Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  The apparent success of the elections in Iraq is a disappointment to people who dislike President Bush. They’re unhappy when the news about anything is good for the President.

  I know people who dislike President Bush so much they’re disappointed when the market goes up even though they own a lot of stock.

  No one in our country knows what the Iraqis were voting for or who won. However, it didn’t really matter and most Americans were surprised by the number of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote.

  The election was also a pleasant surprise because we had not thought Iraqis cared that much about the democratic process from which they had been so long separated.

  Reporters and cameramen don’t dare circulate among the people of Iraq because of the danger of being blown up or kidnapped and beheaded, so we haven’t been seeing average Iraqi people on television. Most reporters are forced to stay in safe compounds, isolated from the Iraqi people. Some of what they said on camera was even written for them in New York. The joke in network newsrooms was that before going on the air from Iraq the reporter would call the writers in New York and ask, “What’s it like over here?”

  We’re all enthusiastic about democracy in a general way, but there is a limit to what public opinion, as expressed by its vote, can accomplish. People are often so uninformed and dumb that it’s a miracle democracy works at all. That must be as true in Iraq as it is here. “The public,” someone once said, “is a idiot.” It doesn’t really know what it thinks and there’s no guarantee the people it elects will do what they promise to do anyway.

  We aren’t talking a lot about it because it’s an uncomfortable subject, but religion is as basic to our problem in Iraq, as it is in many countries we deal with where spirituality plays a dominant role. Americans know little or nothing about Islam. They are even uncertain about when to use “Islam,” when to use “Muslim,” or even whether the word is spelled “Muslim” or “Moslem.”

  When I was young, Muslims were called “Mohammedans.”

  TORTURE, AMERICAN STYLE

  It’s strange for proud Americans who have never doubted the honorable intentions of their leaders to feel tentative with their support right now. That’s how the administration’s approval of torturing prisoners has made a lot of us feel.

  There is no justification for torture. The information elicited can never be trusted. It has been well established by military people who have held enemy prisoners that torture, besides being uncivilized, is not an effective way of eliciting information.

  Is there something we don’t know? Has the CIA been able to get lists of names of the Iraqis who plan to blow up landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or the Sears Tower by holding prisoners under water until they’re close to drowning? This is a torture technique known to the CIA as “water-boarding.” Have we been able to get the dates when their operatives plan to attack by water-boarding Iraqis? When an enemy captures American soldiers, which will inevitably happen, will Americans be subjected to water-boarding?

  The Washington Post published an article saying that the CIA had set up secret detention centers in as many as eight countries. This made a lot of people wonder what was going on in those prisons. The CIA promptly demanded a criminal inquiry into the source of the Post’s article. My friend Ben Bradlee, the former Post editor, still has a major role there and I worry about him. I don’t know how Ben would stand up to torture if the CIA set out to make him reveal where the Post got its information.

  What has our Central Intelligence Agency learned of vital importance by torturing prisoners? They should tell us about the results they’ve obtained from torture that make it acceptable to them. Even if they told us, I don’t think most Americans would approve of torturing anyone. The prisoners we have done unspeakable things to—including killing some of them during their torture—are mostly Iraqi soldiers. They know as much about the secrets of their leaders as I knew about the day and date of D-Day when I was in the Army in England waiting for the invasion of France in 1944. Nothing. Soldiers don’t get in on planning the actions in which they are killed.

  In a secret CIA report by its own inspector general, some of the agency’s methods of questioning prisoners were said to violate provisions of the international Convention Against Torture. Things like this make it harder for us to continue thinking of ourselves as the good guys.

  There’s no question we are in danger, as a nation, from terrorists, who are planning, as I write probably, to destroy some landmark buildings in the United States and kill several hundred people in the process. We need the CIA, and our operatives are working, in small, clandestine groups in more than 20 foreign countries, trying to search out potential terrorists. We approve of all that. We do not approve of the kind of torture to which we subjected prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

  Many Iraqi prisoners being tortured have been captives for more than a year. Is there an Iraqi so brave, so inured to pain that he would hold back secret information he had after having skin torn from his body? Other techniques designed to illicit information include “impairment of bodily function.” I hate to think what that means.

  Every once in a while, it occurs to me to wonder where all the women are over there. I don’t suppose Iraq has even a token group of women in uniform comparable to ours, but the Iraqis must have wives and girlfriends. Women have all but disappeared in this war. Maybe that’s why it isn’t nicer. We don’t see many American women on the scene, either. Not since the charming Lynndie England dropped her leash.

