Ben Stein's Diary
Stein, Ben
BEN STEIN'S DIARY SUNDAY Beverly Hills It is summer here in Southern California. The days are cookie-cutter perfect week after week. Balmy skies, no humidity, afternoon breezes, cool nights. The...
...I still lift occasionally, and I was the first to show Tommy how to lift...
...He has become a major bodybuilder to help with his wrestling, and he is almost embarrassingly proud of his strength...
...THURSDAY J see that the ultimate unfailing avatar of political correctness, our own Gray Davis, has signed a bill limiting auto emissions in cars sold in California...
...It is intensely controversial even among climatologists...
...It was about how bonds worked and how inflation and risk of default affect bonds...
...But the weights will be a shrine to the days when Tommy said, "Dad, spot me," and learned to have Dad help him lift the world's weight, while he helped me lift mine...
...I love my car...
...And I love trees myself and have hugged many a tree in my thoughts...
...He picked it up...
...It is the perfect summer activity, better than any trip to France or hiking in the Rockies...
...I am terrified about what the future holds...
...I do not want my cars taken away from me unless it is clear that the world will come to an end within a measurable time because of my cars—and maybe not even then...
...Now I feel as if the spirit of Garth is farther away than ever, and how I miss that spirit...
...He would follow me to my office above the garage and wait for me for hours, then brush against my leg...
...It was still light then and whoever killed him could easily have seen him if he were not speeding...
...They carry me everywhere I want to go, with strength and speed and grace...
...He would often lie with his face right on my cheek...
...My nephew, Jonathan, had a cat and my sister had cats and my dear friend Paglin had cats...
...Hands off...
...He is doing this of course first and foremost to please his core constituency of Greens and veggie lovers and anti-globalist environmental tree huggers, and I don't blame him...
...Truly, I have been in agony about it...
...I had to get strong to protect myself from a nasty little gang of anti-Semites at my junior high school...
...He could not take the cat, so we said we would take it...
...He was, as I said, totally black except for one tiny infinitesimal white speck on his right rear paw...
...The people we trusted to manage our money are walking around with hundreds of millions while we sit in terror because our own money was taken from us...
...Naturally, I felt horribly guilty...
...But there is one glorious time of day when I am indispensable, and I am treasuring it...
...He had slipped out the door, as he was prone to do, and apparently instead of just lying in the back yard waiting for squirrels, he had ventured across the street in front of our house...
...Scientists, figure something else out...
...But even if it is man-made burning of fossil fuels that is causing the warming, it is not totally clear that global warming is an unmixed bad thing...
...While he's here, he spends most of his day ignoring his mom and dad, except for when he needs a ride to the mall or to his "job" (for which we pay his employer) walking dogs and bathing cats at a shelter...
...A neighbor had tried to save him, but he died on route to a vet...
...And further, of all of the pollution and greenhouse gases on this earth, only an infinitesimal portion is caused by California's SUVs...
...For reasons known best to that cat, he fell madly in love with me...
...To start at the beginning, I never had a cat growing up...
...But the talk made me feel better...
...It really does not matter what it was...
...Our funds to keep us alive in retirement are vanishing before our eyes...
...The cat was a boy cat, simply perfectly sleek and jet black...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY SUNDAY Beverly Hills I t is summer here in Southern California...
...I want a big one so that when some member of Greenpeace crashes into me in her CRV, I will be the one who walks away...
...Tommy's cellphone rang...
...Then, three days ago, as I was resting, listening to music on my CD Discman, he got tangled in the headphone cord...
...Whatever problem I had, especially about money, Garth had gone through it and worse and come out still alive and laughing...
...The perfect pastime...
...It was a fluffy cat we called Peabo...
...Summer will be over...
...The poorkitty looked amazed and my heart cringed at my crime...
...Then when he starts to wobble, I quickly slide my hands under the bar to grab it (and probably break my spine) in the event he begins to drop it...
...He was the most affectionate cat I ever saw and at the same time, the fiercest...
...So we discussed ways to cut back, whether we should just move back East to a small town in the Shenandoah Valley and retire, or just exactly what we should do...
...Then, I had to go talk to a man about bond funds and Alex had to go to her needlepoint class...
