The days are getting shorter and the air is getting cooler. I always dread that first evening I walk out of the office and it’s completely dark outside, which happened to me last Thursday. Even though we don’t “fall back” for another couple of weeks, it does feel to me like summer has gone the way of the Dodo.
On
September 5, Joe Queenan published a very amusing piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Summer of Our Discontent - Town-hall brawls. Tomato blight. Woodstock nostalgia. Rain. Not hiking the Appalachian Trail. Joe Queenan says good riddance to the summer of '09.” I would encourage anyone looking for a chuckle to click this link http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574391143289432918.html
I feel most of what he offers up in support of his thesis – that the summer of 2009 has been the least scintillating in recent memory – is right on target. “By any standards—cultural, horticultural, political, cinematic, jurisprudential, meteorological—this is the least eventful summer since 1491...” and he goes through a litany of everything bored that him to tears, category by category, right on down the line.
While I recognize the piece was written for a laugh, it stuck with me. Frankly, it upset me the more I thought about it. It’s easy to be critical when the world feels like it’s in a downward spiral. And even though Queenan is one of my favorite critics, I for one refuse to believe it’s all as bleak as he paints it. It’s true that our country is in the grips of a recession. But it’s also true that there are an increasing number of financial indicators that suggest we’re pulling out of it. It’s true the light blight wiped out some tomatoes in the Northeast. But down here in the Southeast, I tasted some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever put in my mouth. Granted I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. So in my glass-half-full kind of way, I’d like to offer up some counterpoints to Queenan’s end-of-summer cynicism.
Politics have been grim in South Carolina this summer for sure, and those of us who live and work in Charleston have been right in the thick of it. As Queenan rightly points the “unpredictable governor” certainly has provided us with plenty of fodder for dirty jokes. And while it’s true that Mark Sanford’s Appalachian Trail / Argentinean travel adventures, and Representative Joe Wilson’s big mouth haven’t cast South Carolina in the best light, their antics certainly have mobilized an otherwise complacent opposition.
In national politics, it’s true Obama wasn’t able to light a fire under his democratic majority and get a healthcare referendum passed before the summer’s end. However, if we look back to the 9th of March, I feel that Obama did a great thing when he signed an order ending restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. If a cure for cancer, or some other such miracle comes out of a new wave of breakthrough medical research, history could very well look back on that one move as a much bigger deal than anything being written about healthcare this week.
In entertainment, I agree that the Jonas Brothers are awful, and the majority of what Hollywood turned out this summer was schlock. But there was a lot of great music to be found if you were willing to dig for it, and there were a few gems that popped up in theatres here and there…
Five Solid Summer Bands:
The Soft Pack
The Dig
The Dead Weather
Fever Ray
Wave Machine
Three Solid Summer Comedies:
In The Loop
The Hangover
The Brothers Bloom
On the summer books front, I don’t have much of a rebuttal. I don’t understand America’s recent obsession with vampires, and I haven’t read any new fiction that I can strongly recommend. But I did find one very interesting, very hopeful book out there that I beseech Oprah to recommend to her book club called “Actions Speak Loudest.”
http://actionsspeakloudest.org/
On the sports tip, it’s true Federer won Wimbledon, again, and Rafael Nadal never showed. But fast-forward to the US Open, and - !!!KAPOWEE!!! – enter the fearsome Juan Martin del Potro who bursts onto the scene out of nowhere – or out of Argentina rather – and steamrolls both Federer and Nadal on his way to his first Grand Slam victory.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/sports/tennis/15open.html
It’s also true there were more grim steroid allegations in baseball, which I concede is a total bore. As a Dodgers fan, I had to stomach a whole lot of Manny being Manny, which was easier for me to ignore when he was misbehaving up in Boston. But while that whole mess was going on and our highest paid player was sitting out a 50 game suspension, the rest of a very young Dodgers ball club went right about their business winning games. I really have enjoyed watching Joe Torre lead los Dodgers to the best regular season record in the National League, and I’m curious to see what happens in the playoffs - which start tonight...
