BEN STEIN'S DIARY: What's Playing?
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY What's Playing? by Benjamin J. Stein WEDNESDAY WHERE I AM. Wait, you'll never guess, so I'll tell you. I am in the Best Western Motel in Corvallis,...
...This has to be taught...
...He's going to buy her a Mercedes convertible...
...The video talks about the new Halo Room...
...Only the people at the other side are in Tel Aviv or Singapore or Glendale or Madrid...
...That was thoroughly exhausting...
...Home prices are soaring...
...But it's important...
...Only this time, I thought of what I was grateful I had never done: I have never been a prisoner in a concentration camp...
...Hispanic men in trucks stop...
...and Min Ko Naing Campaigner for democracy in Burma...
...I have never had to charge against Japanese Nambu machine guns at Tarawa or Peleliu or Okinawa...
...THAVE NOT BEEN FEELING AT ALL WELL for a long time now...
...I am worried about our moral capital...
...It was all pretty amazing...
...Ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted...
...Then I got pleurisy—an inflammation of the lining of my lungs—and now I feel as if I have a sore throat...
...I am not that worried about America's financial capital...
...The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing...
...I guess some parts of it are...
...I am not that worried about America's financial capital...
...I am back in L.A...
...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 FRIDAY 0 KAY...
...I think I know...
...Why didn't I have to do them...
...Mengele...
...I turned off the TV and read the newspaper...
...She's engaged to a man she loves...
...Some dope at a meeting of my 12-step program coughed all over everyone and then announced he had the 'flu, and I've felt fluish since then...
...Things seem to be going amazingly well in America...
...When will we ever be able to pay these people back...
...This scares me...
...And it is exactly like having a real life conference...
...If we're grateful enough, we can never be defeat-ed...
...That seems to be drifting away at a terrifying rate and when it's gone, what do we do...
...They met through a marriage broker who liked her fiance so much he only had to pay $10,000 to marry the beautiful T. So, he's a happy guy and she's a happy girl...
...NOMINATIONS for the Civil Courage Prize are welcomed from non-profit, non-governmental organizations worldwide...
...It is an advance upon traditional, cur-rent teleconferencing about as great as a Boeing 777 is an advance on a biplane...
...by Benjamin J. Stein WEDNESDAY UESS WHERE I AM...
...I have never been on a death march...
...John Train Northcote Parkinson Fund 67A East 77th Street, New York, NY 10021 See the Nominations page on our website, www.civilcourageprize.org / N SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 B E N S T E I N ' S D I A R Y But the point of my thanks is that there are mil-lions, tens of millions who did die that way...
...Corporate profits are up...
...It is hot here, but thanks to the geniuses who invented air conditioning, the tough strong men who mine the coal that fires the power plants, the guys and gals who build the equipment that takes the coal from the earth and then converts it to electricity, the men and women who maintain the electrical lines, the smart guy who built my office, and the resourceful men and women who made and installed my air conditioner, I am cool and happy...
...B E N S T E I N ' S D I A R Y What's PlayiN...
...NOW I FEEL A BIT BETTER...
...Is America really this desperate...
...You just walk into the room...
...I don't know, but I am so thankful you cannot imagine...
...If we forget just how precious our nation and our way of life are, we'll lose our purpose and our meaning and we'll be easy prey for our enemies...
...This is what should be on TV, not shows about how to be an apprentice to a creep like Donald Trump or a strange woman like Martha Stewart...
...They pay no attention to whoever was at the intersection first, to whether there is a car in the intersection at all, whether there are pedestrians crossing in front of them...
...We have plenty of money and plenty of trinkets...
...Except that there is no jet lag, no sweat, no exhaustion, no missing your daughter's piano recital...
...I think this Halo thing will take off and will soon be in well-to-do people's houses, and in every large corporation and law firm, and medicine will be revolutionized by it and so will military planning...
...Only it's an unusual stop...
...I made a list of the people and things I was grateful for...
...A call from my old pal, the beautiful Russian girl, T. She's very excited...
...Then we did a session with an HP scientist named Mark who talked about how using Halo instead of air-line travel helped save families...
...The stock markets are finally taking off...
...EDMUND BURKE The winners of the 2005 Civil Courage Prize Anna Politkovskaya Russian reporter on atrocities of the war in Chechnya in the face of death threats, intimidation and poisoning...
...They really scare me...
...It's amazing...
...They're looking for a much bigger house now...
...But get them behind the wheel of a four thousand pound urban assault vehicle, and Katie, bar the door...
...The usual...
...The Awards will be presented on October 11, 2005 in New York City The Civil Courage Prize of $50,000 is awarded annually to honor civil courage—steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk—rather than military valor...
...I had slept in my Winnebago for a good part of the day while on breaks, so I had a little trouble sleeping, and then I decided to do what I always do when I can-not sleep...
