Ben Stein's Diary
Stein, Ben
BEN STEIN'S DIARY SATURDAY Beverly Hills The worst night of my life as far as fear and pain go. I have been traveling a great deal lately and have been feeling as tired as a middle-aged man who...
...Or think of the small businessmen in the Star Wars movies, powered writers, producers,,, show runners...
...A real loser by any standard, although a good writer...
...But I was still tired...
...It's tough having power...
...Again, never mind that the Hollywood writer was wildly overpaid and untalented by and large...
...It dawned on rue that they were all constantly baiting me about Nixon, about Ford, about the GOP in general...
...And speaking of Cleveland, I had lunches at two amazingly beautiful buildings-the Cleveland Union Club, a magnificent early 20th-century palace, recently redecorated by my talented cousin Betsy Gould Frankel...
...I told a pleasant woman that I had terrible chest pain...
...Then there are the Europeans...
...He was from Fountain Valley, near where Julie and David Eisenhower used to live...
...That there was a shadowy conspiracy of rich Texans and industrialists and Jewish finance that ran the nation, especially the Republican party...
...And when we humans envy a class of people, we also tend to hate them...
...I offer you two totems of modern American humor: The Sinrpsons and South Park...
...But this envy thing goes further and connects with other worldviews.The writers had often become well-to-do men and women (usually men).They thought they should have greater power in the society...
...When I got home to Beverly Hills, lying in the refrigerator was a huge hunk of salmon that my wife had bought...
...They are always cocky and dishonest and looking for a fast and dishonest dollar-and lots of them at that...
...And, of course, again, the devil-envy.The writer felt deeply envious of the powerful studio or network executives in his midst, with bigger cars, bigger houses, hire-and-fire power over him...
...And they all had tales of studio rip-offs and network indifference that made them furious...
...This is sort of funny, because the people in political and business power often think that the people in Hollywood have all the power...
...Handsome, chiseled features, kindly eyes...
...The Hollywood writer also felt envy of the businessmen he worked with...
...We have beautiful prairies and lakes and mountains, and we have ,,i'r all of the money and the cool inventions and the Corvette, and we allow ourselves to have sex when we want to and to make money, and people here are happy...
...They mocked and attacked Nixon and Ford, but they were also extremely afraid of them...
...The drive seemed different along Pacific Coast Highway...
...So, the writer, rather than just saying, "Hey, I'm envious...
...Neighborhood kids raced by in their cars with their screaming insane laughter and booming-bass insane music...
...My son wanted to wrestle with me...
...Then I called 911...
...I knew you were a star somewhere...
...It would have been tedious to show Lenin atop an armored car haranguing the masses in St...
...The unsuccessful hate you...
...For reasons I still am not sure of, they downplayed their own power as molders of mass culture...
...It is a total lie that cigarettes are useless.They are a drug and a darned good one in certain moments...
...And they all think they are entitled to an infinite quantum of praise and income...
...And then, wow, think of how the Europeans and the Arabs must hate us Americans...
...I'm older and on TV" "Right," the man said...
...Fake claim of eating excess Tylenol...
...I called my wife and told her to come home immediately...
...I did.Then I did again...
...To be sure, Kimmel, Carolla, the writers of South Park and The Sinrpsons are still a minority in Hollywood...
...Anti-fish...
...Who had waited for me in my bedroom easy chair and refused to leave my room until I returned...
...It was sinister, yet another hypocritical locus of violence, racism and dishonesty...
...Stein...
...Stiller," said one of the men...
...Here is food for anger indeed...
...She started to argue but I said, "IMMEDIATELY," and hoped she was on her way...
...And I know the feeling...
...Then home, with my wife and me laughing insanely with relief...
...How they must loathe the Jews...
...Also The West WimgsThey are perfect Petri dishes of how a certain sort of writer feels about the larger American society...
...I came across that view over and over again...
...Think of the corporation in all of the Alien movies (as you know, they're on my mind), which brought back the aliens (with the help of the Pentagon) to make money and to make war...
...Normal.They took my BE Fairly normal, considering that I was in full panic mode...
...But most writers lack Stone's fearlessness or capacity to bore...
...who did have the power as far as Hollywood was concerned...
...I especially love Law and Order in this regard...
...South Park is written by two guys from the Midwest.They usually treat the liberals as the fools, not the businessmen.To show their contempt for standard show business stereotyping, they often show the villains as exactly the kind whom old TV would treat as the heroes: the crusading local reformer...
