Out of My Mind Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  PART ONE - Daily Life

  WE’RE WASTING AWAY

  JUST ANOTHER DAY

  STATES BY THE NUMBERS

  WEATHERING THE STORM

  FORGET THE BIRTHDAY GREETINGS

  THE JUNK BUILDING BOOM

  LIFE BECOMES LESS NEIGHBORLY

  THE RETRACTABLE WEDDING

  BETTER BY FAR

  WEDDING DUMBBELLS

  A JOB EASILY DONE

  SOME THOUGHTS ON VACATIONS

  THE SMELL OF A NEW CAR

  EXPENSIVE BED, BAD BREAKFAST

  THE RAIN IN SPAIN AND HERE

  RING A DING DING

  EASY PASS FOR AIRLINES

  THE AGONY OF FLIGHT

  GOING NOWHERE FAST

  TAKE A STAY HOME VACATION

  THE PERFECT PAT DOWN PERSON

  TECHNOLOGICALLY ILLITERATE

  NO-SHOW REPAIR PEOPLE

  A NAME IS A BRAND WE’RE GIVEN

  SNOWY THOUGHTS IN SUMMER

  SIZING THINGS UP

  MERRY CHRISTMAS FOR ALL

  SORTING WELL-AGED FROM OLD

  THE SOUND OF SILENCE

  DON’T MESS WITH MY GRASS

  NOTES ON THE NEWS

  PART TWO - Feeling Philosophical

  THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

  THE TERROR GOBLIN

  PRO- AND ANTI-SEMITISM

  ANTI-ISRAEL, NOT ANTI-SEMITIC

  WHO? ME WORRY?

  NOT A LOVERS’ QUARREL

  THE HISTORY OF HISTORY

  FAITH IN SCIENCE

  VOUCHERS FOR ATHEISTS, TOO

  WAR IS HEAVEN

  HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

  NO WOMEN ALLOWED

  ARCHITECTURE AS ART

  IS IT MUSIC OR NOISE?

  TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD

  FOR IT AND AGAINST IT

  WHAT GOETH BEFORE FALLING

  LEAVE NO WAR BEHIND

  TO CATCH A THIEF

  USING THE FLAG

  BROKAW: ANCHOR AWAY

  NOT ABOUT THE POPE

  TOO MANY CHURCHES

  THE KORAN IS THEIR BIBLE

  MURDER MOST VILE

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  PART THREE - On Food and Drink

  WAR ON A FULL STOMACH

  VIVE LA FRENCH FOOD

  FOOD FOR THOUGHTLESS

  BETRAYED BY AN APPETITE

  COOKING’ S THE THING WHEN VACATION COMES AROUND

  THE KITCHEN SINK IN COOKIES

  SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT DRINKING

  WE AREN’T WHAT WE EAT

  THE MORE YOU EAT

  PART FOUR - At Work and in the Newsroom

  IT’S TIME TO REARRANGE TIME

  READING TIME

  MY NAME’S BEEN STOLEN

  ON LIKING YOUR WORK

  FREE SPEECH

  NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS

  A REPORT ON REPORTING

  DON’T STOP THE PRESSES!

