Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  New York is the cultural center of mankind, too. Art flourishes in proximity to reality, and in New York the artist is never more than a stone’s throw from the action. The pianist composes music three blocks from a fight in Madison Square Garden. A poet works against the sound of a jackhammer outside his window.

  There are wonderfully good places to live in New York, if you have the money. A lot of New Yorkers have the money. Some of the grand old brownstones of an earlier era have been restored. There are no living spaces more comfortable anywhere. There are charming and unexpected little streets hidden in surprising places throughout the city. They attract the artist, the actor, the musician. The insurance salesman lives on Long Island.

  The city is crowded with luxury apartments, so even if you don’t own your own brownstone, there’s no need to camp out.

  The average living place is an apartment built wall to wall with other apartments, so that they share the efficiency of water and electricity that flows to them through the same conduits. They’re neither slums nor palaces.

  If you can afford $2,500 a month for a three-bedroom apartment, you can live in a living room with Central Park as your front yard.

  Several hundred thousand people do have Central Park for a front yard and it’s certainly the greatest park on earth. It’s a world of its own. No large city ever had the foresight to set aside such a substantial portion of itself to be one complete unbuilt-on place. It occupies 25 percent of the total area of Manhattan and yet any proposition to take so much as ten square feet of it to honor a Polish general or an American President brings out its legion of defenders.

  There are crimes committed in the Park, but to say the Park is unsafe is like saying banks are unsafe because there are holdups. Life is unsafe, for that matter.

  Most American cities have rotted from the center and the merchants have all moved to a place under one roof out in the middle of a suburban parking lot. Downtown was yesterday. New York is still vital at its core. It’s the ultimate downtown. And if the biggest businesses are centered in New York so are the smallest.

  Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s are all here and so are the big grocery chains. But the place you probably buy your food is around the corner at a butcher’s where you can still see both sides of a piece of meat.

  If you want a rare and exotic cheese from Belgium, it’s available, or maybe you need a gear for a pump made in 1923. All there somewhere in the city. If you’re seven feet tall, there’s a store that’ll take care of you or they can fit you with pants if you have a waist that measures sixty-four inches. There’s nothing you can’t buy in New York if it’s for sale anywhere in the world.

  Money doesn’t go as far in New York but it doesn’t come as far, either. All the numbers for all the money in American are handled in Wall Street on lower Manhattan. The banks, the businesses and even the government do most of their money shuffling and dealing there.

  If a civilization can be judged on its ability not only to survive but to thrive in the face of natural obstacles, New York’s civilization would have to be called among the most successful. For example, for what’s supposed to be a temperate climate, New York has some of the most intemperate weather in the world. It’s too hot in the summer, too cold in winter. During all its seasons, the wind has a way of whipping the weather at you and the rain is always coming from an angle that umbrella makers never considered.

  The funny thing about it is that Nature and New York City have a lot in common. Both are absolutely indifferent to the human condition. To the New Yorker, accustomed to inconvenience of every kind, the weather is simply one more inconvenience.

  New Yorkers learn young to proceed against all odds. If something’s in the way, they move it or go under it or over it or around it, but they keep going. There’s no sad resignation to defeat. New Yorkers assume they can win. They have this feeling that they’re not going to be defeated.

  People talk as though they don’t like crowds, but the crowd in New York bestows on the people it comprises a blessed anonymity. New Yorkers are protected from the necessity of being individuals when being one serves no purpose. This blending together that takes place in a crowd is a great time-saver for them.

  New York can be a very private place too. There’s none of the neighborliness based solely on proximity that dominates the lives you share your life with in a small town. It’s quite possible to be not merely private but lonely in a crowd in New York. Loneliness seldom lasts, though. For one thing, troubles produce a warmth and comradeship like nothing else, and New York has so many troubles shared by so many people that there’s a kind of common knowingness, even in evil, that brings them together. There is no one with troubles so special in New York that there aren’t others in the same kind of trouble.

  There are five thousand blind people making their way around the city. They’re so much a part of the mix, so typical as New Yorkers, that they’re treated with much the same hostile disregard as everyone else. Many of the blind walk through the city with the same fierce independence that moves other New Yorkers. They feel the same obligation to be all right. “I’m okay. I’m all right.”

  It might appear to any casual visitor who may have taken a few rides about town in a taxicab that all New Yorkers are filled with a loudmouthed ill will toward each other. The fact of the matter is, though, that however cold and cruel things seem on the surface, there has never been a society of people in all history with so much compassion for its fellowman. It clothes, feeds, and houses 15 percent of its own because 1.26 million people in New York are unable to do it for themselves. You couldn’t call that cold or cruel.