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-joe-torre7-2009oct07,0,7703295.story
On TV, I don’t agree with Queenan that it’s hard to get excited about Mad Men. Maybe it’s because I’m an Ad Man myself, but I’m mad about that show.
http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/ And for the record, I laugh every time I see Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World.”
http://dosequis.com/ I’d put this Dos Equis campaign up there among the very best beer campaigns of all time. So even if you agree with Queenan that there hasn’t been any good TV this summer, there certainly have been some good TV commercials to break up the monotony.
When we do finally have to turn the clocks back an hour that dreadful night of the 31st, all won’t be lost. This guy is stoked for what I hope will prove to be a very strong Movember. Get into it.
http://us.movember.com/
* * *
The Summer of Our Discontent - Town-hall brawls. Tomato blight. Woodstock nostalgia. Rain. Not hiking the Appalachian Trail. Joe Queenan says good riddance to the summer of '09.
By Joe Queenan
At midnight on Monday, when Labor Day ends, the summer of 2009 will officially pass into the annals of history. Good riddance. If there is a less scintillating summer on record, it's hard to remember it. By any standards—cultural, horticultural, political, cinematic, jurisprudential, meteorological—this is the least eventful summer since 1491. It started raining in June and never stopped. Health-care reform didn't get anywhere. The tomatoes were uneatable. Congress accomplished nothing. All the movies stunk. There were no good summer reads. The Jonas Brothers maliciously tried to pass themselves off as entertainers. Kate and Jon ruled the roost. As the summer slogged toward its sad, ignominious conclusion—just when the nation needed some bucking up, some leadership, perhaps even a few good chuckles—the president retreated to Martha's Vineyard, where he made a point of getting himself photographed acting really, really cool for a change. That left Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to provide all the last laughs. If it hadn't been for the exploits of the peregrinatory Lothario Mark Sanford and that prickly cop up in Cambridge, there would have been no fun at all this summer.
This is the summer when nothing exciting happened. In fact, the most exciting thing that did happen was the eruption of angry town hall meetings all across the nation whose sole purpose was to prevent anything from happening. Elsewhere, there was not a whole lot to report. Sonya Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination did not morph into an ideological Thermophylae where a pitched battle for, yea, the very soul of the nation hung in the balance. Gitmo did not get shuttered. Mr. Obama stubbornly refused to pick a fight with anybody. Tina Fey didn't do any funny new impressions. Joe Biden didn't say anything ridiculous. What were the odds of that?
America fared no better in more lighthearted spheres. There was no life-affirming little film that came out of nowhere to capture the American people's imagination the way "Slumdog Millionaire" did. The 200-1 longshot Tampa Bay Rays did not dominate the world of baseball the way they did last summer; the New York Yankees and their 26 World Championships did. Rafael Nadal, the most thrilling tennis player since John McEnroe, did not show up for Wimbledon. Lance Armstrong, the greatest bicyclist ever, did not emerge from retirement to win the Tour de France, inspiring cancer survivors everywhere; somebody from Spain, who did not have cancer, did. And oh yes, the Los Angeles Lakers won their 15th NBA championship.
This was a summer well described as déjà vu all over again. Teenagers wearing gladiator sandals, to the beach, to the prom, to their commencement exercises, to state prison, was not a new look. Neither were racy tattoos on freshmen at Sarah Lawrence. The most exciting car introduced this year will not be available until November 2010 and looks exactly like every compact car produced in the past 15 years. When Apple introduced its Snow Leopard operating system in August, it contained no exciting, revolutionary new features. None. The ballyhooed 40th anniversary of Woodstock turned out to be a tragicomic exhumation of legendary bands whose biggest stars were either long dead or too proud to attend. Great! Remind us once again how wonderful things were 40 years ago during the Summer of Love! Only this time, the mood was less SDS than AARP. Anyway, nobody showed up. By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half-a-dozen strong.
