by Andy Rooney
The single most annoying driving habit Americans have on and off the major highways is their practice of hitting the right turn signal just after they’ve started to turn right. By then, you know they’re turning right. What you would have liked is some indication of their intentions a few hundred yards back. It would have helped you make plans. Why do so many drivers think it does any good to hit the turn signal after they’ve started their turn?
With Spencer the bulldog
In city driving, the principal menace for the average driver is the panel truck. I don’t know where they get the people who drive panel trucks. Every year there are a lot of race drivers who fail to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. Maybe they all take jobs driving panel trucks in cities. They’re trying to make enough money to enter the Indy 500 again next year.
The average driver puts 10,000 miles on his car every year, according to Federal Highway Administration statistics. One statistic I’d like to see that no one has kept is, how much I’ve paid out in automobile insurance in the past twenty-five years and how much I’ve collected. We’ve owned two cars for most of that time and I guess we’ve paid out a total of more than $20,000. The insurance company didn’t get the perfect driver when they got me but they haven’t done badly. During that time I doubt if they’ve paid out $2,000, mostly in dents.
I had all my accidents when I was driving carefully.
The White House? No, Thank you
I’m always pleased but surprised that anyone will take the job of being President of the United States. Of all the jobs in the world, it’s the one I’d least like to have. I know you get a big house to live in for free, a salary of $200,000, a helicopter, an airplane, your own doctor and a big staff but I still don’t want the job. Don’t even ask me because I won’t take it.
The President doesn’t even have a White House psychiatrist, which is probably the doctor he needs most.
It’s always been a mystery to me why anyone would want to be President. Anyone who’d want to be President has to be some kind of nut who loves misery and criticism. If I were President, I’d call my personal physician and say, “What’s wrong with me, anyhow?”
As President, any decision you make affects millions of people. You put thousands of people out of work every time you say, “Cut that.” How do you sleep nights or in a Cabinet meeting knowing someone couldn’t feed his family tonight because of some policy of yours that cost someone a job?
A President can’t go down to the basement of the White House on a Saturday morning and putter around. He can’t decide to climb up on the roof and straighten the television antenna. He never gets the satisfaction of taking a load of trash to the dump. Considering he’s probably the most powerful man in the world, he’s almost powerless to do anything he wants to do. If he does do something he wants to do, some newspaper or television reporter will see him doing it and claim he’s wasting the taxpayers’ money.
It’s nice to have someone concerned about your welfare if it’s a friend but I certainly wouldn’t want a lot of guys running alongside my car every time I started down the street to make sure I didn’t get shot. Furthermore, I’d want to drive my own car. I don’t like to be driven anywhere by anyone. I like to go where I want to go the way I want to get there. The President can’t do that.
You can bet there have been nights when the President sat down after a hard day’s work dealing with world affairs and wanted nothing more than to go to a good movie. Presidents of the United States can see any movie they want right in the White House but that isn’t what “going to the movies” means. “Going to the movies” is getting dressed to go out, driving to the theater, finding a parking place, standing in line to buy the tickets, buying the popcorn and then groping your way down the aisle to find a seat. A President can’t go to the movies. Can you imagine the complaints he’d get if he took the First Lady to one of those dirty, R-rated movies?
There are a thousand things I can do the President can’t. I can go to any restaurant I want to eat dinner or I can stay home and eat leftovers. He can’t do either of those things.
I can wander down a street and window-shop, eat an ice-cream cone or lie down and take a nap and not do anything at all if I feel like it. Why would I want to be President?
For all the power he has to change the world with a snap of his fingers, the President can’t decide to turn over and go to sleep in the morning. He can’t even make a plan for a week from Saturday. His calendar is full for the next four years . . . not just the days, but the hours.
I hope you have a happy and successful time in office, Mr. President, but frankly, you can have it.
The Agony of Flight
I have just taken a memorable trip I’d like to forget.
Because I was going to be in Los Angeles for only two days, I drove from my office in New York to Kennedy Airport so I’d have my car when I returned and could drive home to Connecticut. The parking area is just a minute’s walk across the road from American Airlines.
When I arrived at the airport for a 9 a.m. flight at 7:30, I thought I had plenty of time. Sure. The short-term parking lot was closed for repair. I was directed to a lot two miles from the terminal. By the time I found it, parked and waited for the bus to take me to the terminal, it was 8:17. The baggage attendants outside told me my flight was “closed” and I could no longer check bags. Inside, I waited in line to check my bag anyway. By the time I got to the gate (all flights leave from the most remote gate), it was 8:40 and they were closing the door.
