The blessed gift of summer, warm, long days and star filled nights, with the nature’s bounty in full bloom, is brief but treasured paradise for every midwesterner. August then arrives, and the buildup of heat begins to linger, with more muggy humidity and flying bugs, more substantial thunderstorms, and the first hint of the etherial nature of warm pleasantries in a northern clime. These are the dog days, and even the dogs know it. The energy lags. The baseball team is going nowhere. The world is skittish about the number of unhinged people with grievances looking for a violent moment in the sun. The political scene is an unadulterated mess. The Olympics are sliding into the politically correct abyss. Maybe its best to just curl up in a ball, and sleep it off.
Historian Andrew Roberts in the UK Telegraph reminds us August, named for the most dominant of Roman Caesars, has been notorious for being the month of great upheaval. The calamity known as World War I was triggered in August 2014 when massive mobilizations across Europe triggered the inevitable initiation of direct conflict between million man armies. World War II was seared to a close in the dropping of the two atomic bombs on August 6th, and August 9th 1945 in a fitting close to the Armageddon of World War II, launched on August 31st, 1939 by the Nazi dictator who fondly dreamed about Gotterdammerung. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein decided August 2nd 1990, was an appropriate time to attempt to take over a third of the world’s oil with an invasion of Kuwait and in all probability the Arab Gulf States, until the United States and its allies determined to upset his fantasy of untold wealth and power over the next 6 months. Caesar Augustus would likely have been offended that the violent month would be associated with the man who brought the world Pax Romana. Not so much the violent part, just the fact that leaders were unable to instill the iron discipline that prevented upstarts from starting conflagrations threatening the order of things.
The world is drifting into muggy somnolence this August. Polls have suggested a waning interest, particularly among youth, for the engagement, hard work, and need for compromise, that sustains democratic rule. Despite the abysmal records of socialist top down governments, there is a growing comfort with the idea of a “strong” leader to go above the heads of legislatures where nasty differences in opinion have to be worked out, and have the efficiencies of decisions that are determined to be in our “best interest”. The United States, with almost a perfect process of checks and balances to prevent the development of a supreme leader, finds that its current President has used extra-legal means to secure his agenda, and nothing is done about it. To secure