thought someone might like this

[Orion]

i did. its ben steins last article. enjoy.

 

 

"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

"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 [famous restaurant which was often frequented

by Hollywood stars], 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. 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, 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."

[Devils Advocate]

Made my skin crawl. graemlins/thumb.gif

[Ziggy1647545504]

Wow. Good article.

[Guest FBody Addict]

how true

[Guest domestic_disturbance]

Originally posted by CR Caddy:

Wow. Good article.

x2

[suffocateXfaster1647545505]

Originally posted by Republicant:

Made my skin crawl. graemlins/thumb.gif

+1 Very well written as well.