...Cars are the greatest things man ever made...
...I took him to Cafe Sushi, but it had a worn, dark, empty feeling...
...My show has not been picked up for a seventh season...
...But I never had cats, although I had plenty of dogs...
...We go out to the weights and I stand over the bar to make sure it does not fall on him as he takes it from its perch and begins his bench presses of amounts close to his body weight...
...It has to do with a cat...
...Now he is gone, and that little ball of black fur, that slinky magnificent animal who could jump five feet straight up in one bound, who could wait patiently for me for a day at a time, is back with Garth...
...When it goes, so does a good large chunk of the green stuff I use to pay my bills...
...it only matters that he and I were having a give-and-take talk with information flowing back and forth as if we were civil people...
...Anyway, he loves his school now and he's home from that school for a while before he heads off to lacrosse camp and then wrestling camp and then football camp...
...He is at that fine school because he simply refused to go to school here and decided instead he would devote his life to playing on-line games...
...But I am there...
...He's a politician, for heaven's sake, and these are the people who will walk on bare feet across ground glass to vote for him against any Republican until Ansel Adams comes back to life as a Republican...
...When our son left for boarding school, which was about 10 months ago, the cat became ever more devoted to me, although he also loved my wife and would often spend his whole morning lying on the bed with her...
...Now I could not carry him with a truck and he is as tall as I am and twice as strong...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...But the sleepless nights worrying about retirement are happening right now...
...But he had to run out and some murderer had to kill him...
...The first was dear Puppy Wuppy in 1999...
...But I was overjoyed when he was back on my bed purring and cooing next to my face when I took my afternoon nap...
...He holes up in his room, playing on-line games with hordes of his pals clustered around the computer until all hours...
...I always felt, when he was near me, that it was the spirit of my beloved Garth Wood nearby, greeting me, speaking to me, keeping me company, telling me everything would be all right...
...To keep it up during the summer, we bought him weights and a bench...
...He had been struck by a car—no doubt speeding, as people do in front of our house—and now he was dead...
...The feeling of utter, lonely despair that savers in their fifties have when they contemplate the wreckage of their security, the horrible edgy feeling of insecurity that comes from seeing that the people who are legally trustees for our savings simply took our money—and will probably get away with keeping it since they now have enough of it to pay for really good lawyers—is the real crime...
...Pharisees who live to show how holy you are by your simplicity of life, go away and brood...
...A loyal wife, as mine is, is above rubies...
...They make us fleet, powerful and cool...
...The time will soon come when he will be back in school...
...Perhaps above all, I can admire and praise my son, and that is as good a use of my time as I have...
...He never has so far...
...I actually have several cars...
...Artemus was my friend, and I assumed he would be here for 10 more years...
...The crime is not really about how much they took or what specific anti-fraud or anti-theft provision of the Securities Act of 1933 or 1934 they violated...
...I learned to lift them in 1958 as an eighth grader...
...The strength thing worked amazingly well...
...When he was alive, Garth was probably my most reassuring friend...
...And for that crime, despite what I know will probably happen—that they will get away with it the way securities fraud-mongers and corporate crooks always do—they need to be severely punished...
...Then about a year later, he moved to London...
...About a month ago, my wife said she had seen him across the street, so we resolved not to let him out anymore...
...Tommy and I had probably the best talk we have ever had about any-thing serious...
...They're all big...
...If Congress and the Justice Department and the SEC and the White House can step up to the plate and get us some justice for our suffering, we may be able to sleep again...
...That bar will be, for me, far too heavy to lift as Tommy configured it...
...Only I, that same old dad, know anything at all about lifting weights...
...Then, again, catastrophe...
...Let them protest fur coats...
...I fed Artemus his usual meal on top of the refrigerator and left...
...That was no time ago at all, and I could carry him into the house and dry him with a towel...
...When we moved to Beverly Hills, he especially fell in love with me...
...Appar-ently a longer growing season in northerly latitudes will be a major benefit to food production, among other matters that might confuse Gray Davis' fans...
...I have gotten to be dependent on that show—after all, it was my job—for status and income...
...Garth Wood, M.D., had a house on the beach in Palm Beach...