  Everyone must have seen pictures at least of the great number of poor people who live in New York. And it seems strange, in view of this, that so many people still come here seeking their fortune or maybe someone else’s. But if anything about the city’s population is more impressive than the great number of poor people, it’s the great number of rich people. There’s no need to search for buried treasure in New York. The great American dream is out in the open for everyone to see and to reach for. No one seems to resent the very rich. It must be because even those people who can never realistically believe they’ll get rich themselves can still dream about it. And they respond to the hope of getting what they see others having. Their hope alone seems to be enough to sustain them. The woman going into Tiffany’s to buy another diamond pin can pass within ten feet of a man without money enough for lunch. They are oblivious to each other. He feels no envy; she no remorse.

  There’s a disregard for the past in New York that dismays even a lot of New Yorkers. It’s true that no one pays much attention to antiquity. The immigrants who came here came for something new, and what New York used to be means nothing to them. Their heritage is somewhere else.

  Old million-dollar buildings are constantly being torn down and replaced by new fifty-million-dollar ones. In London, Rome, Paris, much of the land has only been built on once in all their long history. In relatively new New York, some lots have already been built on four times.

  Because strangers only see New Yorkers in transit, they leave with the impression that the city is one great mindless rush to nowhere. They complain that it’s moving too fast, but they don’t notice that it’s getting there first. For better and for worse, New York has been where the rest of the country is going.

  The rest of the country takes pride in the legend on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses . . . / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. . . . ” Well, for the most part it’s been New York City, not the rest of the country, that took in those huddled masses.

  Millions of immigrants who once arrived by ships stopped off in New York for a generation or two while the city’s digestive system tried to assimilate them before putting them into the great American bloodstream. New York is still trying to swallow large numbers of immigrants. They don’t come by boat much anymore and they may not even be from a foreign co
untry. The influx of a million Puerto Ricans in the 1960s produced the same kind of digestive difficulties that the influx of the Irish did in the middle 1800s.

  New York’s detractors, seeing what happens to minority groups, have said there is just as much prejudice here as anywhere. New York could hardly deny that. The working whites hate the unemployed blacks. The blacks hate the whites. The Puerto Ricans live in a world of their own. The Germans, the Hungarians, the Poles live on their own blocks. Nothing in this pot has melted together. The Chinese and the Italians live side by side in lower Manhattan as though Canal Street was the Israeli border. There’s no intermingling, and in a city with almost two million Jews even a lot of Jews are anti-Semitic.

  In spite of it all, the city works. People do get along. There is love.

  Whether New York is a pleasure or a pain depends on what it is you wish to fill your life with. Or whether you wish to fill it at all. There is an endless supply of satisfaction available to anyone who wishes to help himself to it. It’s not an easy city, but the cups of its residents runneth over with life.

  It’s a city of extremes. There’s more of everything. The range of notes is wider. The highs are higher. The lows lower. The goods, the bads are better and worse. And if you’re unimpressed by statistics, consider the fact that in 1972 the cops alone in New York City were charged with stealing $73 million worth of heroin. There are 1,700 murders in an average year.

  Neither of those statistics is so much a comment on crime as it is a comment on the size and diversity of New York City.

  No one keeps a statistic on Life. The probability is that, like everything else, there’s more of it in New York.

  An Essay on War

  We are all inclined to believe that our generation is more civilized than the generations that preceded ours.

  From time to time, there is even some substantial evidence that we hold in higher regard such civilized attributes as compassion, pity, remorse, intelligence and a respect for the customs of people different from ourselves.

  Why war then?

  Some pessimistic historians think the whole society of man runs in cycles and that one of the phases is war.

  The optimists, on the other hand, think war is not like an eclipse or a flood or a spell of bad weather. They believe that it is more like a disease for which a cure could be found if the cause were known.

  Because war is the ultimate drama of life and death, stories and pictures of it are more interesting than those about peace. This is so true that all of us, and perhaps those of us in television more than most, are often caught up in the action of war to the exclusion of the ideas of it.

  If it is true, as we would like to think it is, that our age is more civilized than ages past, we must all agree that it’s very strange that in the twentieth century, our century, we have killed more than 70 million of our fellowmen on purpose, at war.

  It is very, very strange that since 1900 more men have killed more other men than in any other seventy years in history.

  Probably the reason we are able to do both—that is, believe on one hand that we are more civilized and on the other hand wage war to kill—is that killing is not so personal an affair in war as it once was. The enemy is invisible. One man doesn’t look another in the eye and run him through with a sword. The enemy, dead or alive, is largely unseen. He is killed by remote control: a loud noise, a distant puff of smoke and then . . . silence.

  The pictures of the victim’s wife and children, which he carries in his breast pocket, are destroyed with him. He is not heard to cry out. The question of compassion or pity or remorse does not enter into it. The enemy is not a man, he is a statistic. It is true, too, that more people are being killed at war now than previously because we’re better at doing it than we used to be. One man with one modern weapon can kill thousands.

  The world’s record for killing was set on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima.

