December 19, 2005

Ben Stein's Heroes

Sorry I didn't post at all over the weekend...with it being the last weekend before Christmas (and I hadn't done any shopping or decorating) I spent the entire weekend catching up.

OK, on to more important things.

Today, someone sent me Ben Stein's final column for E! Online. Let's hope he continues to write elsewhere. In the meantime, we can enjoy what he writes here, because it's great. Apparently, Mr. Stein is no longer impressed by the Hollywood stars he has come to know over the years (and, in my opinion, with good reason):

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.