The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, July 19, 2025

Diary: I looked up the New York Times from this date in 1979, the second time I had entered the United States, but the first with a Green Card in hand (the previous two times I was on a tourist visa). I did not know who the New York Yankees were at the time, let alone who people like Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner were. They were on the front page that day. Billy Martin had suspended Jackson indefinitely for insubordination. That day the Times was reporting that the suspension had been reduced to five days, and a $9,000 fine. Jackson had bunted, against Martin’s orders, and struck out. Martin “flung a clock radio and a beer bottle against a clubhouse wall after the game,” the paper reported. I would son learn, after becoming a Yankee fan, that Martin, Jackson and Steinbrenner were a ménage à trois if there ever was one in baseball, constantly getting into lovers’ quarrels, throwing things, getting fired (how many times did Billy Martin get fired?), making up and swooning together again. The Yankees sucked that year (I am borrowing a word from Yankee bleachers), mired in fourth place, 14 games behind. Martin and Steinbrenner knew how to keep the fans interested. The fight was nowhere near their first. (See below.) That story was on the front page that day I entered the United States, which I find odd in retrospect. I’d always thought the big papers got into reporting sports trivialities on the front page after Gannett began the dumbed down USA Today. It was a dull news day overall, for a Wednesday. The lead story was of the U.S. House committee defeating Jimmy Carter’s plan for cost ceilings on hospital charges. A more interesting story was on page two, headlined: “Key Black Leader Turns 60 on South Africa Prison Isle.” You’ve figured out who it was: “Nelson Mandela, the man who would most probably head a black government in South Africa, spent his 60th birthday today on an island in the mouth of Table Bay, within sight of the great sea route that brought the first white men to the southernmost tip Africa nearly five centuries ago. Mr. Mandela was not on vacation. For the 16th year he spent his birthday inside the gray stone walls of Robben Island, a prison fortress seven miles offshore…” Another curiosity: the story carried John F. Burns’s byline, the foreign correspondent who won two or three Pulitzers, and with whom I’d end up having a drink at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut in 2000. He’s still around. 80 years old. Lost sights: The Times back then was 84 pages, with about 200 or 300 ads. It is a quarter that size these days, with a 20th the ads, for 20 times the price: it was 20 cents when I landed. It is $4 now. If it had increased only as much as inflation, it would have to be 94 cents. That tells you much of what you need to know about the evolution of print journalism. One regret from that year: I learned too late of the great art of Red Smith, the sports columnist who had a piece in that day’s paper, and who died in 1981, right after writing a column titled “Writing Less, and Better,” a column I clipped, and still have in its original, and whose lesson, obviously, I never learned. 

—P.T.

 

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David Jones had seen death on a vast and public scale but never before domestically and at close quarters. This domestic death revolted him. He had never before realized that death in a bed was dirty business, not the angelic transit of Little Eva in the film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin he had seen in New York. The bowel and bladder collapsed, sheet and matress had to be burnt at the bottom of the back garden. The body, having vulgarly shed its ordures, now turned into an ordure itself. That was because the soul had deserted it. So there was such a thing as a soul then, the preachers were right. This chunck of decaying matter being got ready for the coffin was not his dad. His dad had buggered off somewhere where there was no beer or Welsh mutton, he was a freed soul, but what was he doing now, who could tell? There were a lot of freed souls now rising out of chuncks of ordure in the muddy fields of France, and perhaps he, the living son of a comfortable inheritor, might soon be joining them. It seemed to him that it was a good deal healthier, meaning cleaner, to die like that then in a bed promptly defiled by the soul’s losing hold of the muscles. To die at sea was clean too, but to give your ordures to the soil was good for it, whereas a drowned corpse only gave food to the fishes, which probably had enough already. Soul and soil: it seemed a fair antithesis.

–From Anthony Burgess’s Any Old Iron (1989) .

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