Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  Last month, I came to the office one day and didn’t feel good. By noon, I felt worse, so I called my doctor and went to the hospital where he has an office. He checked me over, poking in all the old familiar places, and couldn’t find anything wrong. He was apprehensive about a possible heart problem and said it would be a good idea if he admitted me to the hospital overnight.

  I had a room with just one bed and was impressed by the attention I got. You can’t tell who’s a nurse in a hospital anymore. Nurses used to wear cute little hats but they don’t anymore so you don’t know who’s a nurse and who isn’t. And everyone wears a stethoscope. They used to be doctors, but now even the people who empty the wastebaskets wear stethoscopes.

  From early on to all night long people kept coming in to take things. They took my temperature, my blood pressure, blood samples, urine samples, and they kept hitting me on the knee with that little rubber hammer to see if I jerked.

  At one point, when one of them started to take my blood pressure by wrapping my arm in the elastic bandage, I said, “Someone just did that five minutes ago.”

  She ignored me and proceeded to take it again. I liked all the unnecessary attention, oblivious to the fact that each test was being entered on a chart at the desk for cost-accounting later.

  My doctor came in with a cardiologist he had asked to look at me. They were impressive professionals, although neither wore a stethoscope. I spent the night with bells ringing in the hallway and the stethoscope women coming in every half hour to wake me and ask if I was sleeping OK.

  I was released from the hospital the next day. In the following weeks, I got a bill from each doctor. I paid them.

  Yesterday, I received a statement from United Healthcare notifying me of my one-night hospital charges.

  The breakdown from Mount Sinai Hospital reads:

  Room and board, $2,875. Not covered, $525.

  State of NY Surcharge, $207.98

  Mount Sinai Hospital Misc. Services, $4,856.95. Amount allowed, $2,725.93.

  State of NY Surcharge, $24I.24

  TOTAL: $8,I8I.I7

  WHAT GOES UP NEVER COMES DOWN

  News of the economy is not the story I read first in my newspaper. My eyes glaze over with money talk because I don’t understand it.

  There have been a lot of stories recently indicating that there is very little inflation in our economy. Officials in Washington concede that the price of gas is higher, but they claim other things aren’t costing much more than they did a year ago. They put the increase at less than 1 percent. If the inflation rate is only 1 percent, how come when I go to the store the stuff that used to cost me $20 now costs $35?

  Does anything you buy cost the same as it used to? I’m talking about ordinary things like a cake of soap, a loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes. I saw a pair of sneakers in a store for $83. Sneakers? Whatever happened to Keds for $7?

  Last weekend, I made a 250-mile drive. The small country road I took met the Thruway, and I was ready for coffee. There’s a small place there where I often stop. “Small, black to go, please,” I said. A pleasant, courteous young woman went about drawing the coffee.

  “How much is that?” I asked as she put the top on, foolishly fishing a dollar bill out of my pocket.

  “A dollar eighty-two,” she said.

  Everywhere you go you’re faced with price increases no matter what economists say about there being no inflation. Motion picture attendance is down sharply this summer. The producers are puzzled and have offered a half-dozen reasons why people aren’t going to the movies as much as they did a few years ago. Have they given any thought to their prices? Obviously, one reason people are staying home is that it costs them nothing to watch a movie on television in their living room but they have to shell out $9.50 a person to get into a theater. A bag of popcorn is $3.50 and a soft drink $2.50. I’m waiting for theaters to start charging people for using the bathroom.

  The price of a hotel room has soared. In big cities, it’s usual for a room to cost more than $200 and, if you order breakfast, it costs more than the room would have cost a few years ago.

  Our telephone bill came the other day and I was shocked to see that a call I made to information for a local number cost $I.99. Didn’t information used to be free?

  A pint of Poland Spring’s water costs $I.35 in the cafeteria in my building. The price of gas may be high, but if gas cost as much as water in those little bottles, you’d be paying $I62 to fill your car with fifteen gallons.

  In Florida, farmers say they’re growing more oranges than they’re selling. Has it occurred to them to reduce the price so all of us up here can afford to make a glass of juice for less than $5?

  I’d like to have dinner some night at a good restaurant in Washington with a government economist and have him pay the check, just to give him a more realistic view of inflation.

  THE GAS BILL

  I haven’t heard yet today, but I suppose gas prices hit a new high. They always do. The last time I filled my tank, I hit a new personal high. It cost me an even $50. I’ve never known exactly, but I think my tank holds seventeen gallons and it must have been almost empty. My personal low cost for a tank of gas came when I was in high school. I remember getting five gallons for $I at the Shell station. I was loyal to Shell for several years and then loyal to Texaco. Now, I buy gas where it’s cheapest. I think it all comes from the same place. It’s the same gas.

  Oil was $73 a barrel the last time I bought any, according to news on the radio. I don’t know why they always tell us how much oil is a barrel. No one ever buys a barrel of oil. How would I get it home if I did? They’d probably charge me extra for the barrel itself.