This was also the summer when journalists kept trying to tell the American people that they were missing something really important, when deep inside they knew they were not. No matter how many times they were told that "Mad Men" was the most riveting program since "Big Love," and that missing out on "True Blood" was a crime of cultural obtuseness on a par with failing to watch "John From Cincinnati," most Americans found it hard to get excited about an ironic TV program dealing with midcentury modern admen. They got more excited about the news that Tom DeLay would appear this fall on "Dancing With the Stars." It is never a good sign when the most exciting thing on television is a dancing Republican.
This was the summer when all the beach reading was atrocious, when all the best sellers announced that America was going to hell in a handbasket—Hey! There's an original idea!—and when the long-awaited new novel by Dan Brown failed to appear. There were no electrifying new cookbooks, no "Freakonomics," no mystifying reading suggestions by Oprah. This summer, the entire city of Chicago did not read "To Kill a Mockingbird," nor did a new translation of "Anna Karenina" win a surprise summer following among high school dropouts. Instead, everyone read more stuff about vampires. The book that got the most attention dealt with a weird frathouse in Arlington, Va., frequented by people like…Mark Sanford. Once again, South Carolina's plucky, unpredictable governor was the only one providing any laughs.
Pop music provided no respite from this hegemony of dreariness. Bruce Springsteen went out on tour with an album lionizing gallant working stiffs. Then he left for Europe. Madonna went to Bucharest and upbraided the Romanians for being mean to Gypsies. Just what the Gypsies needed: Madonna in their corner. Then Eminem came out of retirement, as if that was going to cause society to pop the champagne corks. Meanwhile, everywhere you looked photos of the sullen, posturing Jonas Brothers—Menudo for white folks—stared back at you. Annexing Keith Richards's 1965 tilted-sunglasses look and Joey Lawrence's 1994 hair, the Jonas Brothers looked about as edgy and dangerous as a trio of gherkins.
The seen-it-before sense was particularly acute in the movies. More "X-Men" movies. More "Terminator" movies. More "Harry Potter" movies. More "Da Vinci Code" movies. With the exception of "Inglourious Basterds," which posits a world in which Nazis are dapper, poly-lingual, and actually kind of amusing, all the moves we looked forward to were duds. "Terminator Salvation" was a monstrosity. Sasha Baron Cohen's willfully offensive "Bruno" came and went so fast nobody had a chance to be offended buy it. Judd Apatow's "Funny People" wasn't funny. There was no Batman film starring a meteoric young talent who was already dead; instead, we got yet another Transformer movie, where rising star Shia LaBeouf—who looks like the young George W. Bush—got upstaged by the ordnance. Last year's offbeat comic classic was "Tropic Thunder"; this year's offbeat comic classic was a movie about Julia Child. What kind of year is it when a movie starring Julia Roberts is a bomb and a movie about Julia Child is a hit?
Oh yes, this was the summer when Woody Allen released a movie about a miserable, self-loathing New York-based neurotic.
The summer of 2009 was the summer when nothing positive happened. The stock market went up but it didn't help the economy. The classic bear market "sucker rally," which lifted stocks by 50%, still left the Dow 5,000 points short of its all time high. In other words, those who had lost 53% of their life's savings had now only lost 38%. Golly! Pass me another Dos Equis! Toxic assets were still on the books, mortgage refinancings slowed to a trickle, no one could get a loan to start a business. Housing starts remained at apocalyptic lows, people kept getting laid off, people kept getting furloughed. The press kept writing stories about people getting laid off and furloughed. Then journalists started getting laid off, and those that had not been laid off started writing stories about how journalists getting laid off—or furloughed—was hurting the economy because now there would be even fewer people to write stories about people who had been laid off. Or furloughed.
Obviously this summer could not possibly measure up to the standards of the summer of 2008. It did not have the millennial hoopla supplied by Barack Obama's stunning ascent to the highest office in the land. It did not have Sarah Palin. It did not have the return of the Weathermen to the national stage and the enthralling, quixotic candidacy of Mike Huckabee. Nor did it have the astonishing demise of Bear Stearns, the implosion of AIG, the ritual seppuku of the American auto industry. It did not have Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial or routine 500-point one-day drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It did not have the overnight collapse of the global economic system, with the concomitant, looming possibility that life as we know it would be extinguished.
