Ben Stein Missing the Point of Occupy

Ho, ho, ho! Ben Stein is so funny! It is hard to understand how someone would not be forced to wipe away tears of mirth when they hear the deadpan comedian suggest, in his monotone nasal voice, that “Occupy” movement protesters should just take baths and get jobs (echoing the recent quips of fellow Washington, D.C., insider Newt Gingrich).

For reasons that are probably somewhat obscure to average television viewers, Stein has made attacking the Occupy movement his latest cause and, for reasons equally obscure, CNN has given him a regular platform for doing so. Both of them, however, have reasons that I think are fairly prima fascia: Stein wants to sell copies of his latest book, What Would Ben Stein Do? and CNN wants to be able to appeal to its more conservative viewers by allowing the Occupy movement to be criticized without actually having one of its regular talking heads take the hit for it.

But Stein’s dismissive comments about Occupy reveal him to be someone who is missing the point — whether deliberately because he is closing ranks with the Republican right or inadvertently because he has just gotten old and is out of touch. His main contention in recent comments has been about the methodology of the protestors and that they are not accomplishing anything with it.

“Banging on drums ain’t working,“ Stein said recently on CNN, a complaint he made at least a dozen times during a previous appearance on the news network (whether because he really dislikes drums or, like many geriatrics who repeat the same thing again and again, because he believes people will think it is cute).

Whether or not the protestors are accomplishing anything, however, is separate from and secondary to the main point, which is that tens of thousands of people nationwide have turned out to protest corporate greed and the general state of malaise that has descended upon America over the past decade in particular — and done so even though they are probably not going to achieve anything concrete. The fact that Occupy is happening at all is significant and worth paying attention to. (See the related coverage of the Occupy Houston activities on this site.)

Stein has also expressed a fundamental lack of knowledge about the economic conditions prevalent in the United States today, most strikingly in contentions meant to criticize the Occupy protest, which claims to represent the 99 percent of least affluent Americans.

“The 99 percent are working,” Stein claimed. The fact that the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent last month, however — the lowest it has been in two-and-a-half years, after exceeding 10 percent in late 2009 — disproves his contention. And those numbers only include people without jobs who are actively searching for fulltime work, and could probably be more than doubled by the inclusion of people who are underemployed or have given up on hopes of gainful employment in the foreseeable future (not to mention the people who are employed in jobs below their levels or outside their areas of expertise). Like many of his ilk, however, the rightwing pundit would prefer to claim that people are out of work simply because they are lazy.

“There is dignity in labor and I wish people would realize that,” Stein said recently on CNN, suggesting that the unemployed seek work at fast food restaurants and in the retail industry. Unfortunately, that is all just a theory to Stein, who has never done anything approaching actual “labor.”

So just what has Stein done and who the hell is he anyway? His most well-known claim to fame is certainly as playing a high school teacher in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and more recently as a game show host and flack on Clear Eyes eye drops commercials.

What is less well known is that Stein was a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon during that president’s ill-fated administration — in short, he is a product of the most quantifiably corrupt presidential administration of the modern era and his opinions should be considered in that context. Along with his boss and colleagues, Stein had to watch those damn dirty hippies be a nuisance by protesting the Vietnam War. Those protesters, of course, were only motivated by moral outrage against an immoral war and most of them could have just sold out and gone mainstream if they wanted to — as compared to the sheer desperation and fear of the many Occupy protestors who wish they were working normal jobs and that they could have the things average people once took for granted in America.

Interestingly, Stein has also managed to get digs in against the Tea Party during his rants against the Occupy protestors, which would suggest that he uniformly dislikes any sort of non-traditional political movements. This is certainly a rare stance these days among both rightwing pundits and Republican presidential candidates, most of whom try to dance around the most rabid TP sentiments in an effort to pander simultaneously to them and more mainstream voters. This would suggest that Stein is at least sincere in his points of view and not just taking a party line, as so many conservative talking heads seem inclined to do.

Stein’s sincerity, of course, does not make him right about the significance of the Occupy movement—it just makes him seem mean spirited and confused.