Summer is always a bad time for nasty stuff to go down . . . too much heat and too much humidity and nobody ever being quite comfortable enough. Long ago, I read a piece by Judith Martin – writing in propria persona, not as Miss Manners – opining that this was the real reason why so many holidays of national independence are in the middle of local summer: too many days in a row of heat, humidity, stinky streets, and flies, and all it takes is one more incident and the next thing you know they’re hanging the aristos from the lamp-posts again someplace.
And this is an election year in America, which always makes the summers worse even when we aren’t afflicted with as polarizing a pair of candidates as I think I’ve ever seen. (Though I’m amazed that the right-wing true believers haven’t given up on hoping to pin something on Hillary by now. You’d think that after over two decades of trying and failing, during which she’s been under almost constant investigation by a regular clown parade of different interest groups, they would wise up to the fact that either there’s nothing there for them to find, or that where leading a double life is concerned she’s got Batman, Superman, Daredevil, and the Amazing Spider-Man all beat to hell.)
This year, though, it isn’t just us here in the USA. The UK has got the results of the Brexit vote to contend with, and France has mass terror attacks, and Turkey has an attempted coup, and it’s generally difficult to put your finger down at random on a spinning globe and not hit someplace that’s having a hard time at the moment. And thanks to the wonder of immediacy that is the internet, we get to have everybody’s bad day in our faces all at once, instead of getting the news delivered to us in more manageable, staggered-by-distance chunks, so that we have time to process things in between.
(Overly serious people sometimes complain that the internet is too full of pictures of people’s cats. I maintain that the ability to go look at the pictures of cute cats in Japanese train stations, in New York City apartments, and in backyards all over is a necessity in a world where we are regularly slapped in the face with bad news from everywhere, whether we’ve asked for it or not.)
Maybe when the cool weather comes back around, things will calm down a little. Probably not, but one can hope.
Meanwhile, it’s back to the word mines for me. If anybody out there has a manuscript that needs editing, they can always get in touch with me by way of the About or Contact Me links on this page.
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