NY newspaper strike ends

I was going to begin by saying that, this past week, Americans were preoccupied with election fever but that would only show that I'm not quite on my toes, not quite awake and falling back on the most hackneyed of newspaper headlines, for in a country where two qualified people in three used to vote and where, this year, only one in three was expected to show up at the polls, you can hardly call that 'fever.' It suggests a people for whom the fever has long past, a nation declining into political torpor.

This apathy probably indicates many subtle things and you may be sure that the sociologists and the pollsters are working on them. But one thing I suspect it shows is the yearning of most Americans to believe that government is or ought to be grand and simple, something to be run, to be sure with the consent of the governed, by a strong man. Not a fuehrer, but a good president. 

Now I may seem to have put this backwards. What I am saying is that this is not a presidential election year. It's what they call a mid-term election for congressmen and senators and governors, and mayors and city treasurers, and the like. And it's only once every four years, when far fewer people vote than in a presidential election, even though the issues are local issues, this time of great intensity, even though they're the main things which concern or ought to concern us in our daily lives. 

But somehow the belief that the prosperity, the fate of the United States is turned around by a new president is so strong that many of us feel it's no sin to skip the mid-term elections. I am, myself, a shameful victim of this belief. I forgot to register for this election. I was abroad. I had lots of plausible excuses. Still, if I'd cared enough, I could have seen to it before I left. On the other hand, if this had been a presidential year, you may be sure I would have gone around skulking and keeping things quiet if I hadn't voted. I wouldn't have been advertising the delinquency. 

Well, if two or three out of us are bored or lazy enough to skip it, it would be fair to guess that this election is not going to excite people abroad. Whenever there's an American election, I always think of the useful warning given to me many years ago by an English listener. I imagined him as a droll, upper-crust, club man, a sort of low-key Terry Thomas. He wrote when I'd been going on for weeks about a coming election, 'Do us a favour, old boy! Forget the election! It's bad enough fretting over our own politics! But somebody else's political system always sounds like another form of chess in which the knights move backwards, the pawns sideways and there's no king or queen.' 

Well, remembering that, I won't go on this week, but by next week all the results will be in and – wait for it! – I'm not going to talk about numbers or winners, losers, but about such things as these intense issues – smoking in public, abortion, whether Miami Beach can be saved from bankruptcy with legalised gambling, homosexual teachers in schools, whether the town needs a new dam. 

This year, more than any year I can remember, have been less about aspiring or failing politicians and more about single issues that tear one community apart but are, nevertheless, issues that are likely to come up in your own neck-of-the-woods, whether you live in Derbyshire or Melbourne or Jamaica, or Sheffield, Addis Ababa, or Little Piddletrenthide. They're a fascinating lot and next week I propose to put them all together and see how they strike not the Americans who voted for or against them, but how they strike you. 

In the meantime, I retire from thinking about the whole country and retreat into the parochialism of being a New Yorker, for New Yorkers have just come through – I don't know whether to describe it as an ordeal, an experience, or a holiday. The newspapers' strike is over. It started on 9 August and ended on 5 November. So for nearly three months, whenever some know-all from Washington or the United Nations or London, Frankfurt, arrived and began to wrinkle a brow, we could say quite blithely, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I haven't kept up with that!' Or, better, 'Is that so?' After a time these came to be not expressions of guilt but almost like speeches for the defence, like the old days when the teacher said, 'But Cooke, you don't seem to have done the reading for this lesson!' And you said, 'But sir, the library was locked. It was Empire Day, remember, sir?' And this put the onus on him as a blockhead, or a very casual patriot, and he'd say, 'Ah yes, of course. Ah, well now...' 

But then... then came the morning when the New York Times thumped once more on the kitchen doormat. And, in my memory, it was like the firm tread of the headmaster and his theatrical cough as he came down the corridor on Friday afternoons to take Divinity and question the class on the sufferings of Job or how Noah collected two animals from every continent in the days before the jet. 

