The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News Correspondent Andy Rooney.
EFL and relevance. My first ever RB post!
It’s hard to know how much time to spend remembering. Memories are more often sad than happy. The word "memorial" itself has a sad sound to it. Those to whom we are close die, and we want to remember them. We die, and we want to be remembered, but no amount of longing can bring anyone back, so there is a limit to the value of grief. | "Memories are more often sad than happy"? Perhaps it's only a certain mindset that treasures the sad over the happy. My most treasured memories are my happy ones — my Dad teaching me to ride a bike; fishing at the dam with my friend when I was eight years old; walking home on a cool night with an exceptionally pretty girl, slightly inebriated, singing "Buffalo Gals" for no particular reason. I can tell stories of red mud and misery and the smell of bodies rotting in the hot sun, but those aren't the memories I keep closest. But I guess Andy does. |
We think of this war now in Iraq as terrible because every day we get the news that three or seven more Americans have been killed. This is his first big lie. If three Americans were killed each day, the death toll would be well over 1000; if it were seven each day, the toll would be nearly 3000 (that’s about how many were killed on 9/11).| He's doing the imagery thing. Facts aren't important when you're doing imagery. Not being of the same bent as Andy, I'm proud of the fact that we've thrown really, really bad guys out of control of two countries at a cost to date of less than a thousand men. Things will probably get worse in the future, but we're pretty economical of lives. |
In the Civil War, 365,000 Northern soldiers were killed, and 133,000 soldiers from the South died. In World War I, 116,000 American soldiers were killed. In World War II, 407,000 died, 54,000 died in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam. More than a million Americans have died in our wars, each one much loved by someone. | That's why war's hell, Andy. Those were wars where men's lives were sacrificed for a purpose. Does the fact that a half million died in the Civil War make it not worth fighting? Did the outcome justify the sacrifice? How about WWII? Did the expenditure of 407,000 Americans keep even more Americans — and Brits and Frenchies and Russers and Danes and Norwegians and Poles — from suffering and dying? War is society's way of defending itself and preserving itself. |
There are men in every country on earth - mostly men - who spend full time devising new ways for us to kill each other. In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. I didn’t bother to look this up, but this has got to be another lie. We may spend 7 times as much on DEFENSE as on education, but not much of our defense spending is on "war."| I think he's probably talking about the government office concerned with education, part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Without defending the nation our kiddies could be educated in other subjects than modern dance and Womyns' Studies. They could be studying the Koran. Or they could be studying Marx more assiduously than they are. Or they could be writing commentaries on Mein Kampf, at least the white, blond ones could... |
There’s something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them. So Rooney thinks that World War II was idiotic? I guess that doesn’t surprise me. BTW, this last comment ignited a fierce family "debate" during which I feared that might very slightly pro-war wife would slap my anti-war mother. |