Within days his producer, Don Hewitt, said, “I spend 90% of my waking hours trying to get Andy Rooney back.” And 22 days after the suspension was announced, Rooney was indeed back. Then, in a draft of a letter to a magazine, Rooney said that he considered sex between men “repugnant.” For this, Rooney was given a three-month suspension. Not whispered them into a bowl of granola.Īndy Rooney, the apparent philosopher, no simple setter of odds, may or may not have said that blacks watered down their genes, but he definitely did say that “homosexual unions” were a cause of “premature death.” He didn’t say this in a spontaneous interview in a restaurant, but in a prerecorded network television show.
The Greek would have bellowed those words. “I still don’t know what I did,” he says, but there’s no outrage to the words, no heart to them, no Greek to them. And instead of diminishing, that sense of injustice has festered, until all that seems left of Jimmy Snyder is the core of anger and bewilderment. Because when CBS took away his job two years and four months ago with a one-paragraph release that called him “reprehensible”-to be precise, it was his remarks they called reprehensible, not him, but that distinction blurred long ago within Jimmy Snyder’s mind-they apparently carved his guts right out, which have since been replaced completely by the singular obsession that he was wronged. He’s says “I’m dead” because no other word wraps as neatly around the emotion that dominates his life. He doesn’t mean he’s literally dead in fact, after spending nine months in and out of Miami Heart Institute, with the bad heart and the chicken pox and shingles and diabetes, he’s looking much, much better than last year, if dangerously overweight, certainly younger than 71.
He doesn’t mean he’s dead because he’s in trouble. They are as soft and insubstantial as rust flaking away, so soft that at first you think you might have heard him wrong, except that his eyes are focused on something that isn’t there, and the flesh of his face has gone completely slack, and part of a bagel sits forgotten halfway to his mouth, and there really couldn’t have been any mistaking them at all. His words break the silence of a breakfast conversation that has wound down to nothing.
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