The Boys Off The Bus

NEWS SEEMS to be our only communal event these days. But if you are looking for a chance to reminisce over the big news events of the past years, this is not the place. Rather, Assignment America is a loose concatenation of over sixty off-the-beaten-track, Charles-Kuralt-in-Middle-America genre stories culled from the last five years of The New York Times.

Stories about crawfish racing in Louisiana, displaced Hillbillies in Detroit, a Baptist convention in Georgia, the Elks Club in Nebraska, mushball in Sheboygan, Wisconsin: these are the "human interest" features, still looking a mite incongruous beside the troubled headlines, that bob up on the front of the second section, or snake around the Gimbel's and Macy's advertisements. These are the stories that, according to the book's Preface, "do not break," but "trickle, seep, and ooze. The Times is covering the ooze."

A hefty assignment, to cover the ooze. Certainly, if done right, this kind of story could do much to correct the myopia plaguing most of us, who don't look beyond the big-story headlines to the rumbling undercurrents. It is hard to deny that it would have been nice if some perceptive reporters of the past decades had had enough insight to sense and write about two of the biggest news-making developments of this century: the movement of blacks from the South to the North, and the desertion of white families to the suburbs. In both cases, there was no "news" until the trickle became a flood, and burst across the headlines with Watts and busing issues, which are still very much with us today.

More recently, it would have been nice if someone wrote about Americans' changing attitudes toward the automobile before the Highway Trust became an uncontrollable self-perpetuating monster.

Granted, all these are difficult tasks, which some would claim lie outside the realm of journalism. We don't expect certainty from sociologists looking backwards, much less journalists trying to augur the future. Notwithstanding, the Editors pretend to even more exaggerated heights of hortatory hyperbole, theorizing about "journalistic counterpoint," and dreaming of historians of the twenty-first century leafing through yellowing newsprint searching for these poignant vignettes that will crystallize the sixties and seventies.

GENE ROBERTS and David R. Jones, the former and present National Editor for The Times, have definitely overstated their case. This is a time of journalistic prestige, when the press often seems drunk in the heady euphoria of its chance successes, when the most menial cub "stringer" has his pet theory about the role of journalism in society. No wonder the editors seem to feel insecure about this sort of breezy, down-home folksy journalism amidst their solemn big brothers at The Times with their grave headlines about politics and foreign policy. Cringing at that phrase from the high school newspaper--"the human interest story"--the editors seem to feel that they had to justify it by dressing it up in some pseudoscientific jargon, hoping for sociological and historical significance.

No need. Assignment America should be read as it is, a pleasant, meandering, and sometimes insightful tour among some interesting people of America. The reporters have a playwright's ear for dialogues and conversations. The writing is superb, with enough periodic sentences to be almost arty, but enough like a newspaper to be largely anonymous.

That is one of the problems. Despite the fact that the stories are all by such top Times writers as Douglas Kneeland, B. Drummond Ayres and James Wooten, one's memory of the sixty-odd stories very quickly blends into one grey wall of good but anonymous writing. It becomes very hard to distinguish individual writers and stories, although to some journalists, that may be the ultimate compliment.

Only Roy Reed's stories on the South consistently display a denser, more individualistic prose. His story on black families making a Christmas pilgrimage by train back to their old homes in the South is one of the best in the collection. Jon Nordheimer writes with a restrained power and simplicity, particularly in his forceful piece on the Congressional Medal of Honor veteran who was shot while robbing a grocery store.

ASSIGNMENT AMERICA often veers between journalism and the short story. And it is interesting to realize from this juxtaposition of the two genres, a bastard belonging to neither, how much literature since Hemingway and Edmund Wilson has picked up the mannerisms and styles of newspaper writing. Here, as we read the smooth flow of narratives, the captured regional accents and hestitations of the dialogues, we are almost fooled into thinking that the often abrupt, slightly non-sequitur one-liner endings to the stories may conceal some literary profundity befitting a contemporary short story. Most probably, it was merely the unmerciful cut of a harried editor.

In these times of Mideast violence and Christmas bombings, Assignment America presents a good sampling of a new emphasis in journalism: the solace of unchanging and familiar faces, a reminder that people still live out in the nameless suburbs west of the Hudson, where high school and football and the prom is still important. But when the Elks member explains his reasons for excluding blacks from his club, and the banker in Poplarville, Mississippi talks about "nigras," the reactionary trap of the Liberal as guilty populist gapes wide, trying to lull us into thinking that it is somehow "openminded" to tolerate these attitudes. Lest the good writing mislead us, it is helpful to remember that this is still journalism, and these are real people.