Ben Stein's
Last Column...
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called
"Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of
Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people
from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move
on to other things in his life.
Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein's Last Column...
============================================
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's
World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which
means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This
heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I
have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall
when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I
came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a
person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale,
Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars
as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and
definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago,
and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a
splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed
that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not
the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think
Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant,
friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be
treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing
lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of
a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in
insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we
mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in
Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw
fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me
any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division
who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could
have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he
faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the
decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next
to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off
and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the
U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece
of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a
station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it
exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl
alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have
lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul
even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies
battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from
terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of
our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on
military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships
and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they
live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such
poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by
pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the
policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have
no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who
bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them
for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits
into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work
in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the
World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my
idea of a real hero.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one
that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put
it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an
actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull
or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or
as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of
them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and,
above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.
This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with
my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents
(with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in
their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went
into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with
my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the
soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize
that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that
it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon
me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and
best use as a human.
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein
