Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [51]
About a year ago, I became aware of a more serious theft of my name and it is so hurtful to my reputation that it calls for legal action against the thief. Hundreds of people have written asking if I really wrote the twenty detestable remarks made under my name that have had such wide circulation on the Internet.
The list of remarks begins: “I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses and big campfires.”
It continues:
My Name’s Been Stolen 105
“I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting babies.”
“Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer.”
“I have the right NOT to be tolerant of others because they are weird, different or tick me off.”
Some of the remarks, which I will not repeat here, are viciously racist and the spirit of the whole thing is nasty, mean and totally inconsistent with my philosophy of life. It is apparent that the list of comments has been read by hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom must believe that it accurately represents opinions of mine that I don’t dare express in my writings or on television. It is seriously damaging to my reputation.
The only good thing to come out of this incident is the dozens of letters I’ve received from people saying they know me well enough to know I didn’t write the comments. There must be many more, however, who are ready to believe I did write them.
I have tracked the e-mail back to an address in Tucson and a Web site called CelebrityHypocrites.com, which is owned by a man named Dave Mason. Mr. Mason lists as his address, 405 East Wetmore Road, No. 117 PMB 520, Tucson, AZ 85705. I was in Tucson recently and foolishly went to that address thinking it might be Mason’s home or business. I’d like to know more about Mason, but the address was a commercial mailbox business and I didn’t wait around for him to show up so I could confront him. If it is Dave Mason who has stolen my name, I demand that he put out a retraction that reaches as many people as his fraudulent e-mail did.
On Writing
There Is No Secret
W riters are repeatedly asked to explain where they get their ideas. People want their secret. The truth is there is no secret and writers don’t have many new ideas. At least, they don’t have many ideas that a comic strip artist would illustrate with a light bulb over their heads.
New ideas are one of the most overrated concepts of our time. Most of the important ideas that we live with aren’t new at all. If we’re grown up, we’ve had our personal, political, economic, religious, and philosophical ideas for a long time. They evolved out of some experience we had or they came from someone we were exposed to before we were twenty-five. How many of us have changed our opinion about anything important after we were twenty-five because of some new idea?
Like almost everything else that gets popular, new ideas and the concept of creativity have been trivialized. People are passing off novelty for invention. Not many products have been improved with a new idea compared to the number whose quality has been diminished by inferior workmanship and the use of inferior materials. The shortage we face in this country is not new ideas, it’s quality work.
Much of the progress of the world has come through genuine creativity but we’ve cheapened the whole concept by treating creativity as if it were a commodity that could be bought and sold by the pound.
Colleges teach courses in “creative writing” as if a course in just plain writing weren’t enough. Trying to teach someone to be creative is as silly as a mother trying to teach her child to be a genius.
I don’t know where we all got the thought that ideas come in a blinding flash or that we can learn how to be struck with creative new