  The price they give for what a gallon of gas will cost at the pump on any given day never bears any resemblance to what I pay.

  New York borders both New Jersey and Connecticut, and gas is cheaper in New Jersey because the gas tax is less. The tax is 32 cents in New York, 25 cents in Connecticut and 14.5 cents in New Jersey. Georgia has the lowest tax, 7.5 cents per gallon but I’d have to drive about 700 miles to get it.

  I often drive to upstate New York, and I make a point of driving a route that takes me through New Jersey. After driving about 30 miles, I come to the New York State Thruway. I always try to get to New Jersey when I’m low on gas, then I drive to a gas station that’s just before the New York border and fill up there.

  I drive 130 miles north and two days later, after the weekend, I return and can usually get back to New Jersey before I have to fill up again. I continue on into New York and can usually get home with more than three quarters of a tank left. I don’t save much but it makes me feel wonderful.

  If radio announcers want to tell us something we don’t know about gas, tell us how much the guy who owns the pump pays per gallon. Tell us how much the wholesaler pays the big oil companies. That’s what we’d like to know.

  There are seventy gallons in a barrel of oil, but the oil in the barrel is the crude stuff, straight out of the ground. From that, refineries can produce only about thirty-five gallons of gas that we can burn in our cars. Let’s say a barrel of crude costs $70, I figure a gallon of gas would cost an oil company something like $I.40 a gallon to produce. With gas selling for more than $3 a gallon at the pump, even after all the costs they must factor into their prices—things like trucking, rent and salaries—gas station owners and wholesalers must still be making a big profit. For the most part, I don’t think it’s the gas station owners who are ripping us off. The wholesalers make more than the retailers.

  Oil company profits are sky high with the new prices and this gives capitalism a black eye. Oil companies shouldn’t make a single penny more on a gallon of gas when the price goes up. They should make the same profit on gas selling for $3 a gallon that they made when it was selling for $2 or $I.50 a gallon.

  I have some ideas for saving gas myself. I’m going to put a note pad in my car and every time I get in I’m going to write down where I’m going. I’l
l start the car, go where I said I was going and no place else. I’ll go directly there and directly back home. No wandering around. I’ll cut my gas bill in half without ever having to go to New Jersey.

  DON’T BE GREEDY

  About four years ago, I was a guest on Martha Stewart’s television show. I was impressed with her charm, competence and attractive appearance. I liked her a lot, although I was amused by her aggressive personality, which was apparent in everything she did. More recently, I was impressed with the classy way she behaved during her five-month stay in prison. She just took it. When she came out, she was so open and public that she came off more as a victim than a criminal.

  The only thing wrong with all that is, my semi-friend Martha did something wrong and deserved what she got. She contributed to the lack of confidence a lot of Americans have in our economic system. A jury concluded she lied when she said she didn’t have inside information before she sold 4,000 shares of a stock that plunged the next day.

  There is plenty of reason for all of us to worry about this sort of thing. Our economy is based, to some extent, on trust. We have to trust that the people who run the institutions primary to our economy, in business and government, are honest. It’s bad for all of us when we have good reason to lose confidence in such important people.

  It was bad public relations for our free enterprise system this week when the chief executive of Boeing, Harry Stonecipher, was forced out for having an affair with another Boeing employee. It wasn’t the affair that did Harry in; it was being a hypocrite.

  Events like these make the rest of us think the stock market deck is stacked against us and we’re right; it is. Something like 70 percent of Americans are invested in the stock market. Dishonesty in high places makes us aware that we don’t have the same chance of profiting that business executives do. In spite of laws prohibiting their taking advantage of information about their companies, they know where the cards are in the deck and we don’t. Martha knew and took advantage of this. If an average American makes money in the stock market, it’s more apt to be based on luck than financial perspicacity; by happy accident, they picked the same stocks that people picked who had inside information.

  Specific incidents like Martha Stewart’s stock sales and Harry Stonecipher’s foolish behavior undermine our confidence in the system that needs our confidence to prosper. Two great systems, democracy and capitalism, are sort of tangled together in our minds. They are in mine, I know. We think of them as equal, and they are not equal. Democracy is a great, high-minded idea. As a theory of government, it is unassailable. The prosperity and freedom of the lucky people of the world who have lived, as we do, under a democratic system of government, are proof enough of that.

  Capitalism’s credentials are not so unassailable. The defenders of capitalism speak of it as though it was an economic religion but it is anything but that. It depends for its effectiveness on one of the least admirable of our traits: greed. The free enterprise theory is that if everyone takes as much as he can get for himself, things will work out best for everyone. Well, they don’t. If the theory is right that everything works for the best for everyone when selfishness is God, it’s a sad day for all of us.

  But uncontrolled capitalism doesn’t work and we’ve known it since Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Unfortunately, we’ve been undermining the strength of that law recently.

  One flaw in capitalism is that it’s at the mercy of dishonest business people, and I hope we scared a lot of them by making an example of the exemplary Martha Stewart.

