Ben Stein's Diary
Stein, Ben
TUESDAY Malibu T here is a great scene in "Richard II" in which the imprisoned monarch paces in a cell. He has only one companion, a spider. He is thinking of how he got into that mess of...
...And lo and behold, soon the old patriots were marginalized or learned to keep their mouths shut, so they would not get mau-maued at faculty meetings...
...I think it has to do with tipping points and co-optation...
...There are fleecy clouds...
...It is paradise...
...So I am endlessly trying to educate Tommy about why he must be a patriot and support this country...
...Best of all, when he fell down, he laughed...
...Well, almost pristine...
...It ain't gonna be easy and the dominant powers on campus will need fighting against for a long, long time...
...If you get in the habit of reading and learning on your own, you will get an education...
...I have been giving this speech for about fifteen years, so it's familiar ground...
...Their prices are rock bottom...
...The girl looked shocked at first, but then thanked me effusively and the audience applauded thunderously...
...By the way, my WordPerfect does not recognize Bolingbroke, marginalize, or ethnicities as words...
...There we found our goal...
...Who made it come about...
...The explosive went off and he was mortally wounded...
...Anyway, the point about education—not mine, my father's—is a good point...
...If these beliefs seem intensely patriotic, they should be...
...It was safe, safe, safe and beautiful and the food was great, and we drove home in a fog of happiness...
...Now I think of all of this in connection with our son, the little angel, Tommy, who is starting already to get negative messages about America...
...It is your responsibility, not the responsibility of taxpayers you never met, to make yourself educated in this environment...
...The big difference between the anti-American, left-wing, dominant group and the old guard is this: the old guard permitted, even welcomed, dissent...
...What is new is that today a young African American girl asked me a question about education...
...His findings were fascinating...
...Get out the works of Shakespeare...
...He loves it—a Subaru WRX...
...Conservatives stand for true diversity of thought and action—not the phony, state-imposed diversity of affirmative action, but the real diversity of thought that plays out when young people are allowed, even encouraged, to organize around their hearts' and to speak their beliefs...
...We were a timid, careful, frightened lot...
...In fact, I have missed the whole Sandpoint travel experience...
...You look at taxes differently...
...Hill's Resort is, as far as I can tell, America's premier family resort...
...Helping that to happen, I am happy to say, are my pals at the Young America's Foundation, who send conservative speakers to resurgent, fearless College Republicans, right-to-life groups, and others on campus who have finally had enough...
...You look at a country that gives you opportunity differently...
...At the Safeway, the checkers all remembered me and said how happy they were to see me and how happy they were that I was back in town...
...And believe me, I know the smell very well...
...This is roughly how it goes: why are universities in this country so determinedly left wing and anti-American...
...I was touched and the day-old pizza was fine...
...In fact, the audience applauded thunderously over and over again...
...At Yale Law School from 1967 to 1970 (I dropped out to be sick and to work for a year in 1966-67), there were many patriotic teachers such as Mr...
...After a fine start this summer—calling me "sir" and generally acting right—he has slid back into his old ways of surliness, staying up late, and sullenness...
...The conservatives on campus are more discerning in whom they rebel against...
...It is co-ed and does not have a dress code, which scares me...
...They walked all around with me helping me to find what I needed and then checked me out in a trice and sent me on my way...
...Get a new book every week and read it...
...And it is true...
...He has after all been better this summer than ever before...
...Frightened people are angry people...
...The best, tangiest spare ribs on earth...
...The waiters and waitresses and busboys were beaming...
...No educational entity I have encountered has ever done as well as Cardigan has done with Tommy...
...Get out an abridged version of The Outline of History...
...The Hill family came over to the table and greeted us and brought us spare ribs...
...Because he did fairly well at school—and I definitely do not mean really well—I also bought him a very much upgraded and insanely expensive sound system so he can listen to his loud thumping bass rap songs and make the car shake...
...No one in L.A...
...Anyway, I went to sleep seething with rage at him, but then I prayed for a long time and I felt better...
...But it's where he was dying to go...
...Because America is about allowing every race and ethnicity, every sexual orientation, every gender to make its way in the world in a dignified way so long as it does not hurt others...
...They fear that world...
...They stock everything you need...
...Because America has given us Jews a chance to be who we always could be—happy, productive citizens with the opportunity to laugh and play in the sunshine—instead of the cringing, fearful souls that Europe and the Middle East tried to make us into for two millennia...
...Kear was at sea, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer...
...Get Capitalism and Freedom...
...If we can afford to pour billions into trying to educate kids who refuse to be educated, if we want to exist as a nation, if we believe in basic fairness, we have to pay our soldiers, sailors, air force people, and marines more...
...Especially when students enter the labor force, their lives change remarkably...