...Then, when he ate, his tail hung over the edge and wagged happily but slowly...
...Now, I see I am not quite able to describe just how much that cat was in our hearts...
...I love my car...
...The ultimate goal is to make it very hard and socially taboo for people like me to have big cars with leather seats and stereos and big mighty 300-horsepower gasoline-burning engines...
...I am terrified about what the future holds...
...She grabbed it and said she was going to learn to start painting pictures with his tail as a brush...
...I am lonely and I am scared...
...I want to be buried in it...
...Artemus wanted to be my cat, my one and only cat...
...The real problem is the one that is summarized by postcards and letters saying, "We are terrified...
...But about 10 years ago, or maybe a little less, my wife picked up a cat that had been run over and took it to a vet to allow it to die humanely...
...Especially for income...
...And those weights will still be there, in a corner of the yard, awaiting a Tommy who will rarely if ever come to what I hope will always be home to him...
...And this scares me and makes me angry...
...I think I will skip the rest of the details...
...Plus, if I tried to dry him with a towel, he would probably call the police...
...I love their style, their heft, their smell...
...When he lifts weights, he needs me to "spot" him...
...But let's face it, the science underlying a supposed connection between car exhaust and melting icebergs is weak, to put it mildly...
...My cars are strong...
...When Brigid would not lie on the bed with me, Artemus did...
...He jumped right in my way and tripped me...
...just as he was picked up and taken to the vet...
...He would express hunger by climbing on top of the refrigerator and hanging over the edge of the door like a gargoyle, demanding to be fed up on top where Brigid could not steal from him...
...I always start to tear up when I am out there with him, and he looks disgusted...
...We got another male cat about a month ago, and the two of them hissed at each other constantly, but he was still good company...
...As for me, I just felt empty...
...He one day found an all-black lost cat there who followed Garth home...
...My wife shrieked with agony...
...But I want to say something more primitive than that: I know where this whole movement is heading of saying how noble we are to have tiny little cars that run on fuel cells...
...Sullen, scorching black despair, to coin a phrase...
...Thenthe time will come when he is in college and does not even want to come home for the summer...
...Garth flew all the way from Miami to Los Angeles with the cat in a little box on his lap, then took the cat off his lap and gave it to us...
...In recent weeks and months, I have received a torrent of e-mails and letters and phone calls from friends and strangers who know that I spend more time on investments than they do and they have a common message: We are terrified...
...I hold my fingers out to guide the bar into his hands...
...We called him Artemus, because our son wanted to, although why I am not sure...
...It was Mommy...
...When he got in my way again, I kicked him out of the way and he ran for cover...
...He said, "I lost a cat I loved 10 years ago and I still grieve?' I often think God's greatest gift to us is companion animals...
...Once or twice when I did grab him to take him back in, he scratched my hands and even my chest through my jacket...
...I lean over him to make sure the bar touches his chest...
...He was the most affectionate cat I ever saw...
...I don't want to give it up now or ever...
...It brings to mind what the real crime of the people at Enron and Adelphia and Tyco and a vast host of high-tech businesses and other businesses is...
...I love their air conditioning...
...I told my friend Kevin about it...
...Then, in about 1996, we got another cat...
...So Tommy once every few days hurtles down the stairs from his room, collects me from my computer, sticks his face up to mine and says, "Dad, spot me...
...This is speeding driver number two who has killed a pet...
...Politicians, come unto me and I will give you money to leave my car alone...
...and would hurl himself against the doors endlessly until we let him out to be by the water and in the sun...
...He loved lying in the sun by the pool 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 sper d aˆ rnoon discus r my tore in show business with my wife...
...After the dinner, I called Tommy at his computer game lair, and he wanted dinner...
...I spent a long afternoon discussing my future in show business with my wife...
...The best part is that our son, the handsome but academically rebellious Tommy, is home from boarding school in New England...
...Little by little, he began to throw himself over the walls of the pool and meander in our front garden...
...I will concede you are bet-ter than I am if you just let me keep my car...
...Another neighbor told us how he had seen the dying Artemus in the road at about 7 p.m...
