BEN STEIN'S DIARY: Better Than We Deserve
Stein, Benjamin J.
EREIAMINMINNEAPOLIS,MINNESOTA,and a surprise is waiting for me at the door of my hotel room. Why, lookee here. It’s an article on the front page of the New York Times attacking me. Why?...
...Second, because I denied that I ever misled anyone...
...The first one was from a small town in Minnesota...
...But anyway, now I can say I was attacked in the New York Times...
...I spent the afternoon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, at the ward for amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...One of them was extremely tall...
...No one I interviewed ever asked me what the movie was about...
...The article sneeringly describes me as a freelance writer but I’ve been writing that column every other week for years now...
...Witty...
...But far worse has happened to people far better than I, so it’s a passing thing...
...He and I talked for a long time about Blair, old and new times, and then I went on to visit a young man from a small town in Kentucky...
...In fact, it’s about how a few of the many, many scientists interviewed for the movie say they were told it had a different title (Crossroads) and was about science and religion...
...He plans to run a ten-mile marathon soon...
...But I have a deep feeling of reverence for the men and women in the amputee unit at Walter Reed, and for their families and for the men and women who serve them, and for all of those who serve us...
...The rooms are small but well furnished with a TV, sometimes a very large TV, and chairs and places for family and friends to visit...
...They writhed like insects or worms,” said the witnesses...
...Tell him I don’t like Hitler either,” she said...
...I didn’t schedule the interviews...
...What did we do to deserve them...
...Did you know that most of the men there are there because the scumbag Iranians have supplied some fiendish thing called an EFP, explosively formed projectile, to the terrorists in Iraq...
...It is spotlessly clean, immaculate, far, far cleaner and brighter and more pleasant than any civilian hospital I have ever seen...
...There is no doubt at all in my mind that Walter Reed and the Army are taking incredible care of these guys...
...It is stupendously advanced, with every kind of rehabilitative device imaginable...
...I asked him if his friends from his small town e-mailed him and called him...
...So far as I can tell, the movie is about science and religion, but never mind...
...It’s very much like Communism, in which “science” showed how the workers would kill everyone else, and that was just impartial science...
...Nelson McCouch, my Army guide, we saw three wounded men getting off loaded from two immense buses fitted up as ambulances for severely wounded soldiers...
...Somehow the fact that these scientists claim the title of a small documentary was switched gets on page one of the greatest newspaper on earth...
...I visited many...
...Now it has black men—probably black women, too—who graduate and go on to serve their country magnificently...
...The movie is also about howscholars who have even slightly questioned whether there might be areas Darwin never touched have been fired, harassed, denied tenure...
...The doctors and nurses are pleasant and omnipresent...
...I have a terrible feeling about it...
...Then there was another man from Minnesota, also very handsome, quite cheerful, but also definitely not as happy about the war as some of the others...
...An amazingly handsome, cheerful fellow missing one leg...
...But that is ostensibly not what the article is about...
...I wonder what Darwin would have thought of the photo...
...We with our endless bitching and moaning and getting and spending...
...Often laugh out loud funny...
...Scott, Manohla Dargis, Virginia Heffernan, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko something or other, Stephen Holden...
...There is a photo on page one of a Nazi SS man shooting a poor innocent Jewish man as he sits on the edge of a pit...
...But I do love the Times...
...It’s an article on the front page of the New York Times attacking me...
...Sometimes the pits would rise and fall with their breathing and moaning for three days...
...TUESDAY AREALLY ASTONISHING DAY...
...a few days after that...
...They with their endless sacrifice...
...One point five MILLION...
...She probably didn’t know what to think...
...The stories are heart-rending beyond words...
...He was being visited by a beautiful young woman who was his girlfriend...
...I don’t know what the answer is about Iraq...
...I used to write reviews my own bad self for the Wall Street Journal, and I hardly had any work to do at all...
...There is a French priest going around the Ukraine gathering material about the shootings from the aging survivors...
...The one who made me sob was a tall career Army man with only one leg below the knee who said he wanted to get well and get his prosthetic leg attached and train in it, “… so I can go back to Iraq with my buddies and finish the job...
...I visited a young man missing both legs below the hip and with a huge head wound and gaping wounds in his chest...
...Anyway, it really upset me that the article attacked me solely, as far as I can tell, because I believe in God...
...No coincidence, it seems to me...
...So why am I in that article...
...Quite a difference...
...I wonder what that woman thought she was doing by telling me her mother’s horrifying comment...
...Anyway, that story about the Nazis killing the Ukrainian Jews is deeply upsetting...
...I guess he would have been horrified but thought it was nature’s way of working things out so that the strongest would survive...
...Some Jewish girls were made into sex slaves, then killed...
...Well, that’s just it...
...Now, of course, this upsets people who believe that Darwin is God, a sort of god for the godless...
...Then to Landstuhl in Germany in a few more hours, and then to Walter Reed in D.C...
...Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu...
...Darwinism was really about how the Englishman and the German and the Nordics came to dominate the world, according to a legitimate scientific progression...
...That’s not science and I guess it’s really dangerous to the people who worship Darwin...
...The notion that they are getting short changed is just nonsense...
...I saw the new rehabilitation center...
...These are astounding talents...
...But then why am I in the article...
...One of 14 children...
...I don’t think that makes me a freelancer...
