by Andy Rooney
NOTES ON THE NEWS
• A recent survey concluded that half of all working Americans don’t like their jobs. That’s a sad statistic but I wonder if it’s true. I’m always surprised at how interested people are in what seems like dull work to me. I don’t meet a lot of people who are unhappy with what they do. My father worked for a company that sold products to the papermaking industry. I always thought Dad did the dullest work I ever heard of but he liked it so much he always hoped I’d follow him into the business. I wonder if the people who did that survey like surveying.
• The mayor of New York has proposed raising the tax on a pack of cigarettes by 50 cents. Smokers already pay $3 tax on a pack. A pack costs $6.90 in most stores. That means one cigarette costs about 34 cents. No one dares complain when they raise the tax on cigarettes, but there’s some question whether governments that raise cigarette taxes are trying to make money or reduce smoking. It’s wrong if their object is to make money. Why don’t they make smoking cigarettes illegal? Marijuana is illegal and I wouldn’t be surprised if tobacco was worse for people than grass. We might find a legal way to provide tobacco to people who were hopelessly hooked on it. They could be exempt from the no-smoking tobacco law for a limited period while they found a way to kick the habit.
• Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tufts University in Boston, says in an interview: “Certainly, the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk with, and who intervenes in the world—that’s a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.”
• I hope you’ll think I’m doing the wise thing by having no comment to make on Professor Dennett’s statement.
• I keep reading airline ads offering special, low-cost deals on certain flights. I have a suggestion for something they ought to include in their lower fares offer. They ought to charge less for anyone who has to sit in a middle seat. Maybe they ought to build thinner airplanes without any three-across seating. There would be no middle seat.
• The report that Ford is closing fourteen plants and laying off 30,000 workers is terrible news for all America, not just for those 30,000 workers. If Ford is in trouble, America is in trouble.
• I have a press ticket for the Super Bowl and it’s a good thing. Stubhub, the online ticket agency, has posted ticket prices for the game. Two tickets together on the 20-yard line in row 17 are $2,858 each. If you want to sit in a suite on the 20-yard line, one ticket will cost you $176,475. It makes saying, “I don’t wanna go anyway” very easy.
• A man would have to need money pretty bad to take a job as a coal miner. I’ve never heard of a woman coal miner. Maybe they’re too smart to take the job.
• A U.S. Army interrogator got off scot-free after an Iraqi general he was questioning died of suffocation. I hate it when I’m embarrassed to be an American.
• I read where some real estate agents are betting that more and more older Americans are going to start retiring to Mexico instead of Florida. Maybe, but I’d be surprised. It has its problems, but “Florida” still sounds better to most Americans than “Mexico.”
• It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, when I look through the newspaper, fur coats are always on sale. Does anyone ever buy a fur coat that isn’t “half off”?
PART TWO
Feeling Philosophical
No, I’m not committed to being open-minded. You can carry being broad-minded too far. By this time in my life, I know what I know and I know what I think and it’s very damned unlikely that I’m going to change.
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
Seldom do we get public figures so clearly evil as Osama bin Laden, Kenneth Lay and John Walker Lindh. Writing something negative about any one of them is so easy it’s almost unfair. Writers often get in trouble expressing unpopular opinions about people who are admired by some and disliked by others, but there’s nothing so bad you can say about these three that would evoke a pile of angry letters.
I wish it was always that easy to assess the character of a public figure. I was talking to a good friend about a politician I’d met the other day and I said, “He’s a good guy.”
Well, I’d never met the guy before and didn’t really know much about him. My opinion was based on something I’d heard him say that I agreed with. For all I know, he takes money under the table from company executives he helps get government contracts and beats his wife when he comes home at night. It was ridiculous for me to pronounce judgment on him.
We do a lot of that. We make snap decisions about people based on insufficient evidence. We certainly do it with politicians. We decide whom to vote for based on what someone looks like or because of some insignificant comment we heard the person make on television. Appearance influences our opinion more than substance.
We do the same thing with sports figures; we see them as either all good or all bad. I decided I disliked the St. Louis Rams quarterback, Kurt Warner, and it was a big help to me watching the Super Bowl that year. I knew I wanted the New England Patriots to win because I’d heard that before every game Warner prays to God that his team will win.
We often decide we like—or dislike—someone for no good reason. It’s unfair, but if we waited until we knew everything about everything before we made up our mind or decided whether we liked someone or not, we’d never make a decision. Inevitably, we make some wrong decisions about people and issues.
The confusing thing about deciding whom to like and whom to dislike, whether they’re politicians or people we meet during an average day, is the great number of contradictory characteristics we all have. A domineering Mafia boss may take money for protection from all the dry cleaners in town and arrange for the murder of a dozen people—but still love his wife, dandle his grandchildren on his knee at night and hate violence on television.
