Defending the Right Not to Have a Nice Day

by Warren St. John
The New York Times - May 25, 2003

On a rainy morning last week at his office at the West 57th Street headquarters of CBS News, Andy Rooney, the nation's curmudgeon in chief, took a few minutes to talk about the virtues of complaining. He sat in his familiar spot behind the walnut desk he made himself, and in front of a bookshelf full of titles that seemed to say something about their owner: there was lots of H. L. Mencken, a copy of Bertrand Russell's "Sceptical Essays" and a book called "The Worst of Everything."

"The only way to correct what's wrong is to talk about it," Mr. Rooney said. "A restaurant needs complaints or it's never going to fix what's not going right."

He leaned forward in his chair, scrunched his bushy eyebrows together and adopted that quizzically philosophical tone he uses in his Sunday night broadcasts.

"I don't know why we're so evasive," he said. "People are not honest about what they say. Part of it passes for good manners, and part of it is wanting to be liked by not being negative about things. Negative does not have a good reputation as compared with affirmative."

Indeed, these are tough times for America's cranks, complainers and curmudgeons. Maybe because there's so much that is genuinely wrong — with threats of terrorism and a rotten economy — Americans just aren't in the mood for pessimism. And anyway, in a culture dominated by the relentlessly cheery ethos of the self-help movement, grumps and contrarians are frequently dismissed as mildly delusional, or worse, viewed as malignancies that must be isolated and cut out.

If there were any doubt that cranks are under siege, consider that on Wednesday a group calling itself Smile Mania is putting on a national event called the Great American Grump Out, which aims to do for cantankerousness what the Great American Smoke-Out did for tobacco addiction. Janice Hathy, a 55-year-old stress management consultant from Venice, Fla., has been promoting the Grump Out with a series of happiness exercises; she recently headed a "drive-by smiling" in which she and some local students stood at an intersection and flashed cardboard smiley-faces at passing motorists. On the big day, she said, she and a "grump patrol" will don clown-noses, blow bubbles and hand out bananas. ("When you look at them sideways, they look like smiles," she explained.) They plan to establish "no grumping zones" in her hometown and to urge their fellow citizens toward positivity and optimism.

Ms. Hathy likens negativity to a plague. "It makes us sick and keeps us sick," she said.

Barbara S. Held, a psychology professor at Bowdoin College and the author of "Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching," a book about the virtues of curmudgeonliness, said the Grump Out is part of what she calls "the tyranny of the positive attitude in America."

"It's telling people there's one way to be — smile, be positive," she said. "First you feel bad, then you're told you're defective for not being cheerful about it." Ms. Held added that the pervasive feeling that iconoclastic ideas are unhealthy may be depriving younger Americans of what she called "the right nutrients to grow a curmudgeonly attitude."

Indeed, America might be facing a curmudgeon shortage. The country's best-known cranks are aging — Mr. Rooney is 84, Gore Vidal is 77, Art Buchwald is 77, Jimmy Breslin is 73 and even Fran Lebowitz, 52, is getting up there — or else they're imported, like Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and Simon Cowell, the grouchy judge on American Idol. It's enough to make one feel pessimistic about pessimism.

So how many curmudgeons are there? It's hard to get a tally, in part because few curmudgeons will cop to their curmudgeonliness. Mr. Rooney, for example, said he never cared for the term and doesn't know why it's applied to him. Ms. Lebowitz said she preferred the term "realist." Bill Maher, the former host of "Politically Incorrect" on ABC, who lost his job after he angered network executives with comments about Sept. 11, said he wasn't one, and that he wasn't a contrarian either.

"When people hear contrarian they think that you're trying to be contrary," he said. "No, we are just of the opinion that the rest of you are crazy. I really do think religion is bad and drugs are good," he added, "and I really am for mad cow disease."

Mr. Maher said he has long felt like an outsider. "When Ronald Reagan used to say `It's morning in America,' I always thought to myself, `But I'm not a morning person,' " he said.

Jon Winokur, the author of "The Portable Curmudgeon" and a self-described connoisseur of curmudgeons, said the term suggested "a crust of misanthropy," and added that most curmudgeons are characterized by an ability to "combine malice with wit." George Carlin, Dennis Miller, Mr. Vidal and Mr. Breslin make his list of favorite cranks. Mr. Winokur said he knew of only one genuinely young American curmudgeon, 31-year-old Geoff Shackelford, a golf writer who makes a living writing cantankerous reviews of golf courses. Mr. Shackelford said he's been on a curmudgeon's apprenticeship of sorts, reading lots of Mencken. But he said it's not easy being a young grouch.

"Look at comedy now; that says it all," he said. "Much of it has gravitated towards slapstick, like Jackass, instead of a Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner `Let's have fun with stereotypes.' "

"It's the death of being able to make a joke about something," he said.

So what does it matter if there are fewer cranks? Julie K. Norem, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College and the author of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking," said curmudgeons actually serve an important cultural role. "They help us as a society to avoid complacency," she said. "Most people would rather avoid the negative."

Ms. Norem said most curmudgeons are what she calls "defensive pessimists," people who think about what could go wrong, rather than what could go right. She called the trait "the opposite of denial," and said it could have a positive effect. By thinking of negative outcomes, defensive pessimists prepare themselves practically and psychologically for unpleasant outcomes.

Alan Zweig, an admitted crank and a filmmaker currently at work on a documentary called "I, Curmudgeon," takes a predictably dimmer view. Mr. Zweig said that in his experience the only people who benefit from encountering curmudgeons are other curmudgeons. He gave an example. Suppose you're in a bar, he said, and Celine Dion is blaring on the juke box. "You look around and everybody is saying, `This is so great — I want to play this at my wedding,' " he said. "Then somebody comes along and says, `Hey, turn this garbage off.' That's a great moment," he said. "You needed that."

"If you're the least bit negative or suspicious you can go crazy if you don't hear the odd person saying something you think too," he said.

But being the lone voice of reason, he said, can have a social cost. Mr. Zweig was at a party a few years ago when a Nike commercial featuring the late writer and heroin appreciator William S. Burroughs appeared on the television. Offended by the idea of an addict selling sneakers to kids, he launched into a curmudgeonly rant. "Everybody looked at me like, `Ooo, that guy, he gets all worked up over a sneaker commercial. That's kind of sad, that guy with his lonely opinion,' " he said.

"There is a level of self-destructiveness to it," he said. "Curmudgeons don't pick their battles, they fight every battle."

The isolation of curmudgeons in America may be rooted in our country's heritage. Ms. Held, the Bowdoin psychologist, pointed out that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 that America was built on the profoundly uncurmudgeonly idea of "the indefinite perfectibility of man."

"By virtue of being conceived in a democratic country we are by nature optimistic," she said.

Even so, Ms. Norem said that according to her research, between 25 and 30 percent of Americans are defensive pessimists, and therefore have the foundations of a curmudgeonly attitude. (In France, she said, the number is closer to 50 percent.)

In laboratory studies, she said, she has found that defensive pessimists can do better at everything from puzzles to throwing darts if they are allowed to engage in anxious worrying beforehand. Show the pessimists a nice relaxing nature video before the tasks, and they do worse. The lesson, Ms. Norem said, is not that everyone should be negative, but rather, that pessimists and curmudgeons should get in touch with their inner negativity and embrace it.

On Grump Out day, Fran Lebowitz said, she plans to do just that. "In order to be cheery, you have to be unconscious," she said. "And anything that has the word `out' in it, I don't like — except `Get out.' "