Andy Rooney

Don’t you hate it when a fixture of the past several decades of your life comes to an end, reminding you of your own aging? That happened with the announcement that Andy Rooney, 92, would stop delivering his regular 60 Minutes commentaries. It’s been one of the more fantastic runs in TV history.

Rooney was nearly 60 when he began his commentaries in 1978, so he’s cemented in the minds of his audience as a curmudgeon raising his bushy eyebrows in skepticism at a foolish world. But while it’s easy to sum him up as a cranky old man telling the world to get off his televisual lawn, one of my favorite observations of his was an unstereotypically Rooney sentiment suggesting that it’s myopic for one generation to assume that everything new is worse: “It’s just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.” It’ll have to get there without him now.