...MONDAY any of my friends and even quite a few total strangers know that I follow the stock market closely and often with a highly skeptical eye...
...She said that she had just gotten home and Artemus was dead...
...Garth took in and loved the cat...
...I love my car...
...The feeling is infectious and it is spreading, despite some silly protestations from business magazines that we have nothing to worry about...
...Tommy was so upset he punched a hole in a window...
...We are watching our hopes vanish before our eyes...
...Once, when he was lying in bed with my wife, he was lazily wagging his enormous tail in her face...
...I, his old dad, usually might as well be invisible...
...I love their power...
...He cried so much he threw up...
...When he had his eyes closed, he was totally black and invisible against my wife's mink throw or our son's black bedspread...
...As I see it, the market may in fact be due for some revival right now, but I am often wrong...
...There are just so many mil-lions of variables affecting climate that it is hard for even the most sophisticated computers to tell what is causing what phenomenon...
...He even fell madly in love with Brigid, my beloved German shorthaired pointer...
...He is almost 15 and he has started nagging me to get him some fool kind of car that has lights in the wheels...
...When I pried him out of it, he suddenly scratched my forearm with his claws and then sunk his fangs into my arms...
...Still, he would cagily lie in wait by the door and when we opened it for any reason, he would dash out and refuse to be caught...
...If men and women with sandals and beards want to show how noble they are, let them demonstrate against the PLO (although I somehow suspect they are on the other side...
...An even tinier portion is caused by the difference between the cars we have now and the new holier-than-thou mobiles that Gray Davis is requiring be produced for us in California—and of course for most of the nation as well, since California is such a major market for cars that now GM and Ford and everyone else will have to make tiny little cars for everyone...
...But I remember that it was only a few years ago that I did my weightlifting by picking up Tommy by his ankles and holding him upside down (to his screaming delight) as I walked around the house...
...Let's just say he was a part of the household, and a very lively part at that...
...I can be there as a backstop for him as he becomes himself...
...I can no longer lift him, but I can help him with what he lifts...
...I am not a strong man...
...I am reduced to "spotting" for him, and yet it is not a reduction at all...
...He hated when the new male kitty, Largo, came into my room and hissed at him to keep him out...
...That cat used to lie on my bed in the morning when I left for my show, and then would still be there when I came back in the evening...
...Otherwise, it's another morning seeing the sun rise and feeling sick with worry and having the hollow feeling of getting victimized . . , again...
...I love them all...
...But his pals have no interest in anything that is not on a computer screen, and they have no idea of how to train with weights anyway...
...My dear, dear, beloved friend Dr...
...It looks very much as if it will not be...
...There will never be another Artemus, but all cats are good, and I need another one right now...
...He actually smiled as if he understood...
...As Ronald Reagan said, "What has posterity ever done for me...
...When Garth died, the loss was catastrophic and I felt that the cat he had given us, Artemus, was his way of saying he was still there, still laughing and telling me everything would be all right...
...It was only a few moments ago (well maybe 10 years) when I could and would hold him by his hands and swing him around in a fast circle in the swimming pool...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 The real atrocity that these thieves have committed is to make us feel so damned bad...
...Our savings are disappearing...
...He would lie on top of her head with his whole body and snuggle and snuggle until he fell asleep lying on top of her...
...And again, that is not the real problem...
...I was worried and tried to grab him, but he was too fleet of foot...
...He would come and sleep with his face pressed right against mine, with his whiskers brushing my nose...
...The real problem is not mainly about how long it will be until the stock market revives...
...TUESDAY isaster...
...I shoved him away and rushed into my bathroom to get an anti-septic and some Band-Aids...
...Let me put it the way my late mother would have put it: He was a lot of company...
...We no longer have much hope that the money will ever come back...
...Our son and my wife and I all fell madly in love with the cat...
...My show has not been picked up for a seventh season...
...Drivers behave like total psychopaths on our street, and if he were on the pavement, he could be killed in a flash...
...The only solution is to go to the animal shelter and get another one...
...He followed me from room to room and rubbed against my calves...
...The money may come back in 10 years or 5 years or 50 years or never...
...Then, tonight, catastrophe...
...Instead, it rallied, lived and we all grew to love it...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