...This, she said—I am paraphrasing—explains why government people and professors are so angry and resentful toward the society at large...
...It has been a couple of years since I have been here, and I have missed it a lot...
...and some of it he will have to do himself, but I just hope I live to see him realize how good he has it and how much he owes the people who put him in the catbird seat of all human history...
...He has a job as an intern at a major TV network, and he seems to do it fairly well (all eight hours a week of it), although he has given all of the people at his office the distinct impression that we would rather not be there...
...As happens at least once a year, there was an attack of houseflies...
...Wal-Mart is a marvel...
...Everyone was laughing and smiling...
...The new Left (now the old Left) simply hates dissent and will not allow it...
...1/4...
...There is almost nothing that adequately says how much gratitude we feel toward such people...
...Because America is the first nation to set out in its founding document that all government derives power from its citizens, and not the reverse...
...He is off to a new boarding school this year...
...Because the goal of America is the exaltation of each citizen, not the glory of the state...
...Like a young muscular god...
...They made it clear that only other frightened, angry, Marxist types such as themselves would be admitted or allowed to teach...
...The remaining three were yours truly, my girlfriend Pat Kane (who has not spoken to me in about twenty-eight years), and a friend who was a returning marine going to school on the GI Bill...
...A lot more...
...Why was there such a powerful left-wing monolith...
...It is our secret fortress of sanity...
...Alas, someone has also chopped down the gorgeous cottonwood trees in front of the room, but that's inevitable, I guess...
...It can cling to its fear and childish loathing of grown-ups out in the big wide world forever...
...The dining room is in a large wood-framed lodge with floor-toceiling windows overlooking a paddle tennis court, a volleyball court, a beach, a marina, and then the pristine lake...
...People out here in the big wide world are a lot less angry and less jealous than people in government or the academy...
...They are young and dumb, and it takes me a while to kill them all, but eventually I do...
...This, I believe, is one of my main chores...
...This immediately struck me as true...
...How did they get to be such rara avises...
...All of this made him wildly happy for a while, and he even said to me, "Dad, I love you," which may be a first (and proves that money can buy love...
...I was a student myself at Columbia from 1962 to 1966, and you expect that Columbia would have been a hotbed of anti-American thoughts and action...
...The students pick it up from the faculty, and since there is no group more conformist than most college students, they all conform as if Stalin, and not just their professor, were laying down the rules...
...Anyway, I am thinking about thinking because I have a question that is perpetually going through my brain, and like the imprisoned Plantagenet, I am trying to figure it out in my spidery cell...
...I came out here late last night...
...This by the way is another big source of anti-Americanthought on campus: the reflexive need of immature souls to rebel against the parent, even if the parent is a kindly, protecting parent...
...Then I think of other teachers who talk about how they are rooting for al-Qaeda or for Saddam Hussein...
...Because America glories not in the Ein Reich, EM Volk, Ein Fiihrer mentality of the world's dictatorships, but in diversity and originality...
...A leisure/intellectual class, a college faculty never has to grow up...
...A psychologist—I do not know who—had studied government lawyers and lawyers in the private sector as well as businessmen and professors...
...Wow, do I hate it when he acts badly and then tells me I am overreacting...
...She replied that his place was with the ship and with the fleet, serving his country...
...is offering me any free food...
...We stopped at Priest River to get gasoline, then headed north through dense forests to Luby Bay on Priest Lake...
...As I walked by it with my wifey, my son, and a mountain of luggage on a cart, the young man behind the counter recognized me and greeted me...
...I idiotically bought him a car at the beginning of the summer because he had finished his second year of boarding school in pretty good fashion...
...He insisted I take some pizza...
...FRIDAY And now, Nirvana...
...They are sheltering the academy from the chanciness and difficulty of the big wide world...
...Not by hostile fire, in a way, but by his own altruism...
...Out in the big wide world, students often shed the influence of their faculties and go on to become all kinds of things, even Republicans...
...It is an outrage (I have said it before and I will say it again) that men and women who are on call wenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, are paid barely minimum wage—not even that, if you take into account their number of hours on call—to put their lives on the line for us...
...For this kind of heroism, what can we say or do in thanks...
...But life on earth is largely a material life, and we can make life materially easier and better for the people who protect us by a simple expedient: raising their pay...
...Then I think of how when I was at UC Santa Cruz during the election of 1972, in the campus polling precinct there were something like 1,500 votes cast, of which 1,497 went for McGovern...
...Get 1984...
...Instead, he selected two big black students to be his bodyguards, like in the famous photo of Huey Newton, and they stood guard in his classroom while he paced back and forth inveighing against America...
...It is like America is supposed to be: a club, but a club that welcomes everyone who acts right...
