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.
>>By Ben Stein
>>
>>
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