TUESDAY
Vegas, baby. My wife and I are here to speak to the Western
Petroleum Marketers Association. These are people who own chains of
gas stations and convenience stores all over the western USA. Also
present are the men and women who supply fuel pumps, signs, food,
immense, glittering gasoline transport trucks—works of art, really.
The event is at the Mirage, a wonderful hotel. Last night, I
wandered around the exhibit hall for quite some time and found
myself in front of a display of Noble Roman’s Pizza. I took two
pieces. Rarely if ever have I tasted anything so good.
“Hunger is the best sauce,” as the Latin saying goes, and I was
starving. Still, that was amazingly good pizza. I had just flown
in, along with my bride of some 44 years, and the last food I had
was yummy pistachios that morning after speaking to the pistachio
growers in San Diego. Wifey and I had stayed at the Manchester
Hyatt in San Diego right on the harbor, facing an immense aircraft
carrier and many pleasure craft. That was some astonishing
view.
Anyway, this morning, the day after the pistachio growers and
the aircraft carrier, I had to awaken at 6 a.m., very early for me,
make many notes on my speech, then go down to the breakfast with
the directors of the Western Petroleum Marketers Association. Their
wives were in the room as well. I went up to each person in the
room, introduced myself, asked where they were from and how
business was, and enjoyed it all thoroughly.
I am a born meeter and greeter. I think I have told you how
George Corley Wallace, as a four year old, would meet visitors to
his childhood hometown, Clio, Alabama, at the train station. If I
have this right, he would come up to them and say, “I’m George
Wallace, Junior, and if I can do anything for you while you’re here
in Clio, just let me know.” I could easily imagine doing that right
now. My son is also amazingly good at that kind of interaction. He
learned it from me and at Cardigan Mountain School (one of the
finest institutions of learning on this earth)—how to greet men and
women politely—and it stayed with him.
I, your humble servant, spoke to about 400 people and had a
great time with them. Really, the ordinary citizen, especially the
ordinary small town citizen and businessman in this country, is
just the salt of the earth. They are outgoing, cheerful, and
warm.
The gas station and convenience store businesses are apparently
doing not just well in the western U.S. but very well indeed. There
are a lot of small businesses in this country that are flourishing.
These people have three generations working in the business at
once, just as the pistachio farmers do. It’s a great business. Why
get out of it?
I wish I had a family business to pass on to my son, but in a
way I do. He could help me with research on my books. Maybe I will
try to get him to do that. (“Good luck, Pop.”)
Anyway, after the speech, I was breathtakingly tired, so I went
back to my room and slept. I made a mistake about the time of the
flight and got up way earlier than I needed to. Like a dope, I made
my wife pack and we had a long time to vamp before the airplane
boarded. I felt extremely tired and I felt very, very stupid.
We sat in some comfy chairs at the United Club at McCarran
though and soon I was asleep. Listening to “Idiot Wind,” Bob
Dylan’s masterful rant about the horrors of gossip and malice.
It’s extremely apropos for my life right now because just a few
days ago, someone was telling me what a bad person I am and how I
wasn’t the kind of “choir boy” Republican that I told people I
was.
That actually made me laugh. As I have told my beloved
Spectator readers over and over again, I make no claim at
all to being a good person. A wildly generous person—yes. To the
point of suicide. But a good, non-sinful person? Not in the
slightest little bit. I am a 24-karat, wretched sinner. I have
committed so many sinful acts it is impossible to even keep count
for a few days. There is almost no sin I have not committed. But I
do claim this little bit of light: I have confessed my sins and
asked God for His blessings and forgiveness. And I do believe He
will forgive me if I confess and acknowledge Him.
But as to my claiming to be a particularly good person? Never.
Not in a million years.
The flight home was uneventful. I slept like a baby.
THURSDAY
I think I told you that I recently bought The World at
War, the superb documentary about World War II narrated by
Laurence Olivier, the man with the best voice on this planet—now
gone, of course. (He also was married to Vivien Leigh, probably as
good an actor as there has ever been. What a marriage that must
have been. Two mad people together, both exploding with talent and
ambition.)
Tonight I watched an hour of the documentary about Genocide. It
started out with the origins of racist thought and then the origins
of the SS, Hitler’s killing machine for Jews and many others.
Olivier made it clear that the basis of “thought” for the notion of
killing whole populations of those deemed to be below Aryan status
was a “neo-Darwinist” concept—i.e., that nature will eventually
eliminate a competing, weaker species, so why not give nature a
hand? That was Darwin’s precise idea and, as Himmler understood it,
along with his boss, Hitler, the people who were parasites on the
Herrenvolk were mostly the Jews. So, they had to be killed.
It’s fascinating to me that The World at War says that
the Genocide was a neo-Darwinist idea. Now that the neo-Darwinists
have a stranglehold on all intellectual activity in the Western
world, that kind of statement would be strictly verboten.
The scenes of the murders, the starvation, the tortures of the
Jews were just unbearably awful. Be-yond imagining. But, of course,
they happened. Some of it—a lot of it—was happening in my
lifetime.
The narration by survivors of what went on in the ghettoes and
at the crematoria and—God help us—in the gas chambers themselves
are simply beyond endurance.
If you want to see what happens when man says that man is God
and that science will tell man how to deal with his fellow man, you
cannot do better than to watch this documentary. The World at
War—available from Amazon.
TUESDAY
I am back in Rancho Mirage. I have had a terrible cold and
bronchitis now for a few days and I am limping through the day, day
by day.
But, I am just reeling from what I have seen on The World at
War. I know I am like a broken record about this, but how can
we ever even start to thank the men who fought at Bastogne and
Monte Cas-sino and Remagen and Zeitlen (where my father-in-law did
the heroic acts that earned him the Silver Star)? How can we ever
repay the men who died on the Bataan Death March or in Japanese
prison camps or on Iwo Jima or the Battles of Vella Lavella or the
flyers who flew over Berlin or over the hump in Burma? How can we
repay the wives and widows and children?
How can we ever thank them enough?
With every breath we take, there should be prayers on our lips
and in our hearts for the men and women who wear the uniform.
Meanwhile, what the heck is happening in Afghanistan? That’s
turning out to be a true disaster. Yes, it’s time to get out, but
how do we get out? Afghanistan is landlocked. Pakistan is on one
side and Iran on the other. The only way out is through the north
and I am not sure how much they like us. What a time to be even
thinking of cutting the military budget. Are the people at the
White House insane? No, I am sure not. They are just trying to do
their best as they see it, but they are still way off the beam.
This is a dangerous world. It is not time to cut the military
budget.
Again, back to that woman who was telling me what a horrible
person I am (she gets paid for doing that, by the way)…In the room
with me was a “mediator” who was a human miracle. His parents were
Holocaust survivors. His mother, as a Jewish child in Poland, had
to hide in a closet for five years. His father hid in a forest.
Now, he travels the world skiing and doing Ecuadorean river
kayaking while not mediating. All thanks to America and to his hero
parents and to the heroes who beat the Nazis. Human beings are
amazing creatures—capable of the best and the worst. This country
mostly has the ones who are capable of the best. Let us thank God.
Every breath we take of American air is a miracle.
Speaking of which, here is a perfect Ben Stein hour. I lay down
by my fireplace, under my electric blanket, with my heating pad on
my stomach. I put Mozart’s Requiem and Laudate Dominum on my CD
player. I listened. I smelled the cut grass outside. I heard
faintly the sounds of jets flying into Palm Springs International
Airport. I slept. I got up and put on the radio. KDGL-FM, “The
Eagle” out here in the desert, was playing, “You Can’t Always Get
What You Want,” and I thought of Yale in 1970—”bliss it was in that
day to be alive but to be young was very heaven”—and I was
happy.
