon...
...In despair...
...So much of life and history are in getting things orderly How rarely it happens...
...The world is the oyster of those who inherited the confidence to do what their dads could do...
...They don't hold grudges...
...Wifie and I flew In on the red-eye Wednesday night...
...He inherited a fair amount of money—he has an income about ten times the average family wage for a family of two workers...
...13 Bose Corporation...
...I can't recall a plumber ever coming to our house...
...I love Southerners...
...It's torture...
...It's cold this morning...
...Cheney and his lovely wife Lynne, and Ron Walker and his lovely wife...
...My father attended college at Williams in the majestic Berkshires of western Massachusetts...
...I just putter around with it, and I assume I will be able to fix it, and by Jove, I do...
...105 Maker's Mark...
...The choosers like to choose men and women who are just like them...
...as "that Yankee historian...
...As he said it, I recalled reading about it in McPherson's fine book, Battle Cry of Freedom.Yes, it had been planned to make slavery permanent in the South and the amendment carried the further proviso that it could not be amended...
...I always have a fascinating experience when I leave my show...
...Wait, Bill—I think Lassie's trying to sell us something...
...Lieberman, Secretary William Cohen (a really friendly great guy who recalled my father very fondly a sure way to my heart), my fellow Republican campaigner Bo Derek, and many others of note...
...To MC an Inaugural Ball at the Convention Center...
...Plus, they have that carelessness I love so much...
...I walk back to my little dressing room trying to be happy, trying to be cheerful, acting philosophical, explaining to Yaniv, my bodyguard, or Susie, the makeup girl, that I can't win 'em all, that it's all fine— but inwardly I am seething...
...Why do I, of all the "stars" in Hollywood, have to put up my own money to play this game...
...Plus Mrs...
...He said, "You think you're so great but your show is only a little better than 'Jeopardy.'" Not so bad, especially since I am the world's number one "Jeopardy" fan...
...It's a pain I feel keenly every hour of every day...
...And, as always, I am putting up five thousand dollars that some braino can take away from me if he or she knows more than I do—for sixty anxiety-wracked seconds in the isolation booth...
...Do you know what that 13th amendment was originally going to be before the fighting started in Virginia...
...But the man's scholarship and originality are amazing...
...Maybe I am back at the Federal Trade Commission with my pitiful dusty files...
...McPherson is at Princeton, a lot farther south than my flag man in the Empire State...
...But it is the imitation that is key here...
...That was roughly six years ago...
...11 Blackstone Audio Books...
...MONDAY As usual, I am driving along Fountain over to the set on the lot at KTLA...
...I don't like it...
...If he wandered around here with a gun-shaped toy, he would probably be arrested or shot...
...It's not about aptitude tests...
...Do you know what the amendment is that freed the slaves...
...Bush hugged me and pressed his cheek to mine...
...I was amused that my phone correspondent in New York spoke of McPherson There's more to it than that, though...
...Extreme, extreme, extreme ambition and a lot of luck...
...What a work of genius...
...The owner recognized my voice and we had a fascinating conversation...
...Or I get asked who was somebody's sidekick in a series of detective novels I have never even heard of...
...How much better life is when lived at least occasionally out of doors...
...This battle was slow in starting because a general had an attack of diarrhea and took paregoric (my Men at war are not machines or stones...
...Back Cover Pfizer...
...Because my father had been writing about financial issues for decades...
...Bill Brock, Fred Malek, my new best pal Chris Matthews, and more others than I can shake a stick at...
...Maybe I am back at home on Harvey 92 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 Road in Silver Spring, ready to go off and play army with David Scull...
...But then I get home, and I am important again...
...Most of the toilets in our crushingly expensive house in fact are not the old-fashioned kind...
...Let them know how you earn your living...
...By the time I am ready to fall asleep, I am swimming with the idea of my own lack of importance compared with the men who fought in the Civil War...
...53 Folio Society...
...Let them see how you fix a toilet...
...We love George W Bush, who knows how to get along with people and how to make friends...
...Well, that's in the past and there's a miracle...