...Alex Bickel and Mr...
...The reason I am thinking of this is that I am down in my office in my house in Malibu...
...My father used to say that there has neverbeen an educational system devised that could keep a hardworking, dedicated student from getting a good education...
...Because America is the nation where anyone from anywhere can make his way to his dreams and make them come true...
...It is slow moving...
...But there is still s0000 much more to be done...
...I often suspect drugs, but I am on his case all the day, and I never smell any marijuana smoke...
...At a certain point, when the radicals took over the student bodies, they also made major inroads into the faculty recruiting committees...
...And at the Safeway tonight he somehow found a skateboard and had to ride it up and down the aisles until an employee told him to stop...
...On the trip today he was purposely jamming my gears, delaying us at LAX by having to get two cheeseburgers at the terminal even though Alaska Air gave us a perfectly good lunch on board...
...Then he was not enthusiastic about helping to carry luggage...
...How did this come about...
...Generally, government lawyers were more close to their mothers than private lawyers, more fearful than private lawyers, and less inclined to take risks...
...Now Tommy and Alex are off at a double feature and I, your servant, and my wife are hurtling along Idaho Route 2 along the Pend'Oreille River toward Priest River...
...It's old and I was gonna throw it away, so you might as well have it...
...This means I am giving a speech in Smothers Theater to about six hundred eager and delightful young Americans of all ethnicities...
...But the main star was the captain, James Kear, and his wife, Shannon...
...He realized it could explode at any time...
...But I soon left that vale of tears and went out into the big wide world, where I still am...
...Robert Bork...
...He saw a little Iraqi girl playing with a piece of explosive ordnance...
...Recently a U.S...
...And this is, again, where THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR and the Young America's Foundation and the CRs and the RTL movement all come in...
...I am here at Pepperdine for the summer youth citizenship seminar...
...While Capt...
...And so they express their anger at it, the way frightened people often do...
...Now at the time I was a bit angry at her because of course I, her son, was a government lawyer...
...If you wait ten minutes you can have the fresh one...
...There is only one problem: a five foot ten or eleven inches tall, light brown-haired, extremely muscular and yet surly child named Tommy Stein...
...As I sat down at our table, I was singing a song from a rap album Tommy listens to constantly...
...This, in a nutshell, explains a lot about why professors and their students are so militantly left wing and anti-American...
...It is maddening beyond words...
...Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or read it in the library...
...Because America has given Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, the best place to live and live out their dreams that has ever existed in human history...
...THURSDAY Sandpoint, Idaho Here we are at the fabulous Edgewater Hotel, right on the sandy shores (you might say sandy point) of magnificent Lake Pend'Oreille...
...A lot of people just don't like trees...
...Then I sweep them up and flush them down the toilet...
...But like all black holes, it threatens to crash in upon itself constantly...
...Today we spent the afternoon on the waters of Lake Pend'Oreille, mostly pulling our son and our friend Alex Feierabend (son of our late pal Peter Feierabend) around on tubes and—for a few glorious seconds—on a wakeboard...
...Get The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...
...He ran to her, took it away from her, and threw his body over it...
...But it was not at all...
...My own mother, no dummy, read the same article and drew a smart conclusion...
...Well, it isn't...
...My wife and I pray that the school is as good as Cardigan Mountain, the miracle school that rescued Tommy from oblivion...
...He says he will do something like make his soul the mate to his brain and try to produce the thoughts that will answer his crisis...
...The river is broad...
...It is at the end of a dirt driveway, right on the shore of the lake...
...At the Avis counter, they had my caddy waiting for me, and they all remembered me and greeted me by name and sent me on my way with many salutations and wishes that I come back soon...
...Maybe it's your responsibility...
...The big question I often ask myself is why, oh why, did all of this happen in the past, say, thirty-five years...
...As if it were my fault that he misbehaves...
...Many of my professors were patriotic, even extremely patriotic...
...He is even now starting to say he will just vote against anyone I vote for, to cancel out my vote...
...She insisted, commanded, that he stay with the ship and the crew he had trained...
...Thus you get a faculty that Stalin would be proud of and a student, body that follows their lead...
...At the sprawling local Wal-Mart, the help all remembered me and greeted me as if I were a Walton...
...She had already suffered one bout with the disease, and a recurrence was serious stuff...
...The diners look and are cheery and friendly...
...Tonight was a shining moment of happiness in that perfect bubble called Hill's Resort on Priest Lake...
...The colleges and university monoliths want to take us back to the old days, the bad old days of 1930s Germany or Soviet Russia, when only the Hitler Youths and the Young Pioneers were allowed to be alive...
...In the meantime, a group of spiders has usually come along to eat the flies, and I have to kill them too...
...And, she added smartly, weak, frightened people are envious people...