  THE BUSINESS OF WAR

  When the Pentagon announced its intention of saving $48 billion by closing 62 major military bases and 775 smaller ones, there was an outcry from local people near the bases. Their complaint was that the communities would lose jobs.

  There’s no doubt that when we close a base, lots of people lose their golden-egg-laying goose, but the purpose of a military base is not to provide jobs. The purpose of a military base is to contribute to our national security.

  The people who contend that military spending makes jobs claim that a billion dollars spent by the Pentagon on weapons, soldiers and supplies creates 25,000 jobs. It’s been pointed out by people who are not so enthusiastic about the arms industry that the same billion dollars would create 37,000 jobs if it was spent on mass transit, 36,000 jobs if it was spent on housing, 41,000 jobs if we spent the same amount on education and 47,000 jobs if it was spent on health care.

  We were kidding ourselves, or our military establishment was kidding the rest of us, when they renamed our “War Department” the “Defense Department.” It sounds better, even though we obviously don’t have to defend ourselves against being attacked by Russia, France, Zambia or Zimbabwe.

  We spend almost half of all the money the whole world spends on weapons. Our military establishment costs every single American, man, woman and baby girl and boy $I,533 a year. We are paying for weapons for wars there is no chance we’ll ever fight. We have not dozens but hundreds of military bases for which we have no need. Our military establishment is bloated and overweight.

  In the last ten years, our so-called “defense industry” has sold $I42 billion worth of weapons to foreign countries. If we ever got into a war with a country like Turkey, Uzbekistan or Colombia, we’d be battling ourselves.

  The respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute keeps figures on military spending. Last year, we spent $455 billion on our military. Japan spent $42 billion, Russia spent $I9 billion, South Korea, $I5 billion. Italy spent $28 billion.

  The United States has about I,393,000 men and women in uniform. We have a total of I,I55,I87 enlisted men and women and 225,373 officers. There are about 55,000 first and second lieutenants, 70,000 captains, 44,000 majors, 28,000 lieutenant colonels, II,559 colonels, 435 brigadier generals, 271 major generals, 128 lieutenant generals and 36 full generals. A general’s base pay is $I44,932. We’re paying 3,0II retired Army generals and I,300 retired admirals.

  One of my life’s heroes is Dwight Eisenhower. He was a great general and good, if not great, president. No one ever said anything truer about our arms industry than what Ike said as he was leaving office:

  “The country must guard against the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

  PART NINE

  The English Language

  One of the main reasons I’m pleased to be an American is that I’d hate to be a foreigner and have to learn the English language. It’s too complex.

  ENGLISH FOREIGN TO TOO MANY

  Right after deciding to walk on two legs instead of on all fours, the greatest thing humans did for themselves was develop language, a system of words with which they could exchange information. It was a big improvement over grunting.

  It is certain that the world would be a better place to live if everyone spoke the same language. The languages spoken by the most people are, in order, Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Javanese (not “Japanese”) and Korean. French isn’t even in the top ten, and it makes me wonder why I studied it for five years in school. One strange linguistic aberration is that more people speak Portuguese in Brazil than in Portugal.

  There’s still plenty of room for misunderstanding even when we’re all speaking the same language. But when more than one language is being used—or a proliferation of them—this can lead to a total lack of any kind of understanding. This is already happening in the United States. Twenty percent of the people living in America today speak a language other than English at home.

  Where you stand on any of approximately ten popular issues identifies you as either a liberal or a conservative. If you’re anti-abortion, hate the United Nations and oppose gun control, you’re a conservative. I’m a moderate liberal with a couple of strong conservative opinions. One of those is that English should be the official language of th
e land.

  In twenty-six of our fifty states, there are laws of varying strength that make English the official language. I have no patience with anyone who chooses to come to this country to live, to work, to raise a family, but who refuses to learn and use English.

  Last year, liberals were angry with five conservative members of the Supreme Court who turned down a challenge to an Alabama law that makes English the state’s official language. The case came to the court through a suit brought by a Spanish-speaking woman named Maria Sandoval, who argued that her civil rights were violated because she was unable to take the test for a driver’s license in Spanish.

  Until our traffic lights read both STOP! and PARADA! driver’s license tests should be in English. We drive in English. What language did Ms. Sandoval expect to hear when she came to the United States?

  Language is an important, unifying force in a country. It is divisive to have large segments of our population speaking languages other than English. It’s not only bad for the country, it’s bad for the people who insist on using a foreign language. It’s a quick way to end up on the public payroll for lack of a job.

  In New York City, I frequently ride in taxis, and many of the drivers can barely communicate in English. They often have their radios tuned to a foreign-language station. I always ask what language the drivers speak at home and, without exception, they tell me they speak their native tongue. Many of them learn what little English they speak from their children who are in public school. The ability to speak English fluently ought to be a requisite for getting a license to drive a cab in New York.

  English has become the whole world’s second language. That is partly because of our cultural and economic dominance. It’s also because English, screwed up though it may be, in many ways is still the best language. It has the most words and, while there are prettier languages, English communicates the most effectively.