GreyStorm
Posts: 423
Joined: 1/26/2005
From: Cheeseheadland
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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
_____________________________
Ahhh temptation, I have named thee and thy name is woman.
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