...It’s amazing, just incredible, mind-boggling, how much they cram into each issue...
...He didn’t finish the job...
...Kirby Freedom Center 110 Elden Street Herndon, Va 20170 800-USA-1776 Reagan Ranch Center 217 State Street Santa Barbara, Ca 93101 888-USA-1776 www.yaf.org B E N S T E I N ’ S D I A R Y 7 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 That was long, long, long ago...
...I still really cannot go a day without reading the Times...
...An astounding array of facts and brilliant writing about politics, economics, science, TV, movies, music, literature...
...And boy, do they deserve it...
...The brilliant social scientist, Frank Knight, wrote an essay about how dangerous it is to analogize social science to natural science...
...So there’s a photo of me in a silly outfit with the caption, “Ben Stein denies he misled anyone...
...Did you know the Army can get severely wounded men from the ambush site to the hospital in the Green Zone in 30 minutes...
...Lee Bollinger, you lower than vermin president of my alma mater, Columbia, who invited that demon Ahmadinejad to speak, are you listening...
...I feel a little like Billy Budd at this point...
...He was a black man and I felt extremely happy that my high school continues to turn out heroes just as it did when my class turned out a certain Lieutenant Norris, super Medal of Honor awardee in the Vietnam War...
...My friends are in the Army...
...The movie is on the subject of Darwinism, its social consequences (i.e., racism and the Holocaust), the gaps in Darwin’s brilliant view of the history of species, such as how the world and life and physical laws and lawsof motion and gravity and thermodynamics began, and what other explanations there might be...
...SATURDAY HERE I AM IN MY APARTMENT in the Watergate and, speaking of the New York Times, today’s paper has a page one story about the shooting of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis...
...The piece is about a documentary I am hosting called Expelled...
...We should kick the s--t out of them or get out...
...This, according to the reporter, is a view commonly held by Creationists...
...It’s not even close...
...I keep remembering something that Joan Didion wrote decades ago: “The writer is always selling you out...
...What did we ever do to deserve these super men and super women...
...They e-mail me and call me all day long from Iraq...
...Really sobering but also deeply uplifting and thoroughly inspiring...
...On my way out to the car of Col...
...Mr...
...It can penetrate any armor we have and simply slice off limbs like a hot knife through butter...
...I used to have a girlfriend with a fiercely anti-Semitic mother...
...My theory is that anything even saying that Darwin’s work is unfinished—not even saying he’s wrong—disturbs the PC establishment so much they freak out...
...He looks a lot like me...
...They are a lot better than we deserve...
...The men are amazingly young...
...It was not easy maintaining a relationship with that girl...
...Names like A.O...
...The mother gave her daughter a message to give to me...
...I visited a young man who was with his lovely wife—an Army woman who was about to deploy—and their seven-month-old baby girl...
...Young America’s Foundation congratulates The American Spectator on 40 years of advancing freedom...
...Darwinism flourished in the Age of Imperialism...
...Let’s astonish Darwin and kill 20,000 Jews a day,” said some Nazi official at the Wannsee conference where the Final Solution was worked out...
...T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 40th ANNIVERSARY F.M...
...I didn’t really have many friends back in Kentucky,” he said...
...There was a young man from my high school, Montgomery Blair, in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...I know the editorial writers hate Bush, but some of them are excellent writers, especially Frank Rich...
...EREIAMINMINNEAPOLIS,MINNESOTA,and a surprise is waiting for me at the door of my hotel room...
...Now, for the last many decades, my wife has been an Army brat whose father fought the Nazis...
...To think that my old high school was once segregated against blacks...
...Love thy neighbor as thyself...
...None of them ever complained to me...
...He had a prosthetic leg...
...They were pleasant...
...It is scary to think that there are people out there who want to kill me just because I am a Jew...
...Nowhere comes the great part: NO ONE IN THE ARTICLE ACCUSES ME OF MISLEADING HIM OR HER...
...I can’t figure out why...
...They were actually smiling and clutching stuffed things...
...Well, God bless her...
...So now I am a Creationist, you see, a knuckle-dragging Creationist like the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind...
...The killers only allotted one bullet per totally innocent victim so wounded men, women, and children were shoved into holes, then set afire with gasoline...
...The caption—of course—implies that I did mislead someone but that I deny it...
...His father was there (busy guy...
...I can tell you I don’t like it a lot...
...Two Marines were there (rare, because they usually go to Bethesda Naval Medical Center...
...Some of the men I met had been wounded only a week before and were already in rehabilitation...
...B E N J A M I N J . S T E I N DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 5 Darwinism was really about how the Englishman and the German and the Nordics came to dominate the world, according to a legitimate scientific progression...
...Anyway, it’s a fascinating thing to be attacked in a newspaper that I write a column for...
...These guys and gals see a ton of movies and TV shows, read reams of books, and come up with entertaining, insightful reviews, sometimes several a day...
...So far as I know, all of the people interviewed were paid and paid well...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 B E N S T E I N ’ S D I A R Y Better Than We Deserve by Benjamin J. Stein T H U R S D A Y H The reviewers in particular impress me...
...First, because I told the reporter that I thought Darwinism sometimes led to racism and to the Holocaust as evil people believed they would just help along “survival of the fittest...
...Stein, do you now or have you ever believed in a God of Creation...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
