Authors: Andy Rooney
Out of My Mind (9 page)
I'll bet Mr. Hagedorn thinks you ought to rake up the grass you've cut, too. I don't rake. I take the position that the clippings have all the nutrients the grass took up out of the earth while it grew. It's better to leave them and let them gradually leach back into the soil. I also think the clippings protect the roots of the grass from the hot sun.
I've often raked together a little pile of grass I've cut and stared at it. So nice. It seems as if it ought to be good to eat. If horses and cows find grass so delicious, why is it that humans never eat it? Fried in a little butter with salt and pepper, maybe? If grass turned out to be a delicacy, Mr. Hagedorn would regret the day he developed a lawn that hardly grew at all.
Next time I mow the lawn, I may cook a few cups and have the neighbors over for grass.
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 worldâthat'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.
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 likeâor dislikeâsomeone 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 peopleâbut 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 powerâsomeone 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 caught 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 stayâor 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.
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-SEMITISMThere'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. Manyâmaybe even mostâof 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.
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.
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