Endless Summer

August is usually known as the silly season in News Land because conventional wisdom has it that nothing much happens, and stunt stories take on outsize importance to fill the vacuum. This isn't actually accurate—Nixon resigned and Katrina struck in August, among other things—and there is actually a great deal going on right now, much of it troubling. There's a war that seems to have been forgotten in Iraq, and a new conflict in Georgia, and a housing crash that is eroding a sense of terra firma, and a run on wood stoves at local home stores, at least where I live, by people who fear they will not be able to afford home heating oil come Inauguration Day. "Little House on the Big Recession."

I often wish that everyone could stop what they're doing this time of year, that summer could once again be a time when kids are at loose ends and grown-ups are planning backyard vacations. When I would hear that European countries essentially shut down in August, I would think about how wise their people were. But now European countries are beginning to behave more like us, and we are behaving like us on speed. From the beach, parents text the office; there is a new medical condition called BlackBerry thumb. In the smartest, most thought-provoking film of the summer, the animated "Wall-E," one of the humans on sabbatical from a poisoned planet Earth is thrown away from her video screen and out of her motorized lounge chair. "I didn't know we had a pool," she marvels as she really looks around for the first time. A good friend says cancer treatment can have the same salutary effect. "You do a lot of thinking," she once said, "in the chemo chair."

Surely as they rush from plane to podium to Denver to St. Paul, Senators Obama and McCain can have little time for quiet concentrated contemplation. If presidential races are going to continue to go on for this insane length of time, then August would be a good moment for a negotiated ceasefire: for a week before the conventions each candidate would go to a secure, undisclosed location and make a concerted attempt to remember what he or she stands for. (In a different secure, undisclosed location, the hosts of cable news shows rest with eyeshades and ice packs and attempt to have a thought that is neither derivative nor extreme.) That way we might not have to devolve into a debate about whether Michelle Obama is better dressed than Cindy McCain. If life was like a TV set, we'd all fast-forward right now to the presidential debates. If life had a pause button, perhaps we'd all be better off.

© 2008