First class for the round trip flight cost $ 2,762.90. Business class cost $1,858.90. A coach seat was $517.90. I flew coach. Airlines make coach so uncomfortable that even people who can’t afford it pay the “business” rate.
In flight, the pilot kept announcing that we were ahead of schedule. We landed nine minutes early, and after being told to keep our seats, we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. Then came the inevitable: “There is a plane parked at our gate that should be moving out shortly. Please remain in your seats. Thank you for your patience.” Which we were not.
Flight times should be recorded from the time they close the door for takeoff to the time they open the door to let passengers off. The advertised time of my flight was five hours and fifty-seven minutes. From the time we had to be on board to the time we were allowed off, it was seven hours and twelve minutes.
At baggage claim, the carousel went round and round. My bag never came ’round. At the lost baggage office, I waited in line. They were doing a booming business. I finally got to talk to a woman behind the desk, who said my bag would be arriving on the next flight. I opted to have the bag sent to my hotel.
In Beverly Hills, I went to the hotel I’ve stayed in a hundred times. It’s also expensive but I could stay there for weeks for what first class costs on American.
In my room, I called American baggage service at 12:30 and was told my bag had been found and would be delivered “within six hours.” I once worked at MGM, so I drove around some old familiar places, including Malibu Beach, wasting time waiting for my bag. I needed things in it to dress for dinner with friends. When I got back to the hotel, I called American again and got the “six hour” announcement again. It had now been five.
There was a huge window over the bathtub in the hotel room and by pressing a button next to the light switch, you could open a curtain that allowed you to look out on a palm frond garden.
I took a shower more to waste time than from necessity—I wasn’t that dirty—and dried off with a thick towel that was six feet long. It made the bath towels at home seem puny.
After the shower, I read the paper and waited for my bag, which didn’t come. It was delivered sometime after midnight, so I went out to dinner in khaki pants and slept in a terrycloth robe.
Sunday night, I ate dinner in my room because I wanted to watch 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace interviewed Putin. Morley Safer’s report on West Point was good. I could have done without Steve Kroft’s chat with Ray Romano,
but I watched it almost to the end. Almost. Next thing I knew, I woke up and they were showing the 60 Minutes credits. I had missed the best part of the show.
I’ll tell you about my trip home another time. It wasn’t as good as the trip out.
Appendix
The Following Things Are True
ninety-nine Opinions I’m Stuck With
A writer doesn’t often tell a reader anything the reader doesn’t already know or suspect. The best the writer can do is put the idea in words and by doing that make the reader aware that he or she isn’t the only one who knows it. This produces the warm bond between reader and writer that they’re both after because it feels so good.
The fact is, there really isn’t anything new in the world and what I’ve always hoped to do with my writing is to say, in so many words, some of the ideas that lurk, wordlessly, in the minds of a great many people.
There’s no way of knowing how we get to believe what we believe. We’re all trapped within ourselves. We have this much and no more. We have our genes and our youth, during which our opinions are formed.
Most of us don’t change those opinions once we get them. Instead, we spend a lot of time looking for further proof that we’re right.
If we formed our opinions the way we should, we’d get all the facts together and then compare them, using logic and good sense to arrive at the right places. We don’t do it that way very often, though, and as a result we acquire a lot of wrong answers that we’re stuck with for life. I haven’t changed my mind about anything since I was twenty-three. In my head I know I must be wrong about some things but in my heart I don’t think so.
As an indication of what you’ll find in the body of this book, what follows is a hundred opinions I’m stuck with. There ought to be something here to anger almost everyone:
1 . I do not accept the inevitability of my own death. I secretly think there may be some other way out.
2. It’s good to be loyal even when what you’re loyal to doesn’t deserve it.
3. We are selling things better than we’re making them in the United States.
4. Capitalism and the free-enterprise system are not working very well. There are too many very rich and too many very poor in the United States. Fortunately, the economic system that doesn’t work as well as capitalism is communism. Communists are almost all poor.
5. When I was young I always assumed I’d get to like carrots when I got older but I never did.
6. In spite of all the kind things people are always saying about the poor and homeless, people with jobs and houses are usually more interesting and capable and I prefer to be with them.
7. I am often embarrassed by the people I find agreeing with me.
8. Big Business talks as if it doesn’t like Big Government but the fact of the matter is, Big Business is in business with Big Government. Big Business is closer to Big Government than Big Government is to the people, but neither wants anyone to know it.
9. Most poetry is pretentious nonsense.
10. The people of the United States never worked so well or so hard or accomplished so much as they did during the four years of World War II. We need to find some substitute for war as a means of motivating ourselves to do our best. Money isn’t the answer, either.