  LIFE IS GOOD . . . OR AT LEAST FAIRLY GOOD

  NOT THE RETIRING KIND

  PART FIVE - The Nation at War

  THOUGHTS ON A PEACETIME WAR

  DIPLOMACY: LYING POLITELY

  UNINFORMED AND MISINFORMED

  THE ASHCROFT ISSUE

  A WAR OF WORDS

  A GEOGRAPHY LESSON

  A PREEMPTIVE STRIKE

  TO WAR OR NOT TO WAR

  OUR UN-UNITED NATION

  THE PRESIDENT AND HISTORY

  MUSLIMS AND DEMOCRACY

  THE LOOTER MENTALITY

  A VOTE AGAINST DEMOCRACY

  WORDS DON’T DO IT

  ELECTING A DICTATOR

  TALK TO US, GEORGE

  APOLOGIZING FOR APOLOGIZING

  HEROES DON’T COME WHOLESALE

  GOOD DAYS, BAD DAYS

  WE SHOULD LEAVE WHILE WE’RE BEHIND

  NEVER MIND WHO WON

  TORTURE, AMERICAN STYLE

  NO EASY ANSWERS

  PART SIX - On Politics

  LIBERAL IS A DIRTY WORD

  ELECTION DAY

  JUDGING THE JUDGES

  NO UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTIONS

  BEATING AROUND BUSH

  WE NEED SMARTER LEADERS

  CLINTON AND BUSH

  YOU DO, I THINK

  THE POWER OF A PRESIDENT

  SCHWARZENEGGER FOR PRESIDENT

  THE PERSON YOU ELECTED

  WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  THE GOOD LOSERS

  EINSTEIN FOR PRESIDENT

  HOORAY FOR POLITICIANS

  CRAB GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGNING

  A PHONE CALL TO REMEMBER

  IN BED WITH BUSINESS

  TIME—BOTH OFF AND ON

  A NOTHING-NOTHING TIE IN D.C.

  GOOD PRESIDENT, BAD PRESIDENT

  DIVIDED WE STAND

  NO MORE GAS GUZZLING

  NOT AN INTERVIEW WITH BUSH

  EX-PRESIDENTIAL PERKS

  TALKING HEADS

  WORKING FOR BUSH

  THE KYOTO DECISION

  PART SEVEN - My Life

  HOPELESSLY COPELESS

  ON BEING A COLLEGE PRESIDENT

  CARS I HAVE KNOWN

  ANOTHER LOST WEEKEND

  REUNION: TO GO OR NOT TO GO?

  THE KASHMIR EXPERT

  MAN IS DOGS’ BEST FRIEND

  YOU’VE PROBABLY HAD IT

  A LESS THAN MERRY CHRISTMAS

  TALKING THE TALK

  MISSING FIVE HOURS

  THINGS I LOVE TO HATE

  PURSUIT OF TRUTH, NOT FICTION

  A SHIP AT SEA

  A STAR-SPANGLED TRIP

  THINGS TO DO TODAY

  HOW TO SLEEP

  A FULL HOUSE

  THE V-E DAY I KNOW

  FUGEDDABOUTIT

  FOOD FOR HOLIDAY THOUGHTS

  PART EIGHT - On Money

  OUR POOR ARE RICH

  IT CALLS FOR A REVOLUTION

  FREE ENTERPRISE ANARCHY

  ALL HAIL THE RICH!

  THE BILLION-DOLLAR POOH

  NAME LOTTERY LOSERS

  THE HORSE RACE ECONOMY

  IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

  RICH MAN, POORMAN, BEGGAR MAN

  THE SAVING GRACE

  ALL PLAY AND NO WORK

  FREE ENTERPRISE IS EXPENSIVE

  WRITE TAX LAWS IN ENGLISH

  RAISING MY BLOOD PRESSURE

  WHAT GOES UP NEVER COMES DOWN

  THE GAS BILL

  DON’T BE GREEDY

  THE BUSINESS OF WAR

  PART NINE - The English Language

  ENGLISH FOREIGN TO TOO MANY

  ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE

  DOWN WITH THE SEMICOLON

  THE SOPRANOS, A BASE VOICE

  LAW AMONG THE SORRY LOTT

  ENGLISH ISN’T EASY

  HUMOR ISN’T FUNNY

  THE COMPLEXITIES OF LANGUAGE

  A FEW WORDS ON WORDS

  THE HANDWRITTEN WORD

  PART TEN - The Sports Fan

  THE GOOD-BAD WORLD OF SPORTS

  THE TROUBLE WITH BASEBALL

  EAT YOUR HEART OUT

  WHY I LOVE THE GIANTS

  PITCH AWAY FROM BALLGAME

  NOT WATCHING TELEVISION

  BEFORE JOINING THE HUDDLE . . .

  TOO MANY GAMES

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SUPER

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  I thought to myself, lying in bed one night, in an uncharacteristic moment of modesty, “How much do I have to say that anyone cares about reading?”

  If you write for a living, you have to put modesty out of your mind. It is a great privilege to have something you have written preserved in type and printed as a book.

