PRESS: The All-Time Day Story
Powers, Thomas
PRESS Of all the onerous chores young reporters are given to do, the Day story is worst. Obituaries are always easy to write, and sometimes interesting, and police stories are flavored with...
...We meet the excesses of each new era wan innocence intact, if it gets Beaten down over a time, when the era is over a general pardon will be issued, and our innocence will be fluffed up again, like a pillow...
...In a limited dose-say a year or so-police reporting will give you a good idea of the chaos from which societies grow, and to which they sometimes return...
...THOMAS POWBRS...
...Are they slit-eyed Reagan voters, who cheer when the former California governor says there will be no limited wars while he is President...
...The young black man was then taken down a corridor to the lockup...
...After that the desk sergeant signed the property form...
...In New Haven, once, nearly fifteen years ago, I saw a policeman lead in a young black man with a torn shirt and bis hands cuffed behind his back...
...But after a year or so you cease to sympathize with anyone...
...As soon as his hands were free he swung on the cop who had brought him in...
...You decide-not consciously, after considering the good arguments on the one hand, as opposed to the . excellent counter-arguments on the other hand...
...Obituaries are always easy to write, and sometimes interesting, and police stories are flavored with violence, greed and the seedy appeal of the lower depths...
...The city editor will strike hagiography...
...Are they lowering their sights with Brown, or yearning to trust Carter...
...They are worrying the problem right now, trying to think of the one true thing to say about the first two hundred years of the United States of America...
...watch and are beginning to join the nightly poker game in the police shack...
...It's a daunting prospect...
...The most recent are half a million Cubans and no one knows how many Puerto Ricans, but they, like earlier groups, tend to collect in defensive stockades- Miami in the one instance, New York in the other...
...God forbid they should be like those carpers who say the poor are still with us and the washing machines aren't built to last, but they mustn't overlook America's darker side either...
...As soon as the cell door clanked shut he commenced to yell...
...The lead seems all but impossible, not because there is nothing left to say about George Washington-there is probably plenty- but because the George Washington Birthday story is supposed to be a news story but there is almost certainly nothing newsworthy about the day itself...
...This is a Day story: "Downtown stores, the Whalley Avenue Elementary School marching band, and the New Haven Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, among other area groups, will celebrate George Washington's 230th birthday today with a cherry pie sale, a cherry tree pageant and march-past, and a commemorative reading of Parson Weems' hagiography of the nation's first President...
...What is their character...
...You begin to like eating dinner at one in the morning, after the paper has gone to bed, and like waking up at noon on hot summer mornings, and sometimes forget to brush your teeth before the first cigarette of the day...
...When the time comes to rise and deliver a wedding toast, or a funeral eulogy, or only to wish someone a happy birthday, there is but one thing to do: put the best construction on the facts that you can...
...Whenever I had to write Day stories I used to think of history professors who would begin a course by saying that events are fluid in this world, dates don't matter, history is not cheese to be neatly sliced by centuries...
...Not long ago I read E M. Forster's essay, "Notes on the English Character," and was struck by two things: the fact that the English did indeed have a character, and that Forster had a pretty good idea what it was...
...They have not yet deeply penetrated the rest of the country, where the "Americans'* live...
...But even so it always makes me a little toad to see Reston handing out his pardons, talking about the soaring American spirit and forgetting so quicklyt all the people who got pommeled along the way...
...You've got me...
...It's a thin line the Day storymen have got to walk, and there are going to be plenty of witnesses for those who lose their footing and plunge off into the muck on one side, or the treacle on the other...
...The Ancient Work...
...like them we have lost our innocence a thousand times-when we counted Negroes as two-fifths of a man in our Constitution, when we killed all of the buffalo and most of the Indians, when we cut down all the trees, and paid children a dollar a week to work in the mines, and deported thousands of radicals after WW I, and interned the Japanese in WW II, and hounded the pinkos out of academe, and fought a popular insurrection in Vietnam with Free Fire Zones...
...Police stories wear you down, or did me, and obituaries are too perfunctory to engage you (with the occasional exception of some old fellow who went to the Klondike in 1890), and weather stories are as interesting as the weather, fine in tornado country or hurricane season, prosaic otherwise, but Day stories are never anything but hollow and arbitrary...
...Vietnam, the $100 billion defense budget and COIN-TELPRO are nothing to celebrate...
...The door to the lockup was closed but the prisoner only yelled louder...
...I am reminded of the turn-of-the-century sporting house ladies who became virgins again after they retired...
...There was a shout or two, some ugly thumps, and then silence...
...It is common to begin such a year of police reporting with an instinctive sympathy for the criminal, partly because they have had no advantages (so unlike yourself), and partly because they choose to live defiantly, and by their wits...
...I suppose that was an infraction of the law...
...We tarn over a new leaf, and start out fresh, and can be as shocked at the hundredth crime, as we were at the first...
...we would never be innocent again...
...What sort of people have they become in two hundred years...
...He yelled for twenty minutes...
...I have the deepest sympathy for those in the front lines, waiting to go over the top, not only the apprentices who are going to write the Basic Day story listing all the picnics, parades and speeches, but the leathery champions like James Reston and David Broder and Joseph Kraft and all their hundreds of colleagues...
...it used up all our idealism...