...He had to stop to get chocolate cake between flights...
...But they have a helluva row to hoe...
...There are immense green fields on each side of it...
...It is called Williston Northampton and it's in Boston, Massachusetts...
...The faculty becomes like a black hole in space, a death star that gets ever darker and denser...
...It is a lot of work being a homeowner...
...Every one of the crew and all of the family impressed me...
...WEDNESDAY Well, enough of that...
...Here are a few elements of it when it is working right: • At the sparkling new Alaska Airlines terminal at Spokane, there is a pizza place...
...When they are fighting and undergoing horrible heat and freezing cold, sandstorms and pelting rain, under fire from terrorists, they should at least know that their families are being well taken care of back here at home...
...Then watch C-SPAN...
...You look at loafers and bums totally differently...
...Why is it even more pronounced now...
...Once someone has to get up in the morning, clean up, get dressed, spend the day at work, and live off the pittance he makes, the whole world becomes different...
...Toward that end I have prepared a little nutshell of ideas about why he should love America, and it goes something like this: • Because America is the freest, most open society in human history...
...All I ever hear is bang-bang," goes the refrain, and a cherubic young busgirl joined in...
...This was sad but all too real and all too much a standard part of organizations: when a certain density of one militant type becomes apparent, the rest of the group takes on the coloration of the militant group and soon you have a Stalinist monolith...
...They should know their families live comfortably and that they have good housing, good furniture, good clothing, good cars, and awesome medical care...
...I had a great answer for her, if I may say so...
...He did stay and the ship was a major part of Operation Iraqi Freedom...
...He is thinking of how he got into that mess of getting deposed by Bolingbroke...
...Why else attach ourselves to the Big Mama government who would nurture us, pay us a modest wage, and never expect very much...
...For care, love, discipline, and the ability to make a very young demoralized lost boy into a young man with flashes of maturity—struggling against the system all of the time—Cardigan was a gift from God...
...I recently heard about a man who taught at a school in North Carolina who was so anti-American that although he was assigned to teach American history, hesimply refused to do it...
...But they are super friendly and have that small-town cheeriness...
...Get The War in Outline...
...WordPerfect does not recognize wakeboard...
...They always congregate in one place right next to my desk, swarming against a floor-to-ceiling window...
...This was true of my great economics professor, Lowell Harriss, of my fine government teachers, even of my superb English teachers...
...I start with a scholarly article I read back in 1971 when I was a government lawyer...
...Read THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR or National Review...
...The people of this country who preceded us and who now fight for us have earned the love of the rest of the people of this great country...
...TUESDAY Malibu T here is a great scene in "Richard II" in which the imprisoned monarch paces in a cell...
...It's all good...
...Poor WordPerfect...
...And he is very shy around girls, so it will help him to be in class with them again...
...Finally, when I asked him to return the grocery cart, he smashed it into the other carts in the cart rank and knocked some of them over...
...It is not easy to get up on one of those, but our boy did it and he looked like a god...
...What can we say that adequately expresses gratitude for a man of this kind of nobility...
...I was furious and yelled at him...
...Defending the life of a young girl he had never met, giving up his life and depriving his family of his life for this total stranger...
...I truly cannot think what words are enough to express how well they treated him, how busy they kept him, how patiently they instructed him...
...Back at the university, where professors have tenure and only have to teach a few hours a week, the situation worsens...
...What can be done for his family...
...Why shelter ourselves with tenure and lifelong employment instead of going out into the big wide world and looking for the bucks...
...She e-mailed her husband, and he offered to resign his command so he could be with her during her surgery...
...She asked me what she and her fellow students were supposed to do about getting a decent education when state funding for education was getting cut...
...The sky is blue...
...But now as the computer games and the sloth eat into his brain, he is getting surly again...
...At the Edgewater, they all greeted me effusively and said how much they missed me and they had (as requested) saved my favorite room...
...Because America is the first nation set up to allow its citizens to govern themselves, not to allow an entrenched elite to run things...
...I am bound to say that if the people who make the rules in Hollywood could have seen the level of applause I got, and the delightful group who gave it, they would give me my own show...
...He told me I was overreacting and to "chillax...
...What are the psychological and sociological factors that led to this dismal state...
...On our side are glorious sheer cliffs by the north side of the road...
...For instance, I met the entire crew of the navy missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay a couple of weeks ago at a dinner dance for their return from nine months of active duty in the Pacific and in the Arabian Sea...
...serviceman was killed in Iraq...
...We will deal with Tommy for as long as we live, and with God's help, he will be fine...
...So everything here in Sandpoint is hunky-dory...
...I travel all around, and a lot of what I see merits the love and gratitude of the young people of this country, even including my surly son...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