  One thing I know is, you can make an essay out of anyth
ing. There are times when I’ve written on subjects about which I know very little. A writer can do that. He has the advantage of being able to look things up, to ask questions of other people more knowledgeable than he. He can sit back and think before putting anything down on paper. This puts the writer one up on readers and often makes him sound smarter than he is. I try to do that. It doesn’t seem dishonest. I comb my hair and try to wear decent clothes so I’ll look better than I would naked, so why shouldn’t I try to write in a style that makes me sound smarter and more interesting than I am?

  This book is made up of all essays. The essay is a grand and classic writing format. Igor Stravinsky, the musician, tried to write at one point in his career. He said, “I experience a sort of terror if I sit down to work and find an infinity of possibilities open to me. No effort is conceivable.”

  Stravinsky said he conquered that terror by turning his creative urge to the seven notes of the scale and writing music. “For then I have something solid and concrete,” he said. “I am saved from the anguish of unconditional liberty.”

  I turn not to the piano, but to the essay form. The essay offers a writer a great deal of freedom but falls short of offering the “unconditional liberty” that stopped Stravinsky. The essay provides a writer boundaries within which he can go to work. Confinement is conducive to creativity.

  I am not a great writer, but I don’t write badly very often. This passes for good writing. As a matter of fact, there’s just so much good writing anyone can take. To some extent, it’s like acting. If you notice the acting, it probably isn’t good. Good writing shouldn’t call a lot of attention to itself, either.

  Something happens to a lot of people when they write. Their voice changes—even on paper. They tighten up and are not themselves. One thing of which I am certain is that no one writes as he speaks and no one speaks as he writes. When a writer is faced with the choice of styles, it is always better if he writes more like he speaks. If you know the writer, you should be able to hear his voice as you read the words.

  You can’t take the idea too far because when we talk we are hesitant, discursive and repetitive. If you make a verbatim transcript of a conversation, it invariably needs to be heavily edited before being printed.

  The writer gets a good break in newspapers. His or her name is right there up front, available for credit or blame on whatever has been written. In the arts, it has always bothered me that the writer takes last place. The credits on a movie or a play almost always list the writer in small type where it’s hard to find. I never knew why this was because actors are a dime a dozen and good writers are hard to find. The production of a play or a movie or the publication of a book stands still until the writer gets the words down on paper. No one can do anything until the manuscript appears. There are a dozen editors, publishers, directors, producers and investors waiting for one writer to get something down on paper. Then they change it.

  Writing an essay is, for me, always a pleasure because people tend to leave it alone. An essay isn’t important enough to change.

  The essays in this book were written over the past four years. Some of them show their age. I have rewritten small parts of some of them for that reason. Margie, my wife of sixty years, died in 2004 and her name does not appear as often as it originally did because it hurts too much to write it.

  —ANDY ROONEY

  PART ONE

  Daily Life

  We all look for that perfect day when we have enough to do but not too much.

  WE’RE WASTING AWAY

  Last Saturday, I filled the trunk of my car and the passenger seats behind me with junk and headed for the dump. There were newspapers, empty cardboard boxes, bags of junk mail, advertising flyers, empty bottles, cans and garbage. I enjoy the trip. Next to buying something new, throwing away something old is the most satisfying experience I know.

  The garbage men come twice a week but they’re very fussy. If the garbage is not packaged the way they like it, they won’t take it. That’s why I make a trip to the dump every Saturday. It’s two miles from our house and I often think big thoughts about throwing things away while I’m driving there.

  How much, I got wondering last week, does the whole Earth weigh? New York City alone throws away 24 million pounds of garbage a day. A day! How long will it take us to turn the whole Planet Earth into garbage, throw it away and leave us standing on nothing?

  Oil, coal and metal ore are the most obvious extractions, but any place there’s a valuable mineral, we dig beneath the surface, take it out and make it into something else. We never put anything back. We disfigure one part of our land by digging something out and another after we use it and throw it away. I say “away,” but there’s really no such place as “away.”

  After my visit to the dump, I headed for the supermarket, where I bought $34 worth of groceries. Everything was in something—a can, a box, a bottle, a carton or a bag. When I got to the checkout counter, the cashier separated my cans, boxes, cartons, bottles and bags and put three or four at a time into other bags, boxes or cartons. Whatever came to her hand on the conveyor belt in a bag, she put in another bag. Sometimes she put my paper bags into plastic bags. One bag never seemed to do. If something was in plastic, she put that into paper.

