The National Road by Tom Zoellner

Author:Tom Zoellner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092914
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Is there any sight in a household more laden with pathos than a stack of last week’s newspapers near the door? “Read me,” they beg, their only remaining function. But pulp is static and doesn’t have the dynamism of the electronic screen; it’s locked in place forever and can’t change. A mayfly lives longer. No surprise that the reason so many readers gave for canceled subscriptions, even before the present unwinding, was that too many back issues were piling up and becoming clutter. Perhaps guilt more than cleanliness was the motivator—we knew we should read them, but didn’t.

Journalists know a thing or two about institutionalized guilt. Many joined the profession, especially during the “liberal values” era defined by Pressman, to make a difference, or change the world, or whatever old-shoe phrase defines the revolutionary impulse that writhes to some degree within all of us, especially when we are young. Reality cooperates with notable stinginess. The public pressure and embarrassment fired up by a local paper can indeed bend the course of events in a beneficial direction—a bad idea dropped, a criminal arrested, a person’s life enriched by seeing the right story—but direct cause-and-effect on the moving hand of history is impossible to chart in the long term. Mostly we just wondered if any of our labors did any good. “It’s all chalk on the sidewalk,” my colleague Judy Nichols once told me. “Gone in the next hard rain.”

Perhaps we worked so hard on certain stories—insisted on their importance—as penance for all the ones we knew in our hearts we overlooked. I never turned the car around to talk to the homeless kids on the median, for example, and I left Salt Lake City a year later without ever writing about them. And when I left my career behind with a sigh in 2003, walking out of The Arizona Republic knowing I would never be going back, I did so burdened with a long mental list of stories that I wish I had found the time to write. This was true of everyone I ever met in a newsroom.

What we were doing with all those shorter items we slammed into the paper, however imperfectly, was logging a record of events into the permanent memory of the nation. Crack open any civic history at the bibliography, and odds are excellent that most of the details are sourced from the local paper. If we didn’t publish it, it might as well have never happened, so far as a future consciousness is concerned. Now that a daily record of happenings is vanishing from America’s towns and cities, so with it will come amnesia. The stack of newspapers that mattered most, and which we spent almost no time thinking about, was delivered to the library archives. Future urban historians will come across an abundance of detail about virtually every town and city in the U.S. up until the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the record starts to trail off and the permanent record of what happened across America begins to disappear like brain cells under attack.

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