All Over but the Shoutin'

“Listening to them, I learned much of what a boy should know, of cars, pistols, heavy machinery, shotguns and love, all of which, these men apparently believed can be operated stone drunk. I learned that fighting drunk is better than sober because a clear-headed man hurts more when hit. I learned that it is ok to pull a knife while fighting drunk as long as you are cautious not to cut off your own head” (58).

“What I wrote was football, which was short of killing, usually, even in the South. People have said it is what we do now instead of dueling. That is untrue. It is not so refined a violence as that. It is what we do instead of rioting” (134).

These two quotes describe the culture in which Bragg and his brothers grew up. A man proves he is a man by drinking and fighting and playing violent sports. Bragg absorbed this casual attitude to violence himself and feels he must fight back when insulted.

Near the end of the book, Bragg finally achieves his goal of buying a house for his mother. This happy ending is almost ruined because his two brothers have a vicious fight in front of the house. His older brother tries to keep his drunken younger brother out of the house. This confrontation quickly turns violent. It is not surprising.

At the very beginning of the book, Bragg foreshadows his hypothesis about his father’s experiences in the Korean War changing him forever when he tells us that “A lot of men were damaged deep inside by the killing and dying of wars, then tried to heal themselves with a snake oil elixir of sour mash and self-loathing” (xii).

Bragg hears just enough about his father’s experiences in the Korean War to know that he was permanently damaged by what happened.  Bragg wants to believe that the young man who loved his mother and married her was changed by the war. That helps him make some sense of his father’s meanness and cruelty towards his wife and children. Charles Bragg was another casualty of war. He tells us: “I don’t know anything about wars. I don’t think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it. But here is little doubt, that in that narrow space of time, his life shifted, tumbled off balance. I do not know, for dead certain, that I can blame his meanness and cruelty, his abandonment of us, my momma, on something as distant as the war...I believe that there, in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidelines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged” (21).

Bragg had little experience of death and dying in his own childhood. His grandmother and his mother were survivors.  He did, however, see his father die early.

Yet, Bragg as a reporter was always drawn to tragic stories. His first non-sports story was about a hunter who killed his friend by accident. Later, he wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing and about Susan Smith who murdered her children. He was very good at capturing grief and loss and making it vivid for his readers:  “I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the thin membrane in between. I have never been a ghoul. I have been so sickened by killing and dying that that sleep was just one more dream in bed at 4 a.m. But even then, I was drawn to those stories. There was something about the rich darkness of it, of that struggle by people at risk, people in trouble, that made all other stories seem trivial. They were the most important stories in the newspaper. I wanted to write them, only them” (139).

In Chapter 25, Bragg states his ultimate purpose as a journalist: “I didn’t get into this business to change the world; I just wanted to tell stories. But now and then, you can make people care, make people notice that something ain’t quite right, and nudge them gently, with the words, to get off their ass and fix it” (198).

Probably the closest Bragg comes to changing the world is when he travels to Haiti to cover the story about the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the priest who championed the poor, and the violent coup that drove him into exile. The slaughter of Aristide’s supporters in the most cruel and devastating ways affected Bragg powerfully when he witnessed the results in person. “To cover the story dispassionately was beyond me. It may be that it made me a poor analyst of the sociopolitical situation. I just know that word of it had to get out, had to ring out, and for the first time I truly realized the impact of the newspaper for which I worked.” (256)

Several times in the book, people describe Bragg as a good person or a decent man. He earned that reputation by writing compassionately about the suffering of real people who experienced loss and grief. Yet, the usual assumption about journalistic writing is that it is meant to convey the facts in as objective a manner as possible. Bragg learned through experience that when he wrote the truth as he saw it, his writing could comfort and uplift those who grieved and suffered.

One example is his story about a little boy falsely accused of sexual assault and persecuted as “Dirty Red.” The boy was badly traumatized, to the point of becoming “almost catatonic.” Bragg was able to help the boy by uncovering the story of the real perpetrator, a grown man who tried to shift the blame for his crime. “Seeing it written down they began to believe. The story drew the aid of ministers and other do-gooders who helped spread the word...People sent money. People sent toys...He got better” (198).

On his trip to Haiti, he saw the impact a powerful media outlet like The New York Times can have. His writing in that newspaper could potentially change public opinion and political decisions and, ultimately, people’s lives.