
          An Unending Stream: History One Day at a Time.
          Reviewed by Dunbar, LeslieLeslie Dunbar
          Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 20-23
          
          The News
and Observer, Raleigh, North_Carolina, (Friday, November 17,
1989, five sections, $0.25).
          We are swamped by information. The least of us knows, sort of,
things that the wisest of old could hardly imagine; nor the most
pessimistic know to dread. Historians are the reporters of what of the
past is important to keep in memory; news reporters are historians of
the instant, digesting for our minds each day's memorable
happenings.
          I am a word man myself, and so I get nearly all my "news" from
reading, not from television. I suppose, though, it is all the same:
the stream is unending and unrelenting. Usually we take it passively,
absorb what we can or want to and go on about our business. Every now
and then, however, the weight of it jolts one into awareness. It is
like catching a cold in the winter; there are germs swirling about all
the time, but only sometimes are we vulnerable. The news of November
17 may not have been more overwhelming than on many other days, but it
was one of mine for being vulnerable.
          My morning paper is the Raleigh News and
Observer. It is a good newspaper. Compared with what was for
years my daily, the New Fork Times, it covers
local and state news more adequately and its editorials are typically
more intelligent and stimulating (even when wrong or
annoying). National and international news it mostly cribs from the
big national dailies, and does that very well. It carries probably too
many columnists, and as the contemporary preoccupation with "balance"
demands, selects them from a range of opinions; also in contemporary
style, it pretty well ignores the left. Conservatives such as Safire,
Kilpatrick, and Georgie Anne Geyer are not truly "balanced" by a
centrist such as wicker--more closely by the occasional Mary McGrory
but she is outnumbered several to one. Admittedly, America political
opinion has not much "left," but it should not really be hard to find
pro-labor or pacifist or Marxist commentators. Nevertheless, the News and Observer is a paper of quality, has a
manifest integrity about itself, and no one outside its home-town owns
it; not yet at any rate.
          Back to November 17. Look at the day's front page, the mounting of
the flood that was to break over me. The "top" story was that five
Jesuit priests plus a lay one (later we would also learn that he was
Jesuit), their cook and her daughter, were murdered in San Salvador,
almost certainly by thugs in the employ of our side in a civil war
which seems on the brink of turning El Salvador into another Lebanon,
where death is an individual's and the national society's realistic
expectation.
          There was more on the front page. In one of the state's towns, a
twenty-year-old black mother of three children, ages two months, one
year and two years, killed them all with a steak knife; no one seems
to know why. In East Germany, non-communist parties entered the
Cabinet; in South_Africa beaches were de-segregated; and in the United
States the House of Representatives "balances" reforms of its ethics
by pay increases.
          A political horror. A private horror. An advent of liberty. A small
murmur for equality. A decaying of a once 

proud American
institution. The news of November 17, 1989, would go on this way; one
could sense history trembling in order to rise and claim it all.
          In the following pages, George Bush, Jesse Helms (in the manner of
a playbill, I am picking up characters in order of appearance), the
five Senators who took the coin of a rotting savings and loan, Admiral
Poindexter (does anyone believe that the subpoena he got, as this day
reported, for Mr. Reagan to testify at his trial will actually be
fulfilled?), Phillip Morris (that's a corporation which will subsidize
the government's celebration of the Bill of Rights' bicentennial), and
Ms. Donna Bazemore--all these stride toward us.
          Ms. Bazemore, not so incidentally, is a black_woman of Ahoskie,
North_Carolina, who told a Congressional subcommittee what they (and
probably the rest of us) would just as soon not hear; our enormous
poultry factories are unsanitary places. Picasso came into the news,
too; one of his paintings brought $40.7 million. (We were later to
learn that a Japanese businessman was the buyer.) Congress surrendered
to Mr. Bush on abortions for poor women, and Democrats there abandoned
expanded child care for this session. The Navy was insistent--in a
gloss on the meaning of loyalty--that one of its own seamen, not
itself organizationally, caused the deadly blast on the USS Iowa, an
old battleship brought out of its mausoleum by the Reagan
administration to parade around the planet, "projecting power."
          I stop, even though I am only at page 14 of the first section. Read
farther, and there will be news of Israelis and
Palestinians. Bulgaria. Lebanon. Brazil. China (as I am swamped by
news, that country is awash in too many
cabbages). Nicaragua. Afghanistan. Lech Walesa. There will be
editorials about oral sex, national youth service, and a state
officeholder straying among the flesh pots of NewYork. Columns about
Mr. Helms, Mr. Walesa, France's children's policies, fetal tissue
research; and there will be Mr. Safire chortling over the USSR's
reported economic difficulties. There will be a cartoon about
Mr. Bush's "secret" plan to overthrow Noriega, another reminding us
that it was labor unions which brought about change in Poland.
          One "Letter to the Editor" affectionately remembered the Rev. James
Reeb, murdered in Selma, Alabama, at the time of the 1965 march;
another lamented threats to the state's environment implicit in the $9
billion--that's it: billion--road building
program adopted by the legislature earlier this year; another by the
manager of the huge Shearon-Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh
assured all that, as regards a recent fire at the plant, "at no time
was the public in danger."
          Then there are Sports--lots--and Business. But it is enough. On the
other hand, I suppose I should not leave out that there was a panel
discussion of business ethics at the University of North_Carolina,
with several very important persons participating in this the
concluding session of a conference on international competitiveness;
or that Burroughs Welcome, a British company which has a big
laboratory in the state's Research Triangle Park, reported 

