One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gene Weingarten is a Washington Post journalist. He writes long-form stories as well as Below the Beltway, the weekly syndicated humor column. His previous books include I’m With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up (with Gina Barreca); The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death; Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs; and The Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of his best-known work. Weingarten is the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for examining the phenomenon of parents who accidentally leave their children to bake to death in hot cars, and for an experiment in which he arranged for famed violinist Joshua Bell to busk incognito outside a Metro station in Washington to see if anyone would notice.

He lives in Washington, D.C.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Day

It is a Sunday, the 362nd day of the year of Chernobyl and Challenger, when preventable failures of technology humbled two superpowers.

The moon is a skinny slice. Before daybreak, its faintness will abet innumerable crimes, including a theft of extraordinary audacity and a murder of unfathomable brutality. Eighteen hours later, narrower still, it will lend an overhead wink to a lifelong romance getting off to its preposterous start.

At midnight on the East Coast, a team of doctors and nurses is hastily assembling to attempt something not one of them has ever done before, except in macabre rehearsals with corpses in the morgue. They've been waiting for weeks, to be summoned on a moment's notice. In the next few hours, they will try to save one life and help a family atone for the final unhinged act of another.

At midnight on the West Coast, a young woman's body lies undiscovered in a culvert beneath an abandoned highway overpass as her family crisscrosses the roads above in a frantic search to find her. They are on their own because police have refused to step in, on the grounds that in the life of a pretty blonde, being two hours late on a Saturday night is not late at all.

A little after two a.m. in Washington, D.C., a conservative political operative, known for his ruthless tactics, dies at thirty-six. Fulfilling a promise to his patient, the man's doctor publicly diagnoses congestive heart failure of unknown origin. But it is just the final lie of a successful, influential, cynical, hypocritical, self-delusional life.

Just past three a.m. in a small town in Nebraska, a sullen young man, a devout hell-raiser who has never done anything right, finally does, and it kills him.

At five a.m., in a suburb of Memphis at a sleepover with a friend, a precocious eleven-year-old girl from a strict Mormon family wakes up in a darkened house and starts on a video game she is not allowed to play at home. Five hours later, she will decide that December 28, 1986, is a date so memorable that she solemnly writes it down on a slip of paper, signs it, and puts it in a shoebox to keep forever. As it happens, she was on to something.

The bestselling nonfiction book in America, in its thirty-fourth week on the list, is Bill Cosby's Fatherhood, a slender, amusing, surprisingly sardonic take on being a dad. It is ghostwritten, but Cosby hasn't revealed that and has no plans to. Driven by the entertainer's wholesome popularity and salt-of-the-earth reputation, Fatherhood is becoming the fastest-selling hardcover in history.

Where it isn't unseasonably warm, it is unseasonably cold. Car radios play to saturation "Walk Like an Egyptian," a hypnotic, slickly stylized bit of silliness by the Bangles. The milestone will go unnoticed, but the group has just become the first all-female band to top the charts playing their own instruments. For women, it is a time of restive transition. On this day in a Native American village in New Mexico, a tribe's elders-all male-try but fail to negate the election of its first woman governor because custom forbids it. In dozens of Sunday newspapers, an Associated Press story matter-of-factly reports that men across the country, feeling threatened as heads of their households, are dissuading their wives from going back to school to get their GED degrees-sometimes under threats of violence. The story quotes sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus: "Just as a saddle is not suitable for an ox, so learning is unsuitable for a woman."

At 8:15 a.m., in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man with a big secret is awakened by his beaming wife on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. She has a present for him. The moment is utterly anodyne, sweet and ordinary, but to this man, who is vacillating over a paralyzing existential dilemma, it is a reminder of how strong and centered and fundamentally good his marriage is. And that, as it happens, is a big problem.

At 10:50 a.m. a fire breaks out in a little house outside of Dallas. No one is in the room except two babies. One dies. The other will become a modern-day Quasimodo, faced with the agonizing challenge of figuring out how to navigate the world as a monster.

The network news is chockablock with opportunistic automotive ads urging you to buy now because on January 1, under the Reagan administration's new, simplified tax code, you will no longer be able to deduct new-car sales tax on your returns. The pragmatic, unsentimental strategy will work better than the usual crowing about engineering and aesthetics: American car sales in 1986, hugely goosed in the fourth quarter, will be higher than any year before or since.

At 11:10 a.m. a car departs a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., on a secret mission. Word of it has leaked-but not the destination-so news reporters are out front, in their vehicles, ready for pursuit. To elude them, the driver takes his car out a back exit, with U.S. Secret Service cars preceding and trailing it. Inside this middle car are a doctor, a nurse, and a pudgy, nondescript nebbish, the most notorious psychotic in the world. Doctors had decided that John Hinckley-1981 shooter of Jim Brady and the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan-was largely cured of his febrile, erotic delusions and could be trusted in supervised visits with his family outside the institution. It was to be a precursor to eventual discharge. The meeting will go off without incident, but not long afterward, guards will discover hidden in Hinckley's room photos of Jodie Foster, a letter to a mail-order house requesting a nude drawing of the actress, and evidence of an ongoing pen-pal relationship with serial killer Ted Bundy and Manson family acolyte Squeaky Fromme. It will be another thirty years before Hinckley would get out for good.

Around noon, the flamboyant mayor of New York City, trying to defuse racial tensions after the death of a black man at the hands of a white mob, walks into a church in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. The mayor expects a warm welcome from these blue-collar white people, his most loyal constituency, the demographic that has voted him into office three times despite lingering mistrust among people of color. The reception he gets flabbergasts him, and will strip bare the maddening complexity of race relations in urban America.

Eyeglasses are all over TV, big and bold, on faces male and female, in news and sitcoms and commercials, making spectacles of themselves: huge goggle-like affairs, with enormous lenses suspended in what appeared to be face scaffolding. This will turn out to be a defiant final stand for eyewear, and one of those visual markers of an era: 1987 will be the year truly comfortable contact lenses become widely available.

The New York Times announces the upcoming nuptials of a "Miss Van Cleve" to a "John Van Doren." Decades tardy to the basic protocols of feminism, the Gray Lady's matrimonial pages are also notoriously elitist, biased toward America's blue-blooded white aristocracy. Eventually this will change, but not any time soon, nor will the newspaper's occasional willingness to make journalistically excruciating accommodations to assure that this important demographic remains sufficiently cosseted. On this day, the engagement story duly notes the pedigree of the groom's grandfather-a poet, critic, and literature professor who inspired Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac-but about the groom's father, Charles Van Doren, it reports only that he is a former college professor and a writer. Discreetly not mentioned: Charles's international notoriety as the leading villain in the spectacular quiz show scandal of the 1950s.

At 2:35 p.m. in...