Some of the brave firemen who died trying to save others in the World Trade Center were very likely the same guys who, in the weeks before the disaster, cheated on their overtime.
We were all faced with this dilemma about character when Bill Clinton was President. Here was a bright, capable, charming guy with the moral standards of an alley cat. If you ignored his ability and concentrated on his shortcomings, he was one of the least admirable Presidents of modern times. If you judged him on his ability as a leader alone, he was one of the best.
I’ve read that Thomas Edison was impossible to get along with. Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy all had secrets which would not have increased their popularity if the facts had been made public.
We have to face the truth that we can’t judge a great scientist, an inventor, a novelist, a politician or an athlete by the sum total of his personality. We should only judge them on what they did in one area of their lives that was better than the rest of us could have done.
No matter what virtues may exist in the characters of Osama bin Laden, Ken Lay or John Walker Lindh, I think we’ll still judge them for their worst behavior because it dominated their characters.
It’s very satisfying for all of us to have three people so clearly and undeniably bad. That makes it easy for us.
THE TERROR GOBLIN
“Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet might be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you take against such an evil, you put yourself into the power of the evil.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that more than 150 years ago. I first read it 10 years ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since our government began warning us about the probability of another terrorist attack. Are we being careful, or have we put ourselves “into the power of the evil”?
If you’ve bought an airline ticket and tried to fly to another city, you certainly might think you were in someone else’s power—someone evil. Airline security is not going to do any more to inhibit terrorism than Geoffrey’s boots did to prevent snake bites. No terrorist is going to be ca
ught trying to board a plane with a bomb or weapon in his briefcase.
On grounds that it might compromise our ability to gather intelligence from sources they suggest are secret, agencies like the FBI and CIA say they can’t reveal where they got the information that another terrorist attack was imminent. I strongly suspect that if we’d known what the information was and where the government got it, we would have been less fearful.
Now that the time when the attack was supposed to have taken place has passed, wouldn’t it be OK if they told us why they thought it was coming? I hope they notice that they’ve been wrong so far and should not trust the same sources of information next time. They wouldn’t have made this up just to keep the Geoffreys among us pulling on their boots, would they?
People obviously fall into different character groups. The modern version of Emerson’s Geoffrey Group built bomb shelters in their back yards in the 1950s and stored canned food, water and toilet paper for a sixmonth stay—or until any nuclear cloud dissipated in the atmosphere. They felt it would be safe then to come out to view the desolation and the dead bodies of their Aaron Group neighbors who hadn’t pulled on their boots.
Some measurements are too difficult to make and some statistics too complicated to set down in numbers. The loss that the terrorist attack has inflicted on the airline industry might be judged within a few hundred billion dollars with some wild guesses. But the changes we’ve been forced to make in our way of life following the attacks are so complicated and multitudinous that they could never be measured numerically.
What figure do you assign to the loss of happiness a grandmother suffered because she did not dare travel from Boston to San Diego at Christmas to see three grandchildren?
I am clearly in Aaron’s camp. I’ve spent little time in my life being cautious because it’s almost always a waste of time. Either the danger never materializes or, if it does, the preventive measures don’t prevent anything.
PRO- AND ANTI-SEMITISM
There’s a lingering vestige of social anti-Semitism in the United States but it is limited to a small number of small minds. There are no longer mainstream clubs or organizations in every community that routinely exclude Jews. Anti-Semitism is out of fashion.
Jews have made a contribution to progress in every area of our civilization in the United States that’s out of proportion to their numbers. Many—maybe even most—of our greatest inventors, writers, musicians, entertainers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors and judges have been Jewish. There are a great many Jewish politicians (nobody’s perfect).
It is, in part at least, our conscious determination not to be anti-Semitic that keeps most Americans who think so from saying that the Jewish leadership of Israel is behaving badly. (We do not include Arabs in our desire to avoid being anti-Semitic, even though they are as Semitic as Israelis.) While terrorism on the part of Palestinians is barbaric, since September 2000, many more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.
If Yasser Arafat had not been so easy to dislike and distrust, the Israelis might have had to make concessions to the Palestinians years ago. Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu could hardly have chosen a Palestinian leader better for their own purposes than Arafat. He was eminently dislikable, and to Americans, he even looked like the bad guy. To the extent that he refused a reasonable plan for peace toward the end of Bill Clinton’s administration Arafat, as much as anyone, was responsible for the mindless slaughter carried out by both sides.
The facts are that in 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, creating the new Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Desperate Jews in Europe needed a place to call home and we were all agreed that giving them part of Palestine was the right thing to do. Well, not everyone agreed. The Palestinians didn’t like the plan even then because it was their land the UN was so generously giving away.