...There are no gaps, no latency in voice or video feed...
...First, I got pneumonia for the sixth or seventh time in the past three years...
...Never have I been used for unanesthetized experiments by Dr...
...Now I am getting a searing feeling in my lungs, so I am going to lie down for a while...
...No teams of technicians, no "technology shrine...
...What can we do for the child without a father because his father died assaulting Shura Castle or defending Corregidor or breaking through to Bastogne or holding off the Chinese Communists at Chosin...
...I have never had to charge against German Maxim guns at Ypres or the Somme...
...Ain't love grand...
...And they're totally life-size, with perfect video quality and perfect audio quality...
...Lots of lay-offs, which is bad, but big net gains in employment...
...They know no law except the law of their own self-obsessed entitlement...
...I, your humble servant, am here in late July because I am doing an "industrial" video for HP...
...He's a wealthy executive at a large software company...
...I am in the Best Western Motel in Corvallis, Oregon...
...The acts that the Prize recognizes should have taken place deliberately, over time...
...Here at the corner of Crescent and Carmelita, where I hang my hat, there is an intersection...
...I am worried about our moral capital...
...We did a session this morning with my old pal Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks and the man who said his creative people needed to 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 collaborate more and fly less, and got the ball rolling...
...You simply have to see how out of control the women in Beverly Hills are to believe it: the worst drivers on the planet...
...The only thing that's missing is that you cannot actually touch the other people, but otherwise, you are right there with them...
...He has declined the Prize money, which will go to a worthy not-for-profit organization...
...It's all become terra incognita...
...I have never been led into a gas chamber and gassed with Zyklon B. I have never been rounded up in a town in Romania and beaten to death by fascist thugs with iron rods...
...Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu...
...As far as I can tell, there are just a lot of sweaty, anxious men and women with big teeth and goofy hair trying to do something that will make them either rich or famous or both...
...Black men in cars stop...
...These were the fates of my fellow Jews just in my lifetime...
...Also, I never had to charge against massed can-non fire in Fredericksburg, or be a prisoner in a gulag or be shot at the Lubyanka because some OGPU officer had to make his quota of "wreckers and saboteurs" to placate Stalin...
...You walk into a room, and you sit at a conference table, and suddenly across from you there is the other side of the conference table...
...I have the terrible fear that the whole country—except for a few people who read history like me and my nephew Jonathan—has forgotten how we got to where we are...
...In person, they are sometimes pleasant...
...I wonder how grateful they are to live in America instead of the mullahs' Iran or whether they even bother to think about it...
...I have never been in the hold of a Japanese prison ship...
...It is a four-way stop...
...You click on a mouse, and the people in Singapore are right there...
...How blessed I have been...
...Not only that, I have never gone hungry, never had to go outside and work in the Polish winter in skimpy clothing while suffering from typhus...
...But what strange-looking people they are: so aggressive, so mentally disorganized and at the same time so ferocious...
...Where do all of these lonely people come from...
...By increasing awareness of civil courage, it hopes to encourage that virtue...
...That we have what we have—and it's uniquely beautiful—because brave men bled and their wives and mothers and fathers and children sobbed and were alone...
...It's all reality shows with premises I do not understand...
...It occurs to me that what's missing in our whole chocolaty sweet culture is this realization of just how amazingly thankful we have to be to the men who died this way so we could bitch and moan about the traffic or the heat...
...I went out to get the mail at my house in Beverly Hills a few minutes ago (it's about 5 P.M...
...It's home to Oregon State University, and it's also home to a good-sized plant and research facility for Hewlett-Packard...
...He endured 15 years of torture and imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement...
...I know I talk about this a lot...
...But where do we start when women like Paris Hilton's mother are considered role models...
...He's shown her his financial statements and she's happy...
...White men in cars stop...
...Shows that bind the nation together in gratitude...
...Corvallis is about an hour and a half south of Portland on the way to Eugene...
...He's bought her a six-carat ring...
...Plus it takes no set-up once it's installed...
...It is one of the most impressive collaborative breakthroughs since the Internet...
...Anyway, we worked on this industrial video from about 7:30 in the morning until about 7:30 at night—with lots of breaks—and then I came back to my little room at the Best Western...
...But women do not stop...
...We have plenty of money and plenty of trinkets...
...They slow down the tiniest little bit in their immense SUVs and Bentleys and Benzes, keep talking on their cell phones, and then just roll right through the intersection...
...Can you imagine in your wildest dreams how lucky I have been...
...I got a cinnamon roll at Starbucks (my favorite BENJAMIN J S T E I N eating and drinking spot) and went to my room to watch TV, which I rarely do...
...I have never been torpedoed while making the Murmansk run and thrown overboard and drowned in icy water while my friends died all around me...
...now) and what do I see...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