...The answer is about the same as the story about toilets...
...ADVERTISER INDEX By patronizing the companies and products posted in this issue, your positive response rewards them for advertising in one of the gems of American publishing, The American Spectator...
...3 Classifieds...
...when I was still in school and she was really just beginning school...
...Right now I am reading an 800-page abridgment of Lee's Lieutenants by Freeman...
...107 F.L.A.M.E...
...Thirteenth," I said...
...It provided for making slavery permanent," he said...
...Still, it is sad that his life is spent indoors before a video screen...
...Simple...
...It had been passed in the Senate and the House, and do you know what it provided for...
...Luckily, his parents made provision for him...
...Bush, and to his lovely, shy wife...
...My father always did his own income tax return, even when he got to have a fairly complex time of it...
...I was in shock...
...Where we saw and tried to talk to Mrs...
...But he sells nothing...
...So the real point of the story begins with the truth that I am confident I can fix the toilet almost solely because my father could always fix the toilet...
...The example of the father is taken in almost as air and water as part of what makes up the day and the experience of the child...
...and artillery all show up where they are supposed to be—this is detailed, persuasive, and eye-opening in a huge way...
...I figured that if they could do it, so could I. And I did, although modestly...
...I loved the first few and even optioned one with my own money...
...The snow was swirling inside and outside our heads...
...The dogs are jumping everywhere...
...The weather has been awful, but we have been dolling ourselves up in our glad rags and off we go...
...Plus, there is something warm about the Southern character...
...15 Quotesmith.com...
...It's about co-optation...
...By the time I am in bed, the shows seem far away...
...Why...
...maybe both, which sort of proves my point...
...Still, D. labors daily in his little home office...
...By the way, when David and I were kids, we would wander around the neighborhood with toy machine guns and pistols, hiding behind hedges and rocks to ambush any Germans or North Koreans who happened to come to the Washington, DC, suburbs...
...It's an answer of some note for us dads, so I'll pass it on...
...One of the demonstrators cursed at me, but I cursed back at him and he shut up...
...Because my father had been doing it since the 1940s...
...Slavery was horrifyingly evil...
...There's a big fat lesson here...
...My son is resisting his homework...
...28-29 Sarkes Tarzian Inc___47 Thomas Aquinas College...
...I wrote it down in about twelve hundred words and sent it in to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which immediately bought it and asked for more...
...They can and do develop abilities and skills on their own, but they do not go out the door to adolescence and young manhood or womanhood simply assuming they can get along in life because, after all, Dad gets along and brings home the bacon or fixes the toilet...
...Because my father was always fixing the toilets," I said...
...He works like a Trojan on his screenplays every day except Sunday I cannot even keep track of them any longer...
...To a party given by socialites Nancy Brinker and Buffy Cafritz, where we saw Colin Powell, Bill Safire, Sen...
...They are just as sensitive as men at peace, and health affects them deeply and with gigantic consequences...
...In 1972,1 had a theory about why movies always had the same kinds of depictions of businessmen and military officers...
...Jordan Baker, in Gatsby, said, "I hate careless people...
...About fifteen years ago, I started writing for Barron's about financial fraud...
...It gives me a certain perspective...
...I make a living by making people laugh at me on my TV show...
...I am suddenly just another little fish with his hopes and fears out in a big ocean...
...Here I am at the Bush inaugural...
...Then the president came in along with his dreamy wife, Laura, by far the most charming and beautiful first lady I have ever known of...
...My hero," my wife said...
...My father is no longer with me on earth...
...Mr...
...Then if I lose, I walk out of my booth to watch the winner get showered with fake money falling from the ceiling...
...My wife and I went out into the snowstorm on New York Avenue...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 95knows how to get along with people and how to make friends...
...Ever...
...SATURDAY And speaking of luck...
...At Chancellorsville, supposedly Robert E. Lee had a heart attack and the congestive heart failure linked to it dogged him at Gettysburg and caused an early death...
...I thought about this for a while, and I realized that I had not quite given my wife the full answer...