So, obviously, 2008 was going to be a tough act to follow.
No one is suggesting that the summer of 2008 was an event we would like to see repeated. But there can be no denying that it had…well…pizzazz. Mindful of this, couldn't the summer of 2009 at least have made some kind of an effort? Couldn't it have given it the old college try? What kind of summer is it when people go to the beach and the only thing they talk about is health care reform? What kind of a summer is it when people have fist fights about whether or not the United States has the 37th-best health-care system in the world? What kind of a summer is it when people actually read the 1,200-page health-care "document" and TiVo the Budget Director's most recent appearance on "The Daily Show"? What kind of a summer is it when people can cite the most chimerical figures supplied by the Budget Director? What kind of a summer is it when the American people even know the Budget Director's name?
Another reason the summer of 2009 seems so ghastly is because other countries are living through infinitely more exciting times. First, the Iranians treated themselves to a bona fide stolen election. Then the Afghans followed suit. Not to be outdone, the Pakistanis put the Taliban in charge of the top tourist draw in that zany, unpredictable nation. Gosh, that worked out well! The North Koreans were up to their old kleptocratic tricks, and the Mexicans, Venezuelans and Colombians kept their nations reliably anarchic. Meanwhile, back home in the states we had…town-hall meetings about…health care.
Sadly, in the summer of 2009, some of the nation's most reliable entertainers remained on the sidelines. Brad and Angie did not break up. Michael Moore did not make a movie suggesting that al Qaeda provided better health care to employees than GM. Paris Hilton kept a distressingly low profile. Cher stayed home. Indeed, speaking of Cher, this summer will be remembered as the summer when the only thriving businessmen were morticians. Nobody actually did anything important this summer; nothing significant got accomplished; the headlines were dominated by people who (a) were checking out for good, and (b) whose best years were behind them.
Yes, this summer only the Grim Reaper came through in the clutch. Yet in the end the Celebrities Crossing the Styx epidemic turned out to be quite unpleasant because it let slip the dogs of eulogy. When Michael Jackson died, we were informed, a part of us all died. A part of us also died when Walter Cronkite went to meet his maker, as a golden age of American journalism evaporated beneath the sands of time. When Farrah Fawcett bought the farm, yet another part of us receded into the ether as our emotional connection with an earlier, more innocent time was sundered. The real haymaker was when Teddy Kennedy breathed his last, for then and only then could one say that the misty, mythical splendor and impossible dreams of Camelot had disappeared from the planet for good. We would not look on the likes of Jackson and Kennedy and Cronkite and Fawcett again, we were reminded again and again by the people that get paid to say these things. The Republic would never be the same without them. Only Ed McMahon's death failed to provoke such an outpouring of transcontinental anguish. In all likelihood, so it appeared, the Republic would survive McMahon's passing. The Republic was bloodied, but the Republic was unbowed. For that which did not kill us only made us stronger.
Death, even at the highest levels, is no substitute for good clean fun. That's because, when you get right down to it, death isn't anywhere near as interesting as life. Which is why the handful of still-breathing individuals who did try to prevent this summer from being completely lethal, the ones who did bridle at the idea of letting the freshly deceased grab all the headlines, are to be congratulated. Just this week, it was reported in the New York Post that roving philanderer and erstwhile Slate magazine columnist Eliot Spitzer is considering a return to political life. Well, bring it on! Down in Dixie, Mr. Spitzer's fellow political cadaver Mark Sanford climbed out of his tomb long enough to say that he is not stepping down from office, no sirree, Bob. Such obdurateness, truculence and refusal to accept reality is to be applauded. These guys may be nuts. They may be unprincipled. They may be utterly conscienceless. But talking about Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford is a lot more fun than talking about health care.
