For all the usual reasons, I usually love summer:
Barbecues, camping, neighborhood festivals, farmer's markets, parades, warmth, starry nights, meet ups with old friends, beer gardens, fire works, vacation time, a bit of tanning, bicycling, healthy eating (salads, tomatoes, olive oil, spongy mozarella, Roma style Pizza Margherita, corn on the cob) and on and on; however,this summer was a bummer. Follow the grievances:
1) Most of the summer was tied up with Tea Party hostage taking that lasted through out June and July, right up to the very cusp of August. This wasn't the finest of our nation's hours. This was an anxiety driven sludge fest brought to us by the Tea Bagger miscreants and their Koch Brothers enablers. Dangling that default felt like a return to the days of the hostage taking of our embassy personnel in Iran back in the summer of 1980 with Ronald Reagen on the ascent. That summer wasn't much fun either. I still contend that this manufactured debt crisis was a slow form of terrorism, and that Tea Party members should have to answer in a Senate committee. You may snicker at that, but we'll see what the voters do in November 2012 when given a chance to air their grievances.
2) The Norwegian massacre was just plain awful. A summer camping excursion that seems similar to a progressive get together on an island for young labor party members ended up in the tragic loss of so many young promising lives. And the usual insanity of Beck and Hannity as they compared the camping excursion with Hitler Youth gatherings in the 1930's. What levels of deprivation could these ass clowns possibly stoop to next?
3) The Somalia famine began to worsen, and we now have new reports of cholera striking down the already weakened. Another Live Aid is necessary. Is Sir Bob Geldof ready for another Knight's quest?
4) Sweltering temps that continued unabated for most of July. Now the midwest and the east coast are within a deep southern zone of high humidity and punishing heat for prolonged periods. Week after week of what was once called a heat wave which is now considered normal for the higher latitudes. Welcome to the Greenhouse World!
In short, this summer was yucky. The only poignant, uplifting thing I read was Roger Ebert's journal entry on the Chicago Sun Times blog concerning F. Scott Fitzgerald's ending for "The Great Gatsby." In high school English we have all encountered the ending to Gatsby. It's profound, and it's poetic or maybe it's what Ebert describes as an "almost too perfect prose." With the mood I'm in at the end of this summer, it's good to read it again. So, here it is via Mr. Ebert:http://blogs.suntimes.com/...
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning...
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.Those fields were especially dark this summer.