Websites

Ben Stein's last column

| 6 Comments

The actor, writer, economist and Republican activist wrote "Monday Night at Morton's" for E! Online for seven or eight years. He cites his changed worldview -- and a new reverence for God -- for dropping the column.

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....A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq...

[fast forward]

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.

[fast forward]

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.

The final column is undated, so I don't know how long it has been up. [Reader Roy found the date: Dec. 20. Thanks...]


More by Kevin Roderick:
Standing up to Harvey Weinstein
The Media
LA Times gets a top editor with nothing but questions
LA Observed Notes: Harvey Weinstein stripped bare
LA Observed Notes: Photos of the homeless, photos that found homes
Recent Websites stories on LA Observed:
Arianna Huffington is done with HuffPo
NYT's Michael Cieply named editor of Deadline
Mitra Kalita leaving LA Times for CNN
Memorial Day media notes: Moves, paywalls, Trump and more
LA School Report merges with Campbell Brown group, gets new editor
Serious kudos for the LA Review of Books
Grantland site killed by ESPN
BuzzFeed newsroom: 58% women and 68% white
Previous story: The power of TV

Next story: 10,000 apologists?


 

LA Observed on Twitter