BEN STEIN'S DIARY: Slovenly in America
Stein, Benjamin J.
b e n s T e I n ’ s d I a R y Slovenly in America by Benjamin J. stein Hsunday ere i am at a Great GroCery store near my house in Malibu. We’re in mid-January and it’s amazingly cold as...
...The people back there are just like galley doing so...
...The mother could not tell her who her father was...
...Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around...
...I am for a back all the way...
...What happened in the late sixties...
...However, I am back in my apartment at the Watergate now, and I’m feeling my parents all around me, and I am happy...
...I am in first class and it’s a sardine imprudently as they did...
...Their hair is short...
...She works hard as a driver but she really feels as if, had she been more sensible and had she gotten more education, she could have been someone successful...
...Although, I happen to like Clear Eyes eyewash...
...least supposed to stop manipulation and trickery in Super ultra, beyond imagining packed...
...That is, men and women take videos of themselves having sex and then post them on the web for the whole world to see...
...They are not paid for it...
...Sometimes I look at photos of men and women and kids in the 1950s and early sixties and people look great...
...Not nice at all...
...Tax cuts are fun, and I like them, but they do not pay for themselves...
...In particular, I find a certain phenomenon so amazing I can scarcely believe it...
...There’s a Roy Rogers restaurant there that has the best-tasting biscuits on this planet...
...She has not seen the eldest of her kids for five years...
...slaves, deprived of enough space to have even mini- I am not at all sure the Constitution calls for a mal personality...
...The men are wearing ties...
...The end of pride in oneself...
...Airline deregulation was and is a form of pornography...
...It’s as if there was a blowup of moral senses...
...Just to me, it sure doesn’t look as if it is belief...
...I don’t like the truth that a group of tough guys with hundreds of billions can move markets and bully the rest of us...
...She was an intelligent woman and extremely well spoken...
...The end of guilt about murder of the unborn...
...But I keep thinking there’s a prob6 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8...
...But the GOP said the same thing about taxes and deficits...
...Does everyone now think the way to stardom is by showing themselves having sex on the ’Net...
...They look like mutants after a nuclear war...
...But the govputs it back again...
...It’s the house of the president of her country, too...
...The end of guilt about drugs...
...Human beings started looking as if there had been a cataclysm and they have just emerged from caves...
...Again, as with airplane travel, it has to do man sitting in front of me who has rudely put his seat with deregulation...
...I see on my computer that world stock markets have “plunged” and the U.S...
...Maybe people only look deranged at that one grocery store in Malibu...
...They look unkempt, slovenly, crazy...
...But also a level of exhibitionism that is simply beyond what could have been conceived of only a few years ago...
...Right behind me is ernment is supposed to at least stop fraud...
...markets are expected to “plunge” tomorrow...
...This was not just true of Democrats...
...I read in a business magazine called Portfolio that the whole porn industry here in glorious Los Angeles has been destroyed by amateur porn on the web...
...Scary and upsetting...
...I spoke to a knot of kids from Archbishop Carroll...
...She told me she had never seen the White House, so I had her drive me down 16th Street, where she could see the White House lit up at night...
...This woman, the driver, had gotten pregnant at 14 (yes, 14...
...The driver told me her life story...
...They do it for the “fun” of it...
...Her mother had “been with” a number of men around the time she was conceived...
...One beautiful young woman named Katie O’Brian (you can’t beat that) asked me about Ron Paul...
...Just heavenly, salty with a hint of butter baked in...
...Or is it just a super deep need for attention...
...ben stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu...
...This is not just in Malibu but all over...
...It’s at coach and it is packed beyond sardine can packed...
...The end of guilt about sex...
...At the airport in Philadelphia, there are homeless men sitting all around the baggage claim area...
...This is not a science fiction hypothesis...
...It’s not a good situation...
...So, seven babies in all...
...This marks so staggering a decline in civilization it really ranks with Communism in its denigration of the human personality...
...Does stardom mean so much that Americans will post movies of themselves having sex worldwide...
...Well, I didn’t know what to do...
...The people on that US Air flight looked pretty darned deranged, too...
...Tens of thousands of people send in videos of themselves doing the most intimate acts and then post them so Internet viewers all over the planet can see them...
...Then, back into my car and on the way to D.C...
...We in the middle have to absorb them both...
...Their executives were neatly dressed, friendly, respectable-looking, a happy throwback to more decent times...
...b e n s T e I n ’ s d I a R y Slovenly in America by Benjamin J. stein Hsunday ere i am at a Great GroCery store near my house in Malibu...