...Think of the evil Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner.They cruelly made "replicants" to be slaves in the off world colonies, just like slave traders in an earlier century...
...It must make the Europeans crazy...
...And then, I rested for a while and my wife came to get me...
...the opiate of the peo ple...
...Back comes the pain and the agony...
...More sweet kids at Baldwin-Wallace College outside Cleveland...
...But this little bit of analysis and anecdote actually has a happy ending: I believe the situation here is changing...
...Why...
...He's younger and in movies...
...Now, let's face it...
...DISASTER...
...Anyway, I had been to a few wonderful places, but I have still been desperately tired...
...And with their ascendance and the truth that they are known to be the best, they have influence beyond their numbers...
...America, which had been so good to them, so wildly, of this resentment was extraordinary...
...They were often, but not always Jewish, but almost never observant, and whether they were Jewish or Christian, they almost never went to houses of worship...
...But it was easily possible to show a businessman sowing radiation across a landscape...
...Imagine...
...Or take the best show in the history of television: The Sinipsons.The man who runs the nuclear power plant, C. Montgomery Burns, is a fiend of meanness and ridiculousness all at once...
...Small wonder the Palestinians hate the Israelis...
...As Marx had pointed out, the politicians were just the lackeys, the lickspittles, the running dogs of the exploiting class...
...I foolishly drove out to Malibu today and lay in bed looking at the ocean for most of the day with nay doggy by my side...
...a great Ren acrd Stimpy cartoon, and it's all I could think of...
...For some reason, I kept thinking that today would be the last day of my life...
...I was scared," she said, "so I smoked...
...But the future is bright for those who want to see a better portrait of business on the big and small screen...
...I met dozens of the most high unbelievably good to them, terrified them...
...Now here is a good note...
...So they just show businessmen, again and again, as killers or cheats or pedophiles...
...They felt that the American military were secretly SS men, capable of the most horrific acts of violence, either on their own hook or because they were "following orders...
...and the Cleveland Federal Reserve, an amazing structure with a haunting immense painting of a steel plant with bare-chested men above vats of molten ore, and as fine a federal building as there is outside D.C...
...More from upper-middle-class suburban backgrounds, fewer from the generation that were the sons of immigrants.We are getting men and women who are not terrified of America, but love America and have lived in America and find it loveable and even sweet...
...Like being electrocuted in an electric chair for half an hour.Thank God for the paramedics.They didn't really do anything, but their presence saved my mind, And those faces...
...I went to sleep with Brigid in my arms, looking into those eyes of infinite love...
...I envy everything but the lack of decency...
...Or think of the businessmen in Wall Street or on Lau, and Order...
...Every one of them looked like a movie star...
...This was true even if they had been making immense sums.They still felt deeply cheated if they made $5,000 a week back in the mid'70s, because they always knew someone whom they hated who was making $50,000 a week...
...But they are the cutting edge best...
...That meant they could and did represent businessmen as killers, polluters, hypocrites, wicked, dishonest people who would do anything for a buck...
...In The Sinrpsons, while, as noted, the owner of the nuclear plant is always a villain, so is the Kennedyesque mayor and so are immigrants and indeed anyone else...
...These people find the businessman just one more figure to be caricatured, along with everyone else...
...Again, the new writers are more comfortable with America...
...To be sure also, the dominant mode in Hollywood is still anti-business, anti-Main Street...
...She smelled of smoke...
...Thank you, God, for letting me see Brigid one more day...
...And I did again, and I started to feel drastically better, although nothing came up.The whole episode had lasted about half an hour, but what a half hour...
...And envy of the businessman in society, and, of course, of the father or brother businessman...
...Thank you, God...
...How the Palestinians must hate and loathe the Jews...
...The richness of the M~_ psychological wellspring MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77 These writers were in business.They were in a particularly cruel, difficult business...
...I was in no mood to fight with him, so I just told him what my father used to tell me, "Be prudent...
...Let me tell you about this because it might interest you...
...78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002...
...Fish-non...
...The men gave me an EKG right in my chair...
...The pain was as if all the devils in hell were practicing on my chest...
...The villain is just exactly what the hero was and is for the old and hack thinkers in Hollywood-Rosie O'Donnell, Oprah, whoever was thought to be cool is to them antique and uncool.And like the really crystal clear thinker he is, Kimmel usually locates silliness and failure within each of us, not as some malign political force...
...They often wrote episodic TV that had priests or evangelical ministers as villains and liars...