a bullish
year, much of its profits coming from its AIDS drug and its antiviral
drug for genital herpes; or that the Navy suspended IBM (!) from
bidding on new contracts because of the revealed fraud of selling used
equipment for new.
          As said, enough, even though I am omitting the most interesting
section of the whole paper today: the local news. But a reviewer
should not tell everything. Buy the book.
          How does this belong among book reviews?
          First, for readers who want to know about the present United_States
or its southern region, what book would tell more? Granted, that from
the above, and the yesterdays' editions, everyone must be his or her
own historian, must give it shape and meaning, must somehow contrive
the formula that would put it all into understandable equation.
          Second, the daily newspaper--if a good one such as the News and Observer--is in fact a standard of
measurement, or seen from another angle an evaluator of the
non-fiction that analyzes and interprets our place and time; for
fiction too, that attempts that. The maddening complexity the journals
report stands as a measure of what a book ought to represent, to
"stand for." A book cannot embrace it all. Somehow, though, the good
book has to reflect an awareness of that same impossibility
complicated, often chaotic and hurtful, occasionally fine, always
on-rushing world and region which the good newspaper
reports. Contemporary Southern writers, of both fiction and
nonfiction, are often so intent on depicting (and typically these days
unlike past ones, celebrating) the uniqueness of the South that any
very lively sense of the region's immersion in a larger world drifts
and vanishes. Possibly that is a holding action, a clinging to what is
still here yet is firmly on a one-way passage away.
          A dozen or more novels could be made from the local news--the
Section C news--of this day's papers: University of North_Carolina
student precariously perched atop a radio tower protesting the CIA;
eight North_Carolina State University wrestlers on trial for brutally
assaulting two men and a woman annoyed over having their lawn urinated
on; an FBI agent convicted for drunk driving after wrecking an
FBI-owned car; more on the trial of Eddie Hatcher, of Robeson County
newspaper office fame; a citation of Duke Power Co. (!) for toxic
contamination of ground water. Novels could be written, and no doubt
similar ones will be. Their quality will depend on how well they
connect their stories to the world beyond Section C, how well they are
"of this world" as well as at home.
          Third, the fact is there is some awfully good stuff in the region's
papers. I have for the past two years been a judge in the Institute of
Southern Studies journalism competition. Some of the "feature" writing
and investigative reporting around the region, from Texas to Virginia,
is 

outstanding, and some series are (as I've wearily discovered) of
almost book length.
          And so finally, and for all these reasons, Southern Charges
herewith invites reviews of your local newspaper. A friend--one who is
often subject to fits of dear and therefore indignant observations of
society--angrily remarked to me recently that there are three bodies
of people who are never told to go jump in the lake (he used a more
vivid expression; federal judges, foundation executives, and the
editorial board of the New_York Times. I'll pass on the accuracy of
what he said about judges, affirm that he is right about foundation
executives (I was one for fifteen years, and no one--or hardly
anyone--during those years spoke a cross word to me), and cannot here
do anything about the Times. But if you, our readers, want to submit a
review talking about your local newspaper, praising or damning, we
shall read what you send to us, in the hope we may publish it. Can you
write clearly and interestingly about the home-town paper, and not too
lengthily? If you can and are moved to do so, we would like to see
your work.
          Encores, of November 17, 1989.
          A crew of Marines rescued in bad weather five men from a sunk
tugboat, eight miles at sea off Cape Lookout. Brave men there are
still.
          An old Woolworth's lunch counter once sat-in in Salisbury, a
videotape of the historic Greensboro sit-in of 1960, and a videotape
of the killing of five by the Klan in Greensboro in 1979 are joined
with an original draft of the Constitution in an exhibit at the
state's Museum of History.
          The family of an Israeli soldier killed by Palestinian guerillas
donated his heart to an Arab; the widow said, "If it is possible to
save a person, I think it is a religious commandment."
          Hope is still ours by right of such as these, and of that young
man, 175 feet aloft.
          
            LESLIE DUNBAR is the review editor of 
Southern_Changes.
          
        