11. I don’t favor abortion although I like the people who are for it better than the people who are against it.
12. Good old friends are worth keeping whether you like them or not.
13. Although I went to Sunday school for several years at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, I was not persuaded that Mary never slept with anyone before Jesus was born.
14. I’m suspicious of the academic standards of a college that always has a good basketball team. When a college loses a lot of games, I figure they’re letting the students play.
15. A person is more apt to get to be the boss by making decisions quickly than by making them correctly.
16. Until we can all have the medical attention a President gets, there will not be too many doctors.
17. A great many people do not have a right to their own opinion because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
18. The least able among us are having the most children. Among women, college graduates are having the fewest babies, high-school graduates are having the next fewest and the people who don’t get to high school or drop out once they do are having the most babies. The most capable women are getting the best jobs and are least apt to have big families . . . or sometimes, any family at all.
19. If I were black, I would be a militant, angry black man, railing against the injustices that have been done me. Being white, I think blacks should forget it and go to work.
20. If I were a woman, I would be an angry woman. Men are satisfied having women be something women are not satisfied being. We have a problem here.
21. There are facts too painful to face. I cannot watch a documentary about the slow death facing all elephants and whales.
22. The people who speak up in public for or against something almost always lose my support by being too loud about it.
23. It doesn’t interest me to watch a movie or read a novel in which the characters are put in difficult situations by a writer. I’m not interested in being reminded of difficulties. It’s already on my mind.
24. It’s hard for me to believe that, in the next 150 years, we’ll have as many important inventions and discoveries as we’ve had in the last 150. What is there left comparable in importance to the electric light, the telephone, the gas engine, radio, flight, television, nuclear energy, space exploration, computers and Coca-Cola?
(If anyone were to read that paragraph 150 years from now, I’m sure they’d laugh at my ignorance.)
25. People like to say, “You’re only as old as you feel,” but it isn’t true. It’s just something old people say to make themselves feel good about their age. You’re as old as you are.
26. I spent fifty years of my life working to become well-known as a writer and I’ve spent the last ten hiding from strangers who recognize me.
27. I dislike loud-mouthed patriots who suggest they like our country more than I do. Some people’s idea of patriotism is hating other countries.
28. Politicians deserve better treatment than they’ve been getting and we should stop using the word “politician” as an epithet. Most of them are honestly trying to accomplish something good for all of us.
29. I spent four years in the army but do not belong to any veterans’ organization. As a way of getting together socially with people your own age and background, veterans’ groups are fine but I disapprove of them as a pressure group. I’m suspicious of professional veterans who wear overseas caps at conventions. Except for the men who were disabled, to whom it owes everything it can give, our country owes veterans nothing. We got what was coming to us, a free country.
30. I wish people spent less time praying and more time trying to solve the problems religion was created to help us endure.
31. It seems wrong for the United States to try to protect democracy by undemocratic means like overthrowing the government of a foreign country by undercover action.
32. A lot of people assume that we live in an orderly world where every event has a meaning and every problem has a solution. I suspect, however, that some events are meaningless and some problems insoluble.
33. I believe a lot of things I can’t prove.
34. Women have better natural instincts than men and are more apt to do the right thing.
35. I’d make a bad nun. Material possessions give me great pleasure even though all the best advice we’re given for happiness advises us to ignore them.
36. When someone says, “You know what I mean?” I don’t usually know what they mean and I know they don’t know. If someone knows what they mean, they ought to be able to tell you. I mean, you know what I mean?
37. My only war wound is an aversion to German accents.
38. We need chefs more than headwa
iters and mechanics more than car salesmen. We need good doctors more than health plans.
39. The evolution of every business enterprise is away from quality. Products always get smaller, worse and more expensive.
40. If someone chooses to live in the United States, they should learn to speak English. I recognize that this is a small, meanspirited, rightwing opinion but I hold it.
41. People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.
42. The accuracy of political polls is sad evidence of our predictability.
43. Most religions are designed to trick us into doing the things we’d do anyway if we used our heads.
44. It’s a lot easier to object to the way things are being done than it is to do them better yourself. Being a revolutionary, even in a modest way, is a lot more fun than having to take over and do it. Castro was a great revolutionary. It wasn’t until he won and started running things himself that he went wrong.
45. A lot of companies spend more to package, advertise and sell their product than they spend on making it. The toothpaste in a tube that costs $1.79 probably doesn’t cost ten cents to manufacture. Something’s wrong here.
46. I think women should be paid as much for doing the same job as men . . . although I don’t think they can lift as much.
47. I don’t believe in flying saucers or the Loch Ness monster and I’m not on drugs or religion. I don’t know my astrological sign.
48. If all the truth were known by everyone about everything, it would be a better world.