...We work like demons, so we're rich...
...First, business, as the last and most potent antagonist of the working classes according to Marx, was by definition evil.The businessman existed to exploit the workers.As Marxistsand again, these people were by and large either Marxists or following a Marxist line, however loosely in their thoughts-business people were the enemy...
...And I don't want an IV What would you put in it...
...It was simply an article of faith, to use the silly joke, that religion was a fraud and a menace...
...Fine financial people with beating, genuine hearts in Orlando...
...With astonishing unanimity, they were not just Democrats, but leftwing Democrats.They were, in their political views, much the same as university professors at Ivy League and other elite schools...
...And now we get back to the main theme here...
...I put my fish on a plate and took a bite...
...So, I thought...
...I assume it was to reassure himself that I was all right...
...It dragged and I felt as if I were not truly there.The plants in my yard looked different, as if they were growing after I was dead, weedy and irregular...
...They learned I had rales in my lungs, probably pneumonia from being in so many fetid airplanes...
...But their attitudes were emotional and psychological, not just political...
...And the businessman is just a part of the landscape...
...But the writers I met reserved a very special place in their pantheon ,r of hates for business peo y' ~~ ple...
...It might also have had a generous smattering of Klansmen in it, too...
...1 was a writer for The Wall Street Journal...
...The people in Hollywood had other attitudes that startled me.They were extremely anti-religious...
...They are not really sinister, but they sure are not nice...
...You guessed it...
...But then there was something richer...
...The ocean and sky looked an even more eerie gray than usual...
...And on the best long -running comedy of recent years, Seinfeld, on which I spent a bit of time, the writers purposely kept stereotypical villains off the show.The villain was usually someone deeply idiosyncratic like the Soup Nazi or a headwaiter at a Chinese restaurant...
...The painting rivals any I have ever seen in any museum...
...The people I met in Hollywood had, as one might say, the standard worldview of a left-wing college boy from the Bronx at City College of New York in 1937...
...So, if we are Hollywood writers, we can take out that anger by showing businessmen as murderers, assassins, polluters...
...This is what it feels like to die...
...No Hollywood writer thinks he is untalented...
...Who leapt up into my arms and kissed me...
...They were in a business in which they had been ripped off and felt cheated a lot of the time...
...Years ago-I hate to say how many-I started spending time in Hollywood...
...The Jews are aggressive, tough, smart, and no matter how the Europeans beat them down, they come back and are successful.Just when the Europeans thought that Hider had done all of their dirty work about the Jews, boom, back come the Jews, in business and science and art and education...
...I think this defines an infantile personality, by the way...
...Instead, they thought that the only real power that counted was economic and political...
...Who is the government, Marx asked...
...As if they were auditioning to play Beverly Hills firemen...
...Brigid Stein...
...But then, back to home...
...Now, all honor to Oliver Stone, who had the honesty to put this paranoid and wildly unrealistic notion into the movie, Nixon...
...It comes to mind a lot lately because of the cruel mass murders aimed by the Palestinians at the Jews...
...Rarely in modern life do we see a businessman or businesswoman on TV or in movies who is not the butt of jokes or else deeply sinister...
...Well, no need for suspense-it was in 1975...
...He looked at me as if I had told him to grow angels' wings...
...Like good Marxists, they really thought that religion was their deadly enemy...
...The building, patterned after a palace in Venice, is in a class by itself, as are the fine people at the Cleveland Fed who took me in and gave me bread and interesting talk...
...They believed religious leaders were hypocrites...
...And, again back to envy, who better to be envious of than a class of people who have deep political power that you thought you should have, who have more money than you, better cars and houses, and who do not live eaten up with the self-loathing that the Hollywood writer so often feels...
...Sweet, lovely kids at Hope College in Holland, Michigan...
...TUESDAY Beverly Hills Tam thinking about something deep: Envy...
...I had entree everywhere...
...Fish-blocker...
...I'm Stein," I said...
...I have envied businessmen pulling down vast sums for what seems like basically easy looting of their stockholders...
...Not only do the Israelis live on land that was once theirs, but they also made that land sing...
...The studio executives made more moneyThey had more power...
...I'm tired," says Ren in "Space Madness...
...Petersburg...
...could and did channel this anger into showing business people as thugs...
...They do not want to fall into it any more than Abbie Hoffman wanted to be dressed by Paul Stuart.When the new writers rebel, they rebel not against the Chamber of Commerce, but against Hollywood's old stereotypes...
...Suddenly, I had to regurgitate...