  On the way home, I stopped at the dry cleaners. Five of my shirts, which had been laundered, were in a cardboard box. There was a piece of cardboard in the front of each shirt and another cardboard cutout to fit the collar to keep it from getting wrinkled. Clipped to the front of each shirt was a cloth tag that identified the shirt as mine. The suit I had cleaned was on a throwaway hanger, in a plastic bag with a formfitting piece of paper inside over the shoulders of my suit.

  When I got home, I put the groceries where they belonged in various hiding places in the kitchen. With the wastebasket at hand, I threw out all the outer bags and wrappers. By the time I’d unwrapped and stored everything, I’d filled the kitchen wastebasket a second time, already getting ready for next Saturday.

  It would be interesting to conduct a serious test to determine what percentage of everything we discard. It must be more than 25 percent. I drank the contents of a bottle of Coke and threw the bottle away. The Coca-Cola Company must pay more for the bottle than for what they put in it. Dozens of things we eat come in containers that weigh more and cost the manufacturer more than what they put in them.

  We’ve gone overboard on packaging in the United States and part of the reason is that a bag, a can or a carton provides a place for the producer to display advertising. The average cereal box looks like a roadside billboard.

  The Earth we inhabit could end up as one huge, uninhabitable dump.

  You’d see me there Saturday mornings . . . throwing stuff away.

  JUST ANOTHER DAY

  “Days” don’t move me much. Memorial Day is not a day I remember friends who died during World War II any more than I remember them other days. Fragmentary memories of them often come to mind, evoked by something I see, hear or experience.

  I enjoy thinking of them for a moment, wince at the thought they’re gone forever, then put them out of mind and go about my day. Tears come to my eyes unbidden ten times a year when I think of my boyhood friend Obie Slingerland, who died on the deck of the Saratoga when he landed his plane with a bomb hung up in its bay.

  I don’t need a Memorial Day to remember friends like Obie or Bob O’Connor, Bob Post, Bob Taft, Charley Wood or Bede Irvin. They died in World War II having lived less than half the life I’ve enjoyed.

  We have so many “Days.” Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day when I was a kid. At some point, the name was changed to Memorial Day and set aside to honor all war dead. That seemed like a step in the right direction. Armistice Day, a federal holiday, was changed to Veterans Day in 1954.

  It seems to me all these “Days” don’t really do much for those they’re intended to honor. When my mother was alive, I didn’t love her more on “Mother’s Day.” I got caught up with the �
��Mother’s Day” pitch by the card, flower and candy promoters but I always resented it. She would laugh if I bought her flowers or candy, dismissing it as silly and something I didn’t have to do. However, I always suspected she might have missed it just a little if I hadn’t done it. Margie doesn’t sit by the phone waiting for it to ring on Mother’s Day but when it did ring at 6 P.M. on May 12, she said, “There’s the last one.” She’d kept track.

  If none of our four children ever called me again on Father’s Day or my birthday, it wouldn’t make me think they didn’t like me. I know them too well.

  Columbus Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday are good rallying days for the Italians, the Irish and black Americans. It’s good for them to get together to indicate their pride in their heritage, but I don’t think Columbus Day or Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday should be federal holidays. The Irish, at least, have had the good sense to celebrate with their St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Sunday when drivers are not trying to get to work.

  Washington’s Birthday is observed as a federal holiday on the third Monday of February. Twelve states have tried to make sense of honoring Lincoln and Washington by establishing “President’s Day” to honor both of them but it isn’t a federal holiday. The silly but good holidays are Halloween, Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving. I don’t know how we let Thanksgiving in so close to Christmas. It’s good if you don’t mind having turkey on two occasions so close together.

  The fastest-growing religion in the United States is Islam and you can bet the Muslims are going to demand holidays of their own before many moons.

  I don’t like to see days off proliferate. There are five great American holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. We need Labor Day because it’s the real New Year’s Day and a signal that summer vacation is over.

  STATES BY THE NUMBERS

  Minnesota is the best state to live in, according to a book of statistics called State Rankings, put together by Kathleen and Scott Morgan, who live in Kansas, the thirteenth best state to live in.

  After Minnesota come Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and Massachusetts.