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 areanonymous 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. 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 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.
By Ben Stein
Faith is not believing that God can.
It is knowing that God will.
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Made with love August 3, 2004
