Kurt Cobain Reaction
I’m well paid for what I do here on 60 Minutes, and while the money’s nice, it’s the warm, generous comments I get that make this job a joy to have – like the comments I got after my remarks last week about the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whom I’d never heard of.
“Dear Mr. Rooney, I can honestly say you are the jackass of the nation. I believed all my life God was perfect and has no flaws, but your creation causes me to rethink this.” Joey Mulvey, Middle Village, New York.
“You are an old, outdated, blundering boob笨蛋.” Signed, Disappointed, T. Michaels, Memphis, Tennessee.
“I will never listen to another word out of your vile mouth. I hope that on the day your obituary appears, some commentator will correctly describe you as the loud-mouthed, self-important, out-of-touch windbag that you are. Too bad you won’t be around to read it.” Mark Chamberlain.
Well, I was around to read Eric Mink of the New York Daily News, who said I dismissed the pain of a grieving, young Kurt Cobain fan who spoke of how hard it is to be a young person today.
“In other words,” Mr. Mink writes, “forget the ethnic brutality revived by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. Forget the repressive governments of the Far East, the starving peoples of the Sudan, the warring factions in South Africa, the racial divisions in this Country, and the environmental recklessness that threatens to despoil剝奪the planet.”
I’ll have to admit that I didn’t realize these problems were what Kurt Cobain was singing about. Maybe I have been unfair.
Anna Quindlen, columnist for The New York Times, wrote that I “brought to the issue of youthful despair a mixture of sarcasm and contempt. After all,” she said, “that has long been the attitude their elders have brought to the pain of those far younger than they.”
When I said I’d like to relieve the pain of young grunge fans by switching ages with them, Ms. Quindlen said, “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be seventeen again on a bet.”
She finishes her column saying that young people who feel an inner agony “often do not reveal themselves because they suspect some adult will scoff and say that what they feel is ‘nonsense.’” “Sunday evening,” Ms. Quindlen concludes, “some adult did just that – and on national television, too.”
From Andy Rooney, Years of Minutes, pp. 267-268.
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