...but unconsciously, perhaps while walking home alone at night, or while sleeping too late in the groggy heat of summer mornings-that this eternal war has nothing to do with you...
...We can learn that the government has lied to us, that the CIA tried to poison Lumumba, that babies were shot right along with the adults at Mylai, that Nixon cheated on his income taxes (imagine...
...But I started out to talk about Day stories...
...Even worse is the possibility that a stroke of genius will somehow enable you to write a good Day story, thereby guaranteeing your editor will assign you the task of writing all subsequent day stories-Easter, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, St...
...The cop went back against a wall and his cheek bone turned red...
...The most terrible things can happen in the course of a year...
...You have probably ceased to...
...Day stories are hard to write...
...Some other cops got the young black man under control and handcuffed him again, but not before he bit one of them in the hand...
...The Bicentennial is the Day story of all time (at least until New Year's Day 2000, which is too awful to contemplate), a challenge which cannot be ducked, but how is one to do justice to the passage of two centuries of (almost) steady growth with no single overriding theme which does not have as many critics as champions...
...Sisyphus springs to mind...
...When you consider what had happened Fitzgerald's remark makes eminent good sense, but he failed to take into account the capacity of Americans for regaining their innocence after they have lost it...
...Almost anything you say will provoke an argument, and if it doesn't, it's too bland to bother saying...
...During the first year you team a lot, more than you would in another twenty doing the same thing, but after that year you had better move on to another beat, or get out of newspaper reporting altogether...
...but we can be sure all the same that when Christmas arrives, Reston and his colleagues are going to issue the annual Christmas pardon...
...They emptied his pockets, typed up a property list, and then uncuffed him so he could sign the form...
...It makes my teeth grate to think of the general amnesty he's going to declare in his Bicentennial pay story...
...Would they side with Udall, if only his dogged progressivism had a chance...
...The American Revolution did not begin in April, 1775, and the nation was not born on July 4, 1776...
...F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote somewhere-I have forgotten where-that World War I ended the American childhood...
...By that time yon have slipped out of phase with ordinary life, and live in the eddies of walk-up flats and all-night restaurants and weekends which come in the middle of the week...
...No, it's the fact that, pushed to it, I think Reston has got the right idea...
...As long ago as 1782 Crevecoeur asked "Who is this American, this new man...
...I'll growl when I read it, but the truth is I'll probably be in a pardoning mood myself, and reston will get one too...
...It is hollow because the holiday is perfunctory, and it is arbitrary because you have got to make something out of next to nothing and write a story anyway...
...You cease to surprise yourself by feeling instinctive disappointment when car accidents are not fatal...
...Everybody has his own list, but there isn't a crime on it-with the possible exception only of the most recent, whose turn is coming-which has not been blotted out from all but scholars' memories with a general pardon...
...By the end of the year, however, you are no longer quite so noticing...
...He didn't...
...After hah* an hour or so the cop who had brought him in went back out to the lockup, billy club in hand...
...At the time, I didn't blame the cop one bit...
...Along about the middle of the year your sympathy switches to the policeman, after you have begun to see that criminals-or at least those you are running across-are not lone wolves, crafty and proud, but mad dogs...
...He Understands what a Day story is...
...perhaps this, then, is one of the things which make up the irreducible American character, this ability to regain our innocence, and repeatedly fight the same battle, against the same enemies, in the name of the same ideals...
...and some sort of answer ought to be possible after nearly two hundred years...
...It is hard to fault such a subtle and mature view of the historical process, but it does not take into account the exigencies of journalism, and when July 4, 1976 rolls around, newspapers all over America are going to publish Day stories, and I am sure reporters are worrying right now what in God's name they are going to say in them...
...They will have their reservations and their concerns for the future, as who doesn't, but in the end they are going to forgive us...
...I expect they are sleepless at night, irritable with their children, fired by a hundred sudden enthusiasms, then tormented by doubts...
...It was nearly midnight and the other prisoners shouted for him to shut the hell up...
...Is there never & year so bad that even he feels it proper to end it with an indictment, instead of a pardon...
...I don't know how it was done, but there is nothing to be gained by doubting their sincerity...
...This isn't just sentimentality-although it's that too-and it isn't a short memory, and it certainly isn't a cosy feeling that everything was some sort of mistake...
...did not end with the sack of Rome in 456, the Renaissance did not begin with Dante, the lights of Europe did not go out in August, 1914, but had been flickering dim for years, and are perhaps flickering still...
...It's impossible to guess what he or his colleagues are going to find to say, except, perhaps, in one respect If history is any guide-and ten thousand Fourth of July and Christmas columns are all but unanimous on this point-then Reston and the rest are going to issue a pardon...
...No wonder Reston is working so hard on this column...
...Of course we are a people of various strains, not all of them on good terms, some of them not even on speaking terms, and new groups are signing in all the time...
...He closed the door behind him...
...Can't he call anything by its right name...
...The event was so terrible, the reasons for it so shallow and mendacious, the result so bitter that we would never get over the shock of disillusion...
...Valentine's Day, and thus on around to George Washington again...
...Naturally I began to wonder if Americans had a character too...
...Doesn't anything touch him...
...He wanted a lawyer, he wanted a phone call, he wanted a drink of water, he wanted the cops to know what he thought of them...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
