DISEASE STORIES may sell a few papers, but they’re really just an appetizer for raw violence. Take another Boston Globe headline from September 11, s.c. slaying stirs image of old south, which reflects the quaint New England custom of patting ourselves on the back for being on the winning side of the Civil War (a habit we’ve suspended so that we can cluck about Middle Easterners who can’t let go of old grievances). " In the tragic end, it wasn’t a lynch mob that killed Edward Snowden, " Wayne Washington reported from North Charleston. " After he tried using a jammed handgun to fend off an alleged attack by four white men, the 35-year-old black Army veteran died on the floor of a local video store, cut down by the gunshots of two white police officers who had been summoned to the scene. " At any other time, this case might have become a cause célèbre for civil-rights activists, but the heroics of the NYPD have made it less fashionable to think the worst about police officers.
USA Today looked to the other side of the country to report: calif. suffers bloody summer: latest killing spree ends with suicide. This trend story was prompted by a former security guard — like the ones now demanding photo IDs from anyone trying to enter a building more than 50 feet high — who shot himself to death after a gun battle with police who suspected him of killing five people. According to one expert, California (the " last resort " state) is " unusually prone to mass murders. " We’re not so keen to keep score these days.
New England had its own crime news on September 11. The Boston Herald, adding another chapter to the saga of missing South Boston mobster (and FBI " informant " ) Whitey Bulger, ran the headline lawyer: feds say ex-trooper tipped whitey on police bug. Bulger may have been bumped off the front page, but I have a feeling that the he’ll be making news long after Osama bin Laden meets his end.
The Bulger story wasn’t the only reference to sloppy law enforcement to appear in the Herald that day. According to another story, " Accused triple murderer Gary Sampson’s attorney said records will show he called the FBI from an Abington pay phone to turn himself in before going on a summer killing spree. " We’ve since learned that the agent who took the call inadvertently disconnected Sampson when he tried to transfer him to another agent — and never bothered to tell anyone.
There was plenty of non-criminal news out of Washington on the morning of September 11. The latest unemployment figures looked bad, and Congress was considering another tax cut to boost the economy. (The liberal Globe editorialized against that idea.) The Bush administration also wanted to cut government spending — a New York Times item headlined rumsfeld attacks bureaucracy detailed the defense secretary’s intention to cut costs at the Pentagon and " shift some jobs to the private sector. " Rumsfeld has presumably thought better of this political initiative.
Another collectible Times headline from the 11th: airlines block rules on pilots’ hours. According to the story, the major airlines went to the US Court of Appeals in a successful attempt to prevent the Federal Aviation Administration from limiting the number of continuous hours a pilot can work. Well, a sleep-deprived flight crew is certainly a novel way to thwart hijackers.
September 11 was also a high point of the fall campaign season, and the Times previewed that day’s NYC mayoral primary (which would be postponed a few weeks). The coverage reflected the universal belief that Michael Bloomberg had no chance to win City Hall, and that half the city of New York couldn’t wait to get rid of Rudy Giuliani. Mark Green, the front-runner and a long-time Giuliani foe, would learn the hard way that an election isn’t won until the votes are counted.
Back in Massachusetts, the Herald reported on September 11 that " Treasurer Shannon O’Brien says she is losing her patience with budget-deadlocked Beacon Hill lawmakers and may have to abandon her plans to follow Clean Elections campaign finance rules in her expected run for governor. " More than two months later, the legislature finally passed a budget without appropriating a penny for Clean Elections; do you think O’Brien has lost her patience by now?
The state’s fiscal crisis ensured that the legislature would eventually return to the front page, but other September stories were swept away forever. Because of the terrorist attacks, we forgot all about the Herald story headlined mystery monkey spotted in middle of n.h. orchard. ( " ‘My husband couldn’t believe it at first,’ Jennifer Valleco, a resident of the Spruce Street trailer park, said of Scott Valleco’s 8:30 a.m. sighting. ‘He was excited, but dumbfounded at the same time.’ " )
Similarly, the Massport follies made us forget how angry we were at the MBTA, which had repeatedly broken pledges to offer some kind of public transportation past the bar-closing time of 2 a.m. Four days before the terrorist attacks, the T finally came through, but few of us cared about the Herald report that 3,000 gave a hoot about new night owl bus service.
ON THE AFTERNOON of the 11th, some Globe readers must have glanced at the headline reality rears its local head and expected to read something about the slap in the face we’d all felt only a few hours before. But the story turned out to be about a guy in Hudson who had been rejected by several Survivor-type TV shows and was looking to produce his own — blissfully unaware that America was about to get sick of the whole genre.
Perhaps the most quickly outdated story of them all also appeared in the Globe: promoted as therapy, forgiveness makes a comeback. It began by describing a 75-year-old in Seattle whose daughter was raped and murdered two decades ago. After battling depression, the man found some peace by talking with his daughter’s killer over the phone and then volunteering in local prisons.
Only a few hours after the Globe hit newsstands, the very idea of " forgiveness " changed: once the ethic of bleeding-heart liberalism, it now signaled outright treason. It was a plot twist that we all could have done without. An autumn dominated by mystery monkeys and the mess at McDonald’s doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Robert David Sullivan is an associate editor of CommonWealth magazine, which can be found online at www.massinc.org.