Once again we... I was going to say 'propped up' the New York Times on the breakfast table but you can no more prop up the New York Times than you can prop up the bedclothes, you laid it out. You darted over the headlines on 90 pages. A special 47-page section called '88 Days in Review' turned the knife in the wound of your ignorance. You became cowed at the awful range of vital happenings in Chile, Scandinavia, Namibia, France, Ankara, Buenos Aires, London, Rome, Baghdad, Rhodesia, that you knew nothing about. 

So, once again, we slog daily through the dense swamp of well-informed prose. Disasters strike again. Confrontations abound. New Yorkers are, once again, residents of the New York area. Problems are ongoing and so are crises. All issues and pronouncements are major. Prosecution attorneys don't wish to name specific individuals by name. Parents are supportive if they dry their children's tears, and if they beat them, they're being counterproductive. Theatrical performances which were once said to be incandescent now have resonance. Some ghastly politician in Illinois announced on the eve of the election that he had 'reached a meaningful threshold for a viable campaign'. I could go on and on until you'd feel yourself sinking into a jungle bog of jargon from which there's no hope of ever seeing a straight path into an ordinary English sentence. 

In the first days, I must say I sympathised – pardon me, empathised – with the little man caught at a tube turnstile and asked if he'd missed the papers. He said, 'No. I learned to play chess and walk in the park'. One of the great things that came out of the newspapers' strike was a paper that appeared waggishly one morning on the stands and, at first glance, you thought the strike was over. There was the familiar front page and a grey photograph like an eighth carbon copy. There was the good old typeface, there was the Gothic streamer which said, The New York Times. It didn't. It said, 'Not The New York Times.' It was a parody. The photograph was of the Queensboro Bridge that spans the East River in mid town. It was broken in two. The headline said, 'Marathon Runners Blamed by City for Bridge Destruction'. 

I should explain that there was, had just been at that time, a marathon race of 10,000 New York joggers. Back to the lead sentence. 'Buildings Department officials today blamed a simple excess of weight for the tragic collapse of portions of the Queensboro Bridge during the Rheingold Marathon on Saturday afternoon.' There were grave interviews with the president of the Runners' Club, 'Blame it on this whole weight-conscious society! Not on me!' There were ponderous speculations from the Highway Department about how an average runner's weight of 150 pounds carrying in all, overall, the same weight as twelve hundred automobiles, could cause the accident. One official put it down to the 'up down' factor. 'Cars,' he said, 'don't go clip clop, clip clop, they go vroosh, vroosh.' The runners' president had the definitive explanation. 'I have never seen so many fat people in my life.' The investigation continues. 

Mayor Koch threw an unprecedented press conference for all the media and distributed a recipe for Chicken Curry Koch. After listing the ingredients, it began, 'In a three-quart Dutch oven, melt the butter and lightly brown the chicken. Continued on page A16.' Of course, there was no page A16. A note at the bottom of page one regretted that 'the cost of labour necessitated by our contract agreements forces not the New York Times to announce that the price of this newspaper must necessarily rise to one dollar, effective today.' There never was another issue. 

There were brilliant, hilarious television and radio schedules in full. There was an enormous parody of the New York Times's exquisite food critic, an exhaustive account of how to cook and serve a versatile, if illusive, delicacy, the humble bat. Nuclear physicists at Long Island's largest atom smasher announced they have conclusively proved that the universe is very old. In Spandau Prison, Rudolf Hess rioted when his demands for better prison conditions were not met. And an enormous, involved despatch from the Gulf of Aden reported that nothing of great significance has been happening in Africa of late. And so, on and on. The whole paper, a thing of beauty and a joy for, alas, only one day. 

When the real Times came back, it took a day or two to believe anything. Consider the fact (no parody) that the American Medical Association has issued a report that breathing deeply in the open air can cause nausea, dizziness, amnesia, heart fibrillation and anxiety. Or the effort of the poor maligned Post Office to win some consumer admiration. The Post Office invited the public to come and see the workings of its mighty headquarters. It sent out 12,000 invitations for the great Saturday get together. The invitations arrived the following Wednesday.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.