Ben Stein's Last Column...
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the
³eonline² website called "Monday Night At Morton's". Now, Ben is
terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading
his final column to our military is worth a few minutes of your time
because it praises the most unselfish among us; our military personnel.
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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. Ben Stein * Page 2

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 firmamentŠ.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. We are not responsible for the
operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly
important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives
to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for
ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as
the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
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 MartinŠ.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.
By Ben Stein


"The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta.
Each political party is a huge pinata -- a papier-mache donkey, for example.
The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing,
comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budge and other goodies.
The American voter is blindfoled and given a stick. The voter then swings
the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate
on the head and knock some sense into the silly *******." - P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
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