...What can it possibly mean...
...Republicans hatched strange ideas about taxes and about no longer needing to have fiscal discipline...
...I don’t like the truth that a group of tough guys with hundreds of billions can move markets and bully the government of, by, and for the tough guy traders with their piles of money...
...Did it start with Paris Hilton becoming a star because she circulated a tape of herself having sex on the web...
...Global warming has frozen us here in Southern California...
...She was excited to see it...
...from downtown Philadelphia...
...Instead, a sort of beaten down, beaten up look that symbolized some loss of selfesteem not in that silly sense it’s used in modern junior high school but in a deeper way, a way that means something...
...I gave her a large tip and went off to be on Larry Kudlow to talk about the stock market...
...And all over Europe...
...Their clothes are neat...
...That’s just eyewash...
...Some deep connection with all of past history was apparently severed—at least for many people in California...
...Maybe this is what Jefferson had in mind...
...That’s good...
...The Democrats and hippies said, about sex and drugs, if it feels good, do it...
...I am rest of u t l s. h e e wa n y, how did a it get so that bank e s cou n ld get can...
...There was a busload of students from Archbishop Carroll High School in Philadelphia just returning from the national Right to Life March in D.C...
...M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 6 3 b e n s T e I n ’ s d I a R y lem here...
...They looked wholesome and enthusiastic...
...I felt terrible for her...
...We stopped at a large roadside refreshment center called “Maryland House” just east of Baltimore on Interstate 95...
...Just beyond the markets...
...But how did we ever get into a situation where the hedge funds and the traders had so much power over the government and over the central bank...
...They were sweet, friendly kids...
...By my sad luck on this flight I have a at all...
...The flight was endless, with horrible food and two drunk, loud men sitting across from me...
...In essence, it’s every man and every woman a porn star...
...What is it...
...You cannot imagine how closely the seats are business of packaging and securitizing mortgages packed in here...
...Again, not nice...
...A small group with billions to play with to move markets, and then my driver and the chaos of her life...
...They sell retirement and insurance products...
...Something big happened in the world after the 1950s...
...I spoke to a lovely group of men and women from a firm that is honest and decent, Lincoln Monday Adelphia...
...Very scary and awful...
...Then I got into my car and my driver, a black woman, headed off to D.C...
...They look like Morlocks...
...The savings of a lifetime wiped out by some evil speculators who move around immense pools of money to depress the markets and ruin the hopes and dreams of us small investors...
...The man who knocked her up later married her under some duress but beat her and drank and was generally awful...
...The really interesting thing is that the people here look as if they’re homeless...
...The odd thing is that this is how people look all over America now...
...Although more so in Los Angeles and in California generally, to be sure...
...It never made any sense and it still doesn’t make any sense...
...It’s unbearable...
...No, I’m not wrong...
...The sixties were really big, big stuff sociologically...
...No shame, that’s for sure...
...How did they get into the s a g i d n l y b y d r a p o e j l t r o m o t i s v on a US Air flight from LAX to PHL (Phila- themse y B nd here’s another stunninG deCline...
...Financial...
...Something very, very big happened in the 1960s...
...Tuesday Wthe market didn’t fall as much as peop S y s e t a t r t n i t a p e l ll t , e m a r n . d b cu er nan e ke e s st r epped . B up a t l o o t. th l o e e were fearing...
...She was a charming woman, but, alas, she did not know the way to downtown D.C...
...The women are wearing stockings and dresses and look like responsible citizens, not like homeless prostitutes...
...This is really happening...
...She had two more babies with him, then two more with someone else, then she met and fell in love with an Irishman...
...The selection of food is fine and the prices are astronomical, but that’s modern life...
...6 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 b e n j a M I n j . s T e I n Now, we’re paying for falling off the cause and effect continuum, and not just in budget deficits, but in moral and psychological deficits...
...My hotel is the downtown Marriott and it’s all right, but I am by now in panic mode...
...Maybe I am wrong...
...They have matted hair, wildly askew, not always clean clothes, not clean, even teeth...
...This meant I could not sleep as I had planned but had to stay alert to direct her...
...I can’t fix these problems and unlike the people running for president, I am not even going to pretend I can...
...Maybe I’m wrong...
...This was not always so...
...We’re in mid-January and it’s amazingly cold as it has been all winter here...
...I keep pushing it up and then he slyly small government as much as anyone...
...They got married and she had two more babies...
...I am getting to be less and less of a fan of speculation...
...You think I’m kidding, but I am not...
...That’s reassuring...
Vol. 41 • March 2008 • No. 2
