BEN STEIN'S DIARY: Dreams and Nightmares
Stein, Benjamin I.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY Dreams and Nightmares by Benjamin J. Stein WEDNESDAY ~ HAT AN AWFUL DAY. I awakened after a nightmare. In this nightmare, Maral, the manager of my real life bank (a...
...Darwin says nothing about it, and it is a mystery...
...Sure," he said, "but she has really sharp teeth...
...The guest bedroom had been slept in...
...I need to pray...
...Mommy said I could...
...There were dirty dishes out...
...I f man is just a lump of clay that was set offby lightning (like Frankenstein...
...I was sick to my stomach for about half an hour before I realized it was just a dream, and abad one at that...
...I had a sad duty...
...I need to sleep...
...Did she say you were to leave it a total mess...
...How could you have thought that...
...More to come...
...This is my sanctuary, Tommy...
...What...
...Anyway, two hours later, in a state of total anxiety and exhaustion, I headed back to town...
...You were out in the desert and I didn't want to bother you and he said he needed a change of scene to cheer himself up...
...My bed had been slept in...
...I had awakened in the guesthouse with the dogs staring at me...
...We went into his house...
...Still, Phil's lecture was a gem, all about the responsibility of the individual investor to care for his own interests, and in a few minutes I felt halfway normal...
...Or like the pro-abortion movement, which will not allow pictures of aborted babies to be displayed...
...I turned to see something miraculous: a Weimaraner puppy, a little girl puppy, on a swatch of white carpet...
...I ran into mind-altering traffic on Olympic...
...How much do I have in my account...
...But so am I. I got to Pepperdine in excellent time...
...It seems a bit 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 BENJAMIN J . STEIN thin...
...But how did life start...
...If man is just a lump of clay that happened by craft to dominate other species, if some species of man are made (but by whom...
...Definitely," she answered...
...Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu...
...I love this man and it makes me insane to think of the grief he is going through, and it's only beginning...
...I called Tommy...
...It was only about 10 A.M., way before he usually wakes up...
...My Brigid, the German Shorthair lover of my lifetime, looked at me suspiciously...
...Great with me," I said and hung up...
...My wifey and I discussed it intensely and then she went to sleep...
...He showed me where his wife had made prints, where she had painted, where she had spent her last days...
...I held her, told the owner what a gift he had, and went back to my car...
...Yep," he said happily...
...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57...
...It turns out that a seminal conference on I.D...
...By that time I was in a daze from stomach pain, that horrible feeling of being lost, and the lingering effects of my horrible dream...
...Is that the whole basis of one of the most important texts in human history...
...has simply stopped functioning...
...I thought powerfully of my Weimaraner, Mary, whom I got in Santa Cruz (actually bought her in San Francisco) in 1972...
...Well worth a trip even i f I was sick...
...I kept on feeling sick for about another hour, ate breakfast, got dressed, dosed myself heavily with stomach meds, and headed out to Malibu from Beverly Hills...
...I need to go back tomorrow and be helpful to Paul...
...I realized the dogs had not been fed, so I got over to the main house and fed them their usual meaty diet...
...Then I went home and watched a documentary that some kindly soul has already made about I.D...
...Are you sure...
...I'm sure," she said...
...This kind of thing happens to me every so often (not very often...
...With dirty dishes and cigarette butts lying around...
...Here is what my little brain considered: Did Darwin really base The Origin of Species on a very short trip to the Galapagos Islands when he was a young man...
...I cannot help but be suspicious of one side of an argument that won't allow the other side to talk...
...My doctor of some 26 years, my bosom buddy, my confessor, myheart's companion, savior of much of my life in a temporal way, Paul, had just lost his wife to cancer...
...Why didn't you call me...
...Can't man just kill other men or enslave them or rape them if he feels like it...
...And, as my ID friends ask, how did life originate...
...Utterly lost...
...He looked smaller than his usual majestic height, thinner, deeply sad...
...After all, he's just a lump of clay, isn't he...
...Both are about lack of morality, about groups dominating each other just by strength and cunning, nothing about cooperation or kindness...
...She started to rattle off a list of checks that had come in, all for things like MasterCard and Visa and property tax, and I started to get worried...
...How brilliantly worth the cost...
...I finally found Paul's house and saw him on the street walking his immense white standard poodle...
...The guest bedroom had been slept in...
...Can't you show some respect even for your own property...
...You are never to come out here again unless I am with you," I said...
...He looks a lot like Abe Lincoln...
...Susie, the Dalmatian-Whippet, shivered...
...I also called and yelled at Alex...
...In this nightmare, Maral, the manager of my real life bank (a unique bank with only one location), called to tell me I was $200,000 overdrawn...
...The lights were on inside...
...We assembled and said Kaddish...
...I say it every night for my parents, Colonel and Mrs...
...Eight dollars," she said cheerfully...
...There were cigarette butts in a dish out on the continued on poge 56 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 BEN STEIN'S DIARY deck...
