Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [63]
Truth has a much better reputation than lying. We propagandize ourselves in favor of it every chance we get. All the wise men have endorsed it:
Plato—“Truth will prevail.”
H. W. Shaw—“Truth is the edict of God.”
Emerson—“Every violation of truth is a stab at the health of human
society.”
Woodrow Wilson—“The truth always matches, piece by piece, with other parts of the truth.”
Mark Twain—“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
In spite of the lip service we pay truth, we spend a lot of time deciding when to lie. It’s good that it doesn’t come easily or naturally to most of us. We spend even more time trying to determine when we’re being lied to and when we’re being told the truth.
Advertising puts us to the test and gives us a lot of experience in detecting untruths. We know they lie so how good is this product they’re telling us about? And what about politicians? Not many people pick up the newspaper and read a story coming out of Washington without wondering whether they’re getting the truth or some altered version of it. The elected official who lies or tells less than the whole truth may, like the husband, believe that it’s best for everyone if he doesn’t go overboard being honest. He can get himself believing it’s best for the American people if they do not know the whole truth. He is not lying for personal gain. This is called “Lying Made Easy.”
It is even sadder to consider the possibility that many Americans know it and accept it. They don’t want the burden of knowing the truth because they are then confronted with solving some of the problems.
Trying to discern whether we’ve been lied to or not is complicated when we start considering that maybe we were told part of the truth but not all the truth. Part of the truth is like a lie but worse because it’s more devious and more difficult to detect.
As a guest on the Larry King show one night I said some things, in answer to his questions, that I would have been better off lying about or avoiding. My superiors at CBS were angry. It was not that the people who objected to what I said necessarily thought I was wrong. They simply thought I shouldn’t have said it. It was, they thought, disloyal to be critical of CBS while I still took a salary from the company.
In my own defense, I told a boss of mine that I thought if all the truth were known by everyone about everything, it would be a better world. He scoffed. I think “scoff ” is what he did. I know he rejected the idea.
I’ve thought about it and in retrospect decided he was right. It was a pompous statement that sounds true but probably isn’t. Our lives could not survive all the truth about everything. If my boss asks me about it again though, I’m going to lie and repeat it. I like the sound of it. Maybe I can get my name in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations by saying, “It would be a better world if everyone in it knew all the truth about everything.”
The Sweet Spot in Time
I’m lukewarm on both yesterday and tomorrow. Neither science fiction nor nostalgia interests me as much as today. I am tempted by the promise of all the great things coming up tomorrow, of course, and I do enjoy all the good memories and the graceful, simple and efficient artifacts of yesterday, the antiques, but this moment is the moment I like best.
The Sweet Spot in Time 135
These thoughts inevitably come at Christmas time. It’s easy to get sentimental about the memories of Christmases past and years past and the people you spent them with. The advertising for gifts with which to commemorate the season, on the other hand, often emphasizes the new technology. “Buy her a computer, the tool of the future!”
So I feel a certain ambivalence toward both the past and the future. I dislike retyping a piece to correct mistakes or rearrange paragraphs. My son, Brian, said that if I got with it and bought myself a word processor, I wouldn’t have to do those