Free Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 by E. B. White Page A

and the feeling passed, but nothing is quite absurd that happens.
    Insofar as orthodoxy has gained strength, our republic has lost strength. But the loss is neither irreparable nor unusual. It is the product of war clouds—a sort of terrible mist that gathers. Luckily, many of our strongest skippers see through it. For 1951, we wish our readers health, faith, the sure eye that sees through mists, and the patience and muscle for the ascent of the most beautiful hill there is.
    NEWSPAPER STRIKE
    12/12/53
    AT ONE POINT in the newspaper lull, * Edward R. Murrow remarked that “breakfast without a newspaper is a horse without a saddle”—an unhappy metaphor, it seemed to us. We began watching our own breakfasts, to see whether they were horses without saddles, and all we could discover was that the breakfast hour had achieved a sort of eerie serenity. Our digestion improved noticeably when the morning paper stopped arriving. Our private feeling about newspapers is a mixed one. Surely ninety per cent of all so-called news is old stuff—some of it two and three thousand years old. And surely ninety per cent of everything we read today is discouraging stuff, whether newsy or not. So the breakfast hour is the hour when we sit munching stale discouragement along with fresh toast. Except for one thing, we could take a newspaper or leave it alone. If we felt confident that liberty was secure and that democracy would remain in good health without assistance from its many admirers, we could do without a newspaper quite handily. At certain periods in our life, we’ve tried the experiment of not reading newspapers, and we found it put no strain on our system, since we enjoy a very low-grade curiosity and are seldom moved to keep informed of late developments. Mr. Murrow’s famous opener, “This is the news,” which carries the vox-humana sound of civilization-at-the-crossroads, often turns out to be a slight exaggeration. Nothing much happens from day to day. Public servants serve, felons act feloniously, demagogues croak their froggy tunes, echo answers echo (if it can get network time), and life goes on in its familiar pattern. But city dwellers without newspapers breathe an ominous air, as though the smog were descending. Liberty is not secure. Democracy does not thrive unassisted. And so, for love of these, we all swallow our bulletins at breakfast along with our marmalade.
    WE’RE ALL AMERICANS
    3/6/54
    DR. SOCKMAN , the Methodist pastor, says the American city is more like a sand pile than a melting pot. “People are heaped together, but they do not hold together.” Well, we have a letter telling us of an incident when Americans held together beautifully. The writer of the letter went, during his lunch hour, to buy stamps at the small post office in Bloomingdale’s basement. Ahead of him in line was a lady who brought things to a stand-still by changing her mind about what kind of stamps and envelopes she wanted, by running up a bill of more than thirty dollars, and by discovering that she didn’t have thirty dollars and could she pay the balance by check? The line grew and grew. After a while, someone ventured to hope, out loud, that she wouldn’t change her mind again, because he was on his lunch hour. At this, the woman turned on him and said, “You aren’t even an American, are you?” The man was quite shaken by this, but the others in the line weren’t, and they came to his aid instantly. “We’re all Americans,” shouted one of them, “and we are all on the lunch hour!”
    That was no sand pile. People hold together and will continue to hold together, even in the face of abrupt and unfounded charges calculated to destroy.
    A BUSY PLACE
    7/5/76
    Our Misfortunes in Canada, are enough to melt an Heart of Stone. The Small Pox is ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indians together. . . . There has been Want,