Ben Stein’s Final Column

For many years Ben Stein has written a bi-weekly 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. Ben is now terminating the column to move on to other things in life.  Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time. It reveals what is really important in life. RB

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 “e-online FINAL,” 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.