  The Bush administration said that certain restrictions on torture do not apply now because we aren’t doing it in the United States. We are torturing prisoners who are not citizens of the United States in foreign countries where those international laws against torture do not apply. Does that make you proud to be an American?

  I am nervous about writing so critical a piece as this about the CIA. I could end up on a list—and end up ending up.

  NO EASY ANSWERS

  For several years now, Americans have been busy asking each other whether we should pull out of Iraq immediately or stay and try to finish what we started. I wish I knew for sure what was right. I even wish I knew for sure what I think. If I knew, I’d state my opinion loud and clear every time the subject of Iraq came up. Unfortunately, I’m ambivalent. Sometimes I’m thinking it’s idiotic for us to be there with more of our guys dying every day. The next minute, I’m thinking we’re doing the right thing for the people of Iraq. Just as we saved the whole civilized world from domination by Adolf Hitler in WWII, we’ve saved the Middle East from domination by Saddam Hussein. Was I against WW II? No, so how could I oppose our saving the Middle East from Saddam Hussein now?

  In idle moments, I’ve often thought that if we all had all the facts about something, we’d all come to the same conclusion.

  We don’t have all the facts, though, and President Bush probably doesn’t, either. You’d think that as the people of the world became more civilized, war might have died out as a way of settling international disputes but it hasn’t. Instead of using the advances in our technology for the purposes of peace, we’ve used them to produce more effective weapons capable of killing more people in a shorter time.

  I argue with myself about Iraq every day. Last week, just when I thought I’d convinced myself we were doing the right thing there and should finish the job, I read the new federal budget. I saw what our government plans to spend on education in one year compared with what it will spend on what it calls “defense.” (“Defense” is the official euphemism our government uses for “war.” Years ago, some smart public relations expert arranged to have our years-old “War Department” renamed the “Defense Department.”)

  The new budget called for spending $439 billion on the military in 2007 and $54 billion on education. If we are the most civilized society on earth, how can we justify spending all those billions of dollars making devices and training armies whose only purpose is to kill people?

  War is an industry t
hat makes billions of dollars for a wide variety of businesses. If our Government made all our weapons itself instead of having them made by the so-called arms industry it might eliminate the people who encourage us to fight so they’ll profit.

  When I was quite young, I thought I might be a pacifist. Pacifists believe that any peace is better than any war. I liked that idea, but I learned that most pacifists were impractical dreamers. It’s nice of them to talk about not going to war, but then what do they do when another country attacks theirs to take land or property? Do they sit back and watch because they’re pacifists, or do they abandon their ideals and pick up a rifle? The answer is, they fight, and that’s why war is inevitable until human nature changes. I should live so long.

  It is not clear that Iraq had any plans to take anything away from anyone, and certainly not from us. We get no sense of any civilization in Iraq from reading our daily papers or watching television but there is a great one. We don’t see it because of inadequate reporting and lack of interest on our part. We don’t want to know that much about Iraq. The fact is, the people of Iraq are not so different from us. They worship a different God than most Americans, or maybe it’s that they worship the same God in a different language.

  PART SIX

  On Politics

  It’s a mystery why so many men want to be president. What kind of ego would you have to have to think you were smart enough to run the country?

  LIBERAL IS A DIRTY WORD

  We have never had so conservative a President as the one we have now.

  We use the word “conservative” interchangeably with “Republican,” as we do “liberal” and “Democrat.” In the past fifty years, we’ve had six Republican Presidents and some of them were more conservative than others. They were Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and now George W. Bush. We’ve had five Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton.

  Even though we almost always associate the word “liberal” with Democrats and “conservative” with Republicans, the words have so many nuances of meaning that this doesn’t always work. You’d think that a conservationist would be conservative, but most conservationists are liberal. Under conservationist, the dictionary says: “One who practices or advocates conservation of natural resources.” Our ultraconservative President is the last person to fit that definition. Like most conservatives, he believes we should use all the world’s natural resources freely now because there’s more where they came from. If that proves false, conservatives believe we’ll find substitutes or ways to do without certain resources. This is not only a position that can be defended but it’s also a more attractive philosophy than the spartan liberal conservationist belief that we have to reduce our consumption of natural resources or we’ll ruin the Earth.

  President Bush has proposed what he calls a plan for preventing forest fires by letting the lumber companies cut down more trees. He says clearing some of the forests will mean fewer fires. This is comparable to killing every other baby at birth to reduce deaths from starvation.

  Most of us have our political opinions and they are seldom formed free from consideration of our own personal or financial interests. For this reason, it’s a mystery why so many working people are conservative and enthusiastic supporters of a President who’s best friends with their bosses. George W. Bush, the most aggressive pro–big business president we’ve ever had, got a lot of votes from people who work with their hands for big corporations at an hourly wage. It’s hard to understand.

