BEN STEIN'S DIARY: Hollywood Comes to God
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY Hollywood Comes to God by Benjamin J. Stein BEVERLY HILLS, MONDAY ALMOST EVERY WEEKDAY I AM IN TOWN, I get into my car a few minutes before noon. I head over to a gaudy...
...Or else there might be a plea that someone in the meeting come to talk to the sharer and confide how he or she has worked to get serenity under the sheltering arms of God...
...The speaker speaks from the heart, often with humor and tears, and then stops...
...These people, including me, have come here at noon in the heart of Hollywood to find God...
...The Po tics of Peace What's Behind the Anti War Movement...
...The March 19 date is the second anniversary of the start of the Bush Administration's "Shock and Awe" campaign against Saddam Hussein, announced on that date in 2003 by President Bush in a nationwide television address...
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...Then there is a period of time when participants in the meeting can talk for a very few minutes each about what is happening in his or her own life and how God or the fellowship or the principles of the program have saved that person that day...
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...For the time of the meeting, down there in that dark club, and for a good long time afterwards, we really believe we are in the sunshine of God's love-and we don't have to do anything but breathe it in and breathe it out...
...This discovery almost always involves finding God, a God of mercy and love and understanding who brings-little by little-enough peace into the heart of the speaker so that he or she no longer needs to poison himself or herself with excess food or methedrine or brandy or rock cocaine...
...We are strangers here in Sodom, but we are so happy with our God and our way of life that we fall into a sort of trance of relief that we serve a different deity from the people who are out there on a fake smile and a line of blow...
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...Man is supposed to love man, said Martin Luther King, Jr., for no greater or lesser reason than that God loves man and made him in His image...
...That goddess is going to lacerate you with her whip and tell you that you are not good enough, that you are not fast enough, that you are not tough enough, that you are not thin enough, not rich enough, not famous enough, not mean enough, not successful enough...
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...It is a program of liberating man from false gods, from self-loathing, from hatred, from envy, from self-destruction in every form...
...As I sat in the meeting today and contemplated the many famous men and women I have seen at these meetings, names that would impress anyone, and the many not well-known names of men and women who do the grunt work of setting up the chairs and tables at the meetings, and speaking truth and love from their hearts, two thoughts hit me...
...But if you find a God who loves you, a God who loves you just as you are, who thinks you're just fine as long as you are humble and at peace, you are no longer going to need to get high...
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...First, when you come to Hollywood, if you are at all like me, you worship the gods of money, property, prestige, sex, and placement in the firmament of stars...
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...All of these movements were motivated by a simple belief that was shared equally by Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 "It's a miracle...
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...The wonderful thing is that when we are in the meeting, we are like Christians in the catacombs under Nero or like the Jews hiding at Masada or in the ghetto of Lublin or like Christians hiding in house churches in China...
...Also ai-ailable from Capital Research Center: Capital Research ('enter Guide to s corproft . Idvucacy Capital Research ('enter Guide to t•enunisI Groups Price: S20 per copy Quanlilr discounts available To Ordcr Call: 202/483-69(li) or 8(JI459-3450 WWW.CAPITALRESEARCI9.ORG April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 BEN STEIN'S D I A R Y The second huge thought that dawned on meand has been dawning on me for a long time-is that it's a commonplace that Hollywood is the hotbed of godless hedonism, and certainly that is true...
...I head over to a gaudy rock and roll nightspot on the west side, park my car at a nearby bank, and walk into the virtually deserted nightclub...
...The Miracle Phone"' can help you once again enjoy phone conversations...
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...The small speaker in the earpiece vibrates and sends sound waves through the air...
...is a careful look at the organizations spearheading the anti-war movement today and a comparison of these groups to earlier movements for peace...
...But for those who are hard of hearing, those words quickly become "lost in translation...
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...The story is Hollywood comes to God...
...Ordinary phones send sound by air conduction...
...And this program is based on a similar idea: you should love yourself and stop hurting yourself because God loves you...
...It sends sound waves via air conduction, but it 2 also sends out sound wave pulsations with its r DirectVibeT"' Pulsator in the earpiece...
...But this "odd" technology is helping thousands of people rediscover the joy of phone conversations, and reconnect with family and friends...
...There are no choirs, no organs, no grandeur of any material sort...
...Those of us who have been coming to meetings like this one for a while-I have been coming for about 17 years-have found that a God of our own understanding, as the phrase goes, can come into our hearts and remove the compulsion to overeat, to take harmful medications, to drink to excess, to slam heroin into our arms, to pick up a glass crack pipe, or just to feel hateful, self-loathing feelings, feelings of envy and feelings of anger...
...It has been in existence since the mid-1930s and has been working miracles in millions of lives...
...I have known the families of some of the people who speak at these meetings...
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...Both places are not in use, or at least not in nightclub use...
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...What has dawned on me over the past 17 years that I have been going to meetings of the program, mostly in Malibu and in West Hollywood, is how many people in the entertainment business come to the meetings, confess their reliance on God, ask Him for guidance and to be in our hearts, and leave the meetings and go out into the sunshine of Southern California armed with confidence in God's love...
...I have seen this power in many a life and certainly in my own life...
...betraying God...
...Liberation from the evils of racism here in our beloved country...
...There are no gilded statues, no altars, no felt cloths over tables...