...The weak hate you with the only weapons they have-hate and rage...
...They felt that the ordinary American gentile was a dangerous man or woman who, under a totally fake veneer of friendly gullibility, was a hood-wearing Klan member.They felt as if small towns were dangerous, violent places...
...It would be slow, even by network standards, to read about the stages of the dialectic...
...Let's start an IV on you, Mr...
...By the way, what a sick miserable sonofabitch Marx was, and a wildly anti-Semitic Jew at that...
...Anyway, it's tough being successful...
...I immediately felt as if I were choking desperately I could breathe, but I felt a terrible painful fullness, an explosion really, a fiery cave-buster fuel-air-mixture five-thousand-pound bomb explosion in my esophagus, one after another...
...By the time I walked from my bedroom to the front door, the paramedics were there...
...It was more than...
...I am having a reaction to fish...
...Our son is home from school to be in aTV documentary about our family as compared with Ozzy Osbourne's family, but he was out to dinner with my wife...
...The paramedics put me on a gurney and took me to their ambulance.A kindly man, a paramedic with another handsome face named Dave, sat with me and I felt cared for and protected...
...She read my address back to me and said help was on its way...
...The executive committee of the bourgeoisie...
...This, interestingly, despite the fact that none of them could ever cite any harm that had been done to them by religious leaders...
...They were deeply afraid of political leaders from Middle America...
...I had hoped to go more quietly...
...What would they put in it...
...Well, not the politicians...
...I put it on the grill, still feeling strange...
...Stereotyping is simply gone on these two fine shows...
...They had more job security So the Hollywood writer, even if stunningly well paid by comparison with his talent or with the general public, felt cheated.And then there was a vein even richer: Many of the writers I met had fathers or brothers who were businessmen...
...I mean, angels...
...So...
...I offer also my former co-host, a genuine genius in Hollywood, Jimmy Kimmel...
...Then another burp and some relief and then whaaam...
...They often described these businessmen as tough and ruthless and usually not very smart and always making a lot of money Or else getting ruined and thereby losing a lot of money and wrecking the lives of their own beloved mothers...
...I burped, and the pain went away-and then came back in seconds, even worse...
...The Jews took a piece of land that the Palestinians 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAYIJUNE 2002 had lived on in bucolic rustic poverty for hundreds of years.They took it by an international mandate and then by winning wars that the Arabs started, but they certainly took it.And then they made it into a wildly prosperous, blooming, gleaming garden...
...always hustling and conning for a universe credit...
...I am thinking about this partly because of the insane murderousness that's happening in Israel and that is, of course, considered perfectly all right by the Europeans and the U.N...
...They had really deep feelings of anger at many facets of modern life...
...Now these people do not just happen to appear on the big or small screen.They are created, made up, invented by writers...
...They determined that my heart was fine...
...No, the real power in the society belonged to the businessmen, the puppeteers who pulled the strings that controlled the politicians...
...So of course the people who are inhibited and bound up with shame and selfloathing hate us...
...Here we have this big, beautiful, fairly empty country...
...Even worse...
...But what a great face...
...On his ultra funny The Man Shoty, he and his partner,Adam Carolla, have no stereotypes at all...
...So, first among the causes of Hollywood dislike of business was the Marxist component...
...They find the old villainy structure to be old news and an old superstition...
...One of them looked like a kindly Irish priest.This man's face will be the last face I see, I thought...
...I drank a sip of tea...
...He also wanted to stay up playing video games...
...Fiery, desperate pain and a full feeling as if that alien in Alien were in my chest, trying to escape and meanwhile eating my lungs...
...Like heartburn, only to the millionth power...
...Or even think of the people who run things on Drew Carey...
...But it was certainly very much possible to dramatize the class struggle by having a businessman as a murderer of an innocent college co-ed...
...I have been traveling a great deal lately and have been feeling as tired as a middle-aged man who travels a great deal might feel.The air in airliners is fetid and sick-making, and I don't much care for airports either...
...We are getting a new class of writers here...
...He actually had a committee of nutty Cuban exiles, powerful businessmen and Texas oilmen as a secret committee running the nation-and who ruined Nixon when he crossed them...
...In we went to Century City Hospital Emergency Room, where my adorable but malingering son had forced us to take him when he did not want to go back to school after Christmas...
...But I am also thinking about it because I see how Hollywood treats American business...
...So, unlike the college professor, the Hollywood writer had experience with business and always, always, felt aggrieved...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