  There have been times in history when one tribe attacked another for no good reason except to take its land or its goods, or simply to prove its superiority. But wars are no longer fought without some ethical pretension. People want to believe they’re on God’s side and he on theirs. One nation does not usually attack another anymore without first having propagandized itself into believing that its motives are honorable. The Japanese didn’t attack Pearl Harbor with any sense in their own minds that they were scheming, deceitful or infamous.

  Soldiers often look for help to their religion. It was in a frenzy of religious fervor that Japanese Kamikaze pilots died in World War II with eternal glory on their minds. Even a just God, though, listening to victory prayers from both sides, would be understandably confused.

  It has always seemed wrong to the people who disapprove of war that we have spent much of our time and half of our money on anti-creation. The military budget of any major power consumes half of everything and leaves us half to live on.

  It’s interesting that the effective weapons of war aren’t developed by warriors, but by engineers. In World War I they made a machine that would throw five hundred pounds of steel fifty miles. They compounded an ingeniously compressed package of liquid fire that would burn people like bugs. The engineers are not concerned with death, though.

  The scientist who splits an atom and revolutionizes warfare isn’t concerned with warfare; his mind is on that fleck of matter.

  And so we have a machine gun a man can carry that will spit out two hundred bullets a minute, each capable of ripping a man in two, although the man who invented it, in all probability, loves his wife, children, dogs, and probably wouldn’t kill a butterfly.

  Plato said that there never was a good war or a bad peace, and there have always been people who believed this was true. The trouble with the theory is that the absence of war isn’t necessarily peace. Maybe the worst thing Adolf Hitler did was to provide evidence for generations to come that any peace is not better than any war. Buchenwald wasn’t war.

  The generation that had found Adolf Hitler hard to believe was embarrassed at how reluctant it had been to go help the people of the world who needed help so desperately. That generation determined not to be slow with help again and as a result may have been too quick. A younger generation doesn’t understand why the United States went into Vietnam. Having gotten into the war, all it wanted to consider itself a winner was to get out. Unable to make things the way it wanted them, but unwilling to accept defeat, it merely changed what it wanted.

  Dwight Eisenhower, 1962: “I think it’s only defense, self-defense, that’s all it is.”

  John Kennedy, 1963 : “In the final analysis it’s their war. They’re the ones that have to win it or lose it.”

  Lyndon Johnson, 1969: “But America has not changed her essential position. And that purpose is peaceful settlement.”

  Richard Nixon, 1974: “But the time has come to end this war.”

  There are a lot of reasons for the confusion about a war. One of them is that the statesmen who make the decisions never have to fight one themselves. Even the generals don’t fight the battles.

  Professional soldiers often say they hate war, but they would be less than human if they did not, just once, want to play the game they spent a lifetime practicing. How could you go to West Point for four years and not be curious about whether you’d be any good in a war?

  Even in peacetime, nations keep huge armies. The trouble with any peacetime all-volunteer army is that the enlisted men in one are often no smarter than the officers. During a war when the general population takes up arms, the character of an army changes and for the better.

  In the twentieth century there is open rebellion between the people who decide about whether to fight or not and some of the young men being asked to do the fighting. It hasn’t always been that way. Through the years, even the reluctant draftees have usually gone to battle with some enthusiasm for it. Partially the enthusiasm comes from the natural drama of war and the excitement of leaving home on a crusade. It’s a trip to
somewhere else, and with the excitement inherent in an uncertain return. It is a great adventure, with the possibility of being killed the one drawback to an otherwise exciting time in life.

  There have been just and unjust wars throughout history but there is very little difference in the manner in which people have been propagandized to believe in them. Patriotism, sometimes no more knowing or sophisticated than pride in a high-school football team, is the strongest motivator. With flags enough and martial music enough, anyone’s blood begins to boil.

  Patriotic has always been considered one of the good things to be in any nation on earth, but it’s a question whether patriotism has been a force for good or evil in the world.

  Once the young men of a country get into a battle, most of them are neither heroes nor cowards. They’re swept up in a movement that includes them and they go where they’re told to go, do what they’re told to do. It isn’t long before they’re tired and afraid and they want to go home.

  True bravery is always highly regarded because we recognize that someone has done something that is good for all of us, certainly at the risk and possibly at the expense of his own life. But in war, the mantle of virtue is pressed on every soldier’s head as though they were all heroes. This is partly because everyone else is grateful to him and wants to encourage him to keep at it. All soldiers who come home alive are heaped with the praise that belongs to very few of them . . . and often to the dead they left behind.

  In part, at least, this accounts for why so many men like being exsoldiers. Once the war and the fighting are done with and they are safe at home, it matters not that they may have served in the 110th emergency shoe-repair battalion. In their own eyes, they are heroes of the front lines.

  Even in retrospect, though, a nation has always felt an obligation to honor its warriors. The face of the earth is covered with statuary designed for this purpose that is so bad in many cases that were it not in honor of the dead, it would evoke not tears but laughter.