  Liberals are having a hard time understanding the popularity of so conservative a president and his conservative Cabinet members.

  Many Bush appointees seem to liberals to have contempt for civil liberties. The Bush administration has operated on the theory that the American public would be better off not knowing the details of everything its government is doing. This is why Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed so little information to come out of Afghanistan regarding our troops’ activities there.

  I have the uneasy feeling that a great many Americans—the majority—agree with the conservative, secretive, pro-business philosophy of this administration. I accept it, but I’m puzzled.

  ELECTION DAY

  Every election day we decide which politicians we’re going to be complaining about for the next couple of years. Congressional representatives only serve for two years. They just get to Congress and they have to start running again, so they don’t have a lot of time to pay attention to the important matters.

  Running for election is a demeaning thing to do—going around telling everyone how good you are. People would laugh at us if we did that in real life.

  No one says so, but I think voters and politicians have a low opinion of each other. When we call someone a politician, we aren’t saying something nice. It’s an epithet. We treat politicians like dirt.

  Politicians don’t have a high opinion of voters, either, though they never let on. There are a lot of things politicians can’t be honest about. Candidates would never be elected if they didn’t deceive us. For instance, politicians don’t decide what they believe and vote that way. They find out what voters want and pretend that’s what they want.

  It’s no wonder politicians are contemptuous of voters because most of the voters they meet want something from them. The voters aren’t interested in what’s happening to their country. They want a law passed that will help their business, or they need help getting their brother-in-law out of trouble.

  That’s one reason our political system doesn’t work very well when it comes to international affairs. Politicians are so busy getting re-elected by sucking up to voters who have petty little problems that they don’t have time for a lot of the more serious stuff.

  The classic dilemma for everyone in Congress is whether to do what’s right or what the voters in their district want. It doesn’t seem as though politicians should ever ignore their best judgment to get in good with voters, but they do it all the time.

  Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator who died in the plane crash, was much admired but little imitated. He was the only senator to vote against giving President Bush the authority to make war on Iraq.

  A lot of Americans are put off voting because they don’t think their vote counts for much in big elections. There are too many special interest groups that support politicians. Maybe they are union members, veterans, business executives, Catholics, Baptists, women or political party members. The politician has to pay attention to these people because they vote as a block.

  Our political system is a mess—no doubt about it—but no other country as big as ours with so many different kinds of people has ever governed itself so successfully for so long as we have.

  JUDGING THE JUDGES

  The success of President Bush and the Republican Party make it apparent that the people of this country are more conservative in many of their opinions about social issues, the law and the environment than they once were. Those who voted for Republican candidates this year would not have voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt had they been of age in the 1930s.

  One of the things that will have the most impact on life in the United States in the future is the conservative judges, at every level, that President Bush is appointing and which a conservative Congress seems almost certain to approve.

  There have been six landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent history. “Landmark” may be a cliché term for them but I can’t think of any other. They’ve had a profound effect on life in this country and it’s interesting to consider whether or not any of them will be overturned. I’m proud of myself for having done a little homework and you might like to have your memory refreshed about these decisions. Amaze your friends by knowing these cases:Brown vs. The Board of Education: The court ruled that separate public schools for black students and white students was fundamentally unequal.

  Gideon vs. Wainwright: Defendants charged with serious crimes must have access to a lawyer at gov
ernment expense if they can’t pay.

  New York Times vs. Sullivan: The press is protected from being sued for libel for defamatory statements about public officials, even if the charges are in error, unless it can be proved that the paper printed the statements out of malice or deliberate disregard for the truth.

  Miranda vs. Arizona: Before they are questioned, suspects in custody must be told they have the right not to say anything and that they can ask for a lawyer.

  New York Times vs. The United States: The court upheld the right of the newspaper to publish documents about the Vietnam War that the government wanted to keep secret.

  Roe vs. Wade: The court ruled that an unborn baby is not a person with constitutional rights and during the first three months of pregnancy, a woman has a right to an abortion.

  Some of those decisions would probably not have been made by a court dominated by conservatives. The one most likely to be overturned by a conservative court is Roe vs. Wade. The U.S. Supreme Court has been a noble institution, though. Over the years, it has usually done the right thing whether dominated by liberals or conservatives.

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican but a very moderate conservative, appointed Earl Warren as chief justice. Warren was considered a conservative when appointed, but many of the court’s most liberal decisions were made during his years in office. While there have always been members of the U.S. Supreme Court whose decisions were 100 percent predictable, over the years many more have been refreshingly independent and surprising.