In 1967, Israel took more land for itself when, over the objections of the international community, they occupied the West Bank and Gaza, taking what rightfully belonged to the Palestinians. Now, after thrityfive years of Israeli occupation, about three and a half million Palestinians still live as disenfranchised vagrants in their own land under Israeli domination. They feel like they are not free in their own country.
The Israelis have been able to move military units in and out of Palestinian territory with impunity. They kept Yasser Arafat under virtual house arrest for two months because they had the military strength to wipe out his housing complex if he had ignored their order to stay put. They have the most modern weapons because we, the United States, give them the weapons and $3 billion in aid every year. This is by far the most we give any country in the world.
Without the money it gets from the United States, Israel would collapse. We underwrite every action they take even when we disagree with the action.
This is an idiotic and unfair war between the Palestinians and the Israelis. No one is going to invade Israel because we won’t let them. Israelis wouldn’t even have to defend themselves; we would defend them. We could also stop Israeli aggression by cutting off the cash and sophisticated weapons we give Israel.
Anti-Semitism is a cancer and it is irresponsible of Israel to encourage its reemergence.
ANTI-ISRAEL, NOT ANTI-SEMITIC
It’s difficult to write anything of substance about anything without offending someone. And then, sometimes I’m wrong, too.
It is not my intention to offend anyone—that would be foolish of any writer who wants to be read—but too many people refuse to face the truth about something they’re close to. I may sometimes be illinformed, but I’m not biased. On issues, I know where the middle of the road is and usually take it.
I occasionally have been called anti-Semitic. It is a charge that should not be made lightly. I’ve been on the side of the Jews too long for that. I don’t recall seeing any of my critics there on April 12, 1945, when I entered Buchenwald with the U.S. Army. I know something about anti-Semitism that someone who wasn’t there will never know. No one entering Buchenwald that day could ever be anti-Semitic.
Although most Israelis are Jews, most Jews are not Israelis. I do not use these words interchangeably, as many of my cities do. They refuse to accept the fact that it’s possible to be occasionally anti-Israeli, which I am, without ever being anti-Semitic.
There are people who are unwilling to accept that the Palestinians being killed, mostly by American weapons, are human beings who wail when their sons die and weep when their homes are destroyed. They won’t admit Palestinians have a right to a homeland of their own.
I do not resort to the some- of-my-best-friends- are-Jews defense. Not some. Most of my best friends are Jews. When we argue, I often remind the ones with a sense of humor about their Jewishness, of Ogden Nash’s couplet:How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews.
I don’t pretend to be a Middle East scholar, nor am I much interested in becoming one. The events of long ago in that area have been so often retold, rewritten, translated, embroidered and fictionalized that it seems unlikely they bear much relationship to what actually happened. Forget 200 B.C. You can’t even be sure of today’s report of something that happened yesterday. Nor does it matter. We have to deal with the world we have today.
WHO? ME WORRY?
If you’re worried about your own problems, one of the good ways to stop worrying about them is to start worrying about the world’s problems.
There are plenty of them big enough to make anyone forget worrying about money, marriage, the job, the kids, the dent in the car or a leaky faucet.
The first story big enough to worry about is the possibility of our being attacked with biological or nuclear weapons. If I were in the State Department, I’d be on the alert if large numbers of suspicious-looking people started leaving the country. This might mean they know something we don’t know.
Before the destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City seemed impervious. Not any longer. The core of N
ew York is the island of Manhattan, just twelve miles long and three miles wide at its fattest point. It must look like a bull’s eye to any enemy looking for a target. The bomb we dropped on Hiroshima would reduce New York City and all the 9 million people in it to ashes in a flash.
If an enemy didn’t have nuclear weapons, it might choose to wipe us out with biological weapons by fogging the city with clouds of deadly bacteria that would kill us all in hours. Thoughts like this make me wonder why everyone doesn’t move out of New York. That makes me worry about the decline of New York because I love New York.
Many areas of the nation are suffering from drought. Drought worries me more than torrents of water, even though flood pictures of houses being washed away and dogs in rowboats are more dramatic. In my worried little mind, the earth is more apt to dry out than drown.
Drought is a time-consuming worry that can take your mind off your own petty concerns for a long while because of the daily reports about global warming. There are stories of huge icebergs (the size of Rhode Island, they usually say) breaking away and floating out to sea where they melt. I worry a lot about icebergs melting.
One of the things that worries me is the report that as the icebergs melt, the seas rise. How can that be? If you put ice cubes in a glass and then fill the glass to the brim with water, the ice cubes float above the rim. When the ice cubes melt, the glass should overflow but it does not. Why then, I worry, do melting icebergs cause the oceans’ level to rise? There must be a physical principle here that I don’t understand.
One of the reasons we’re drying out, in spite of the melting icebergs, is because we’ve depleted the ozone layer that acts as a protective screen from the direct and damaging rays of the sun.
Earthquakes are something anyone in California can worry about as a diversion.