Andy Rooney - 1919-2011

[Kadarin]

And just weeks after retiring... Godspeed, Andy.

 

[evident]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ_0yajZ0WY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

[woodie1]

RIP. He made complaining, whining and ranting an art form, and I say that with respect. 😛

Yes. I didn't always agree with him but did enjoy his perspective and the way it was presented.

 

[ElFenix]

rip curmudgeon

 

[sandorski]

🙁

Haven't watched 60 Minutes in decades, but always enjoyed Rooney's Rants/Whines. They were always Comedic, Familiar, and just a great piece of Poetry/Prose.

 

[Perknose]

There was no art in anything he ever said. He was just dumb and cranky.

I wasn't exactly a fan myself, but you couldn't be more wrong.

As this excellent piece ends:

Reasonable people may disagree on whether Andy Rooney was funny, or whether he should have stayed on “60 Minutes” for as long as he did. But the man is a fine writer of a sort that is gradually disappearing along with his generation. His personality provokes debate. His talent demands respect.

There was, in fact, fierce art and discipline in his writing. Some of his accomplishments:

For his 1975 special “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” he won television’s highest honor, the Peabody. Rooney wrote the script for the 1975 TV documentary “FDR: The Man Who Changed America,” and won an Emmy for writing the 1968 special “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed,” part of a series of CBS specials titled “Of Black America.” When I met Kurt Vonnegut at college literary event in 1990 and asked him who he thought an aspiring writer should study, Andy Rooney was on his short list.

He won a bronze star for his WWll reporting. Try this elegant and evocative line about Normandy on for size:

Recalling the sight of thousands of dead soldiers sprawled on the beach at Normandy, he wrote: “I remember the boots. All the same on such different boys.”

Want depth? Read his musings on patriotism:

War brings up questions to which there are no answers. One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in a country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime, Maybe that’s enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If I could only get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.

The guy spoke as he wrote, with admirable economy and directness. You don't have to agree with him, as I often didn't, to recognize that he was all about the art and craft of his words.