...My pal John Coyne, a smart man on every subject he discusses, pointed out to me recently that the best writing on the Civil War was from the Southern point of view...
...Nahh, I think I'll whine some more...
...It takes two to have an accident...
...My wife and I got married outs...
...She had no inventions comparable to his, but she certainly knew her math...
...He is filled with witticisms and anecdotes...
...Show your kids what you can do...
...Only one guy said anything really bad...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY I dragged myself from my computer to the toilet, took off the top, saw that an arm that lifts up a ball cock had somehow gotten separated from a little chain, and then attached it again...
...I am needed to help restore order...
...To a party given by GM where we talked for a long time to Mike Gerson, the new chief speechwriter for Mr...
...25 Ameritrade...
...We wouldn't be here without you...
...97 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 93 Late, late, late at night this morning, I awakened and called a number for a store in the East that sells Civil War flags...
...Right after that, I was asked to testify before a Senate committee about leveraged buyskate...
...They don't keep track of every wrong or right...
...I often look at my Presbyterian Southern in-laws and wonder...
...I greeted V.P...
...My son's world is far bigger—all of the universe— but also far smaller—a video screen...
...I would have to make some exceptions for Walt Whitman and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., but in general, John is certainly right...
...That battle was poorly run because the men had eaten green apples and suffered from indigestion...
...But for Lincoln to claim he was always fighting to end it—as he later did—was a cruel hoax...
...They both took my hands...
...My wife is exhausted from her very hard work...
...I am myself far too lazy to do what he did, but THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 91 I do collect all of the data myself, and I go over the return—and almost always find mistakes...
...2 Gilder Publishing...
...Center Spread YorktownUniversity.com...
...I failed to answer even very easy questions in the booth...
...Why did I think I could write it and get it published in the Journal...
...God help the child whose father will not share his strength and his ability...
...We couldn't have done it without you...
...It breaks my heart, but I do understand it well...
...He would just take the tubes in and test them and buy the one that needed replacement, and next thing, the TV was working...
...However, today was a low point...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 95...
...If the smell is right, they'll play...
...This was one of our many costume shows, and I was dressed as a clown, with a bright orange Bozo wig...
...Let them share in your competence...
...Somehow, wearing the clown suit made me play like a clown...
...How come I have to...
...Because the writers in Hollywood were usually anti-business, anti-war types who expressed their feelings in their words...
...I jiggle the handle," she said, "but it doesn't help.You fix it.You always know how...
...But he left me with some tools for getting along, most of which I just picked up by way of daily living...
...Or one might take an even more basic issue...
...45 Hoover Institution...
...Our companions, Barron, Steve, and Suzie, were likewise in shock...
...Then when I drive out past the guard gate, the guards all wave at me, but rather absently, so I feel as if I am a little bit important...
...I guess that's what does it...
...Amazing...
...The guys who succeeded are in a line from the furriers who started the business, and D. is no furrier...
...By the way, my spell check did not recognize Chancellorsville...
...It's not about extra-curricular activities...
...I don't see Alex Trebek putting up his own money...
...I think you'll approve of the accommodations...
...I guess I don't," I said...
...I recalled a line from one of Nicolson's diaries about being "a national figure, though of the second rank," and I thought that might apply to me...
...How do you always know how to do that...
...Then there is the matter of health...
...Why did I think I would be able to go to school and also support my little family...
...Then, when I get out onto Sunset, no one pays any attention to me at all...
...WEDNESDAY Uh-oh...
...Their feelings are closer to the surface...
...Obviously there are exceptions...
...Slavery was horrifyingly evil...
...More to the point of my life now, why am I fairly sure I can appear before an audience and make them laugh...
...D. just does not smell Hollywood...
...This battle was slow in starting because a general had an attack of diarrhea and took paregoric...
...His explanation of how difficult it is to get an army, or even a small unit, in place for battle, how impossible to make large groups of infantry and cavalry own favorite drug) and was allergic to it and became agitated...
...I think because, as my assistant Tina says, "the South was wiped out" and we feel sympathy for anyone who is "wiped out...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
