This is not the entire article, the rest is posted here.

Ben Stein’s Last Column…
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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.

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.

Continued Here

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein

Wow where did the summer go. I will chalk up the summer of 2004 as a series of Highs and Lows. Luckily I am well on my way to full recovery it’s nice to be able to tie my own shoes again and the bad days are fewer than the good days. My doctor is pretty typical of most medical doctors these days in military medcine your just a number.

I am on the road again doing what I do best. My wife and I and the help of a bunch of good friends got us moved and we are settled into our new home and life is good. No complaints I’m walking and that is something to be very thankful for considering what happened.

I am not real happy tonight. I have paid a web designer in good faith to develop a template for this site and things were on track with him coming up with a design that I signed off on and since then I keep getting a, “will work on your site as soon as I can message”.

I just don’t get it, I wanted the new skin on the site by the beginning of the DNC but it did not happen, and my e-mail messages have went unanswered this week. I am sure he will get it done eventually but I am not at all happy.

That’s a damn scary thought not sure why I used New York in my title, I guess it’s the farthest city away from Honolulu. It very well could be Detroit, Los Angeles, Dallas gulp Honolulu or any other number of big cities. The death toll and destruction not to mention the probable start of World War III would be upon us.

The nightmare would not only be ours it would also be the nightmare of a handful of countries leaders that could start counting the days before we come to get them. Leaders in countries that support terrorism have to be scared to death of the possibility of one of their groups or even UBL doing such a deed as I could ponder that a few countries will be under new ownership before it’s over, and the American public is not going to be so upset over human rights violations.

God forbid something this terrible happening. My parents lived the Cuban Missile Crises when they where first married. I grew up understanding the meaning of the cold war and had my life very much affected by the events of 9-11. I keep things in sharp perspective but lets face it someone is going to let the Jeanie out of the bottle at some point just to prove they can. Let’s just hope that our defenses are good enough to stop them before they can deliver the payload.