[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 21311-21312]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             THE REAL STARS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the 
horrific attack on our country on September 11, 2001, and we need to 
remember that there are still people in the world who want to destroy 
us and all that we stand for. It is up to us at the national level to 
provide for our national security, and we need to focus on that.
  Today someone sent me a column by Ben Stein that I had not seen but 
was written in 2003. In this column, he does a great job of putting us 
and trivial things into perspective, and I thought that today would be 
a good day to share this column entitled ``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, although 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 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 guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and 
in submarines 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.''

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