...Then up to Santa Monica Boulevard...
...It's a total pigsty...
...Traffic is a major happiness-ending phenomenon...
...Never" "Then I'll never come," he said...
...Tommy was still asleep...
...How we humans suffer when we form attachments...
...He looked as if he were literally in pain and he probably was...
...And of course, both say that there are superior and inferior species...
...Both are soulless...
...He was really depressed...
...It was still a magnificent day and the ocean went on forever...
...Has there been further extensive research confirming the hypothesis...
...My bed had been slept in...
...Then I woke up...
...And who made the rocks and swamps...
...You only have fourteen dollars in your savings account," she said...
...She was playing with the owner...
...There were dirty dishes out...
...That's the Jewish prayer for the dead...
...I stopped at my favorite little gas station in Brentwood and got out to pump some gasoline into my battered Cadillac...
...You don't have to yell at me...
...Are you sure...
...Still, I went home feeling utterly insane...
...Betrayed by my son, in despair, sick, fearful, in dread, lost, my temporal prophet himself torn to shreds...
...Why did the Western world leap to accept Darwinism on such modest evidence...
...I asked...
...Imagine Lincoln trying to look cheerful after his son has died and after the Battle of Fredericksburg and you get the idea of how he looked...
...I demanded...
...I picked her up and held her in front of my nose, my "huge Shylock nose," as my helpful son calls it...
...Instead I spent it cleaning the house...
...Into my addled brain came the most confusing directions I have ever gotten in my life...
...I guess I was wrong to trust him when he said he would clean it up," she said...
...How similar is Marxism to Darwinism...
...I asked in my dream...
...Some day it will be yours...
...Denman, and everyone who has died for America, so I know it largely by heart...
...It made me even more insane...
...Forty-five minutes to go half a mile...
...Someone dangerous had been in my beach house...
...I was bound for his home to say Kaddish with him and his family...
...She had another two hours to go...
...They don't really allow debate-all the while saying it's the religious right who are trying to stifle science...
...to dominate all other species, then man has no spark of the divine...
...The lights were on in front...
...Maybe Darwin had great insights about how life evolved, and I suppose he did...
...The Pacific shimmered gloriously...
...I get it...
...Why did his system of competing groups leading to a dominant group come out at about the same time as The Communist Manifesto, also about competing groups leading to a dominant group...
...These seemed to me like adequate questions...
...To me, the road to Hitlerism and to Auschwitz leads straight from the Galapagos...
...This dog today, Morgan, had the same wonderful feel of wiggly love and vulnerability...
...Why didn't you send him to Paris...
...But Paul took it slowly and agonizingly...
...I am almost certainly going to host a documentary on this subject and it interests me a lot...
...She's rapidly getting senile...
...then isn't man not at all responsible for his actions...
...Then, confusion...
...I went over and asked if I could play with her...
...I asked him...
...I met his in-laws, a prosperous, intensely devoted group...
...I had planned to spend the next two hours lying in bed with the dogs, sleeping...
...took place at Pajaro Dunes, near my old stomping grounds of Santa Cruz...
...How did the rocks and swamps become living creatures...
...Someone dangerous had been in my beach house...
...I thought I cleaned it up," he said angrily...
...Another half an hour to go two miles...
...For now, let us pray for those who have lost the ones they love, and let us be grateful for what we have right now...
...The west side of L.A...
...THURSDAY A FASCINATING DAY SPENT WITH TWO MEN who are /L_~ working on a project about the dispute between .~L ~lk Intelligent Design and Darwinism, especially neo-Darwinism...
...He has seen me through so much insanity, and now, here he is, broken on the rack of human affection and loss...
...Well, transfer it from my savings," said I, warily...
...She licked me and kissed me and I felt her gray furry magnificence...
...Did you spend the night in my house in Malibu...
...It took 40 minutes on a campus I used to know like the back of my hand to finally find Phil nattilydressed as always, lecturing about the problems of investing to a group of young people...
...It was a beautiful day...
...My dear pal and marching comrade, Phil DeMuth, was giving a speech on investing at the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine in Malibu...
...All right," he said...
...I don't understand why the Darwinists won't let the issue be discussed...
...Paul took me on a tour of his home...
...Alex was still asleep...
...It's all a lot like Nazism, where once the state has an idea, it can't be discussed any further...
...He was trying to be cheerful...
...Both endorse violence as a means to power without regard to morality...
...What was it about the mid-19th century that was so conducive to thesis and antithesis, to the dialectic, as a means of explaining change...
...There is something very questionable going on here...
...How we pay for it...
...The he at was on inside...
...The way he looked at his wife's artwork was like the cut of a knife...
...And yet how worth the cost...
...I zoomed up to my house in Malibu, pulled into the ancient, rutted driveway, and then, disaster...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY Dreams and Nightmares by Benjamin J. Stein WEDNESDAY ~ HAT AN AWFUL DAY...
...So, it could have come from life...
...I asked...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