...What there usually is consists of a man or woman who starts by talking about how his or her life was wrecked by bad habits usually involving drugs and alcohol that were supposed to get the speaker into nirvana, did that for a time, and then laid the speaker low to the point ofviolence, suicide attempts, divorces, prison, and "pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization," to coin a phrase...
...At first, when I thought about it, I thought the story was God comes to Hollywood...
...Liberation from the totalitarian future that George Orwell saw coming from Marxism...
...If you keep on doing it, since "doing it" means administering poison to yourself, you are eventually going to get sick and the "goods" that used to work for you are going to lay you low or maybe kill you...
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...BEN STEIN'S D I A R Y Hollywood Comes to God by Benjamin J. Stein BEVERLY HILLS, MONDAY ALMOST EVERY WEEKDAY I AM IN TOWN, I get into my car a few minutes before noon...
...Anyway, the program whose meetings I go to at noon when I am in town-and on many other days and in many other places, and its name is not important-is also a program of liberation...
...In addition to its unique technology, the Miracle Phone"' also has top-of-the-line features that make it a pleasure to use...
...Either upstairs or downstairs is where a fellowship meets that has as its goal the acknowledgment of a Higher Power in our lives, almost universally called "God...
...But that's not it...
...Therefore, a great many formerly tortured souls find peace in those arms...
...It has power, as Martin Luther King said about nonviolence...
...In a world where the very billboards on Sunset Strip are telling you that you are a failure and a loser and that even if you are a success today, catastrophe waits for you tomorrowyou are just naturally going to want to get high...
...It will never be in People, because we meet in quiet dark places far away from cameras, but it's the real story of what is happening in Hollywood../ When they found a God of love and forgiveness, they were saved from the self-destruction into which those evil pursuits had pushed them...
...I don't mean to say I have dis48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 B E N J A M I N J . S T E I N covered something that no one knew about...
...We meet in dark rooms and we look scruffy (actually, I don't look scruffy) and we often have tales of humiliation to tell-but we are in Hollywood and we have come to God and been saved day by day, and there are more of us every day...
...CRC's new book, The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement...
...By placing the DirectVibe Pulsator at strategic locations on your head, sound vibrations travel from the Pulsator to the speech recognition center in your brain...
...You control the volume of both the ringer and the incoming voice...
...This launched me into thinking-as someone far more famous than I did recently-that this is indeed the era of liberation...
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...The man on NPR talking about Niebuhr said that Niebuhr was concerned above all with liberation...
...For those with normal hearing, that's fine...
...It was the basis of the free socie ty, and this belief defeated Communism and Hitlerism...
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...The sound waves go straight to the speech recognition center in your brain without ever passing through your ear...
...Talk to your kids or grandkids with ease...
...This was the basis of the entire civil rights movement...
...In fact, the Miracle PhoneTM works best if you don't hold it up to your ear...
...The speaker usually talks then about how he or she found the program that we are talking about-a program that lauds privacy, so I won't say its name or ever under any circumstances who was there or what exactly was said there...
...Instead, a scruffy-looking group of men and women are sitting in straight-backed chairs, at empty tables, looking at a bench where still more scruffylooking men and women sit...
...A baby who cries and has no one to answer will want to get high...
...As the speakers readily admit, their parents taught them that there was no God but Mammon and Fame and History, and that when they found a God of love and forgiveness, they were saved from the self-destruction into which those evil gods had pushed them...
...Sounds strange, right...
...They're received by your ear and interpreted as speech by your brain...
...But it's also true that some of the biggest names in Hollywood have found God and live by the love of that God in the program I am talking about in a guarded way...
...You may have gotten so frustrated that you've stopped using the phone altogether...
...On March 19 left-wing anti-war activists affiliated with the group called ANSWER staged demonstrations across America to protest the War in Iraq...
...The program I go to every weekday at noon when I am in town, and used to go to every weekday in Malibu when I was in Malibu, offers you that loving God...
...I go down a flight of steps or else up a flight of steps, and reach either a darkened basement or a dim airless balcony bar...
...Liberation from Hitler and Stalin themselves and their monstrous ideology-and it will come to China, too...
...ALL OF THIS WAS REVERBERATING in my head today as well as a certain approach to the whole subject suggested to me by an NPR story about the famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr...
...You ro actually feel them when you hold the earpiece against your head - more specifically, against the hone right behind your ear...
...The Miracle PhoneyI" USes conduction, not just amplification, to make phone calls clearer-and everyone in the family can use it...
...Use your head...
...There are no sacramental vestments on anyone in the room, although an astonishing number of men and women have tattoos...
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...Then a hat is passed to pay for rent, and then there is a prayer and the meeting ends as quietly and unassumingly as it began...
...It has a Visual Ringer that flashes when a call comes in-another handy feature for the hearing impaired...
...You might just say you worship the Bitch Goddess Success...
...And once you start getting high and find you can-by administering something to yourself in the form of a powder or a leaf or a drink or a food-change your mood from one of fear to one of hope and confidence, you are going to keep on getting high...
...There's also an indicator that lights up when the line is in use, and its extra-large keypad makes dialing easy...
...That belief is that man must love man and respect each individual man because God loves man, and that if we fail to love a man (by which of course I mean a human, male or female) because he is black Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in or brown or a Jew or a Catholic or not rich, we are Beverly Hills and Malibu...
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...Liberation from oppression because of faith or ethnicity or gender here at home...
...A baby who has an Infinite Being rocking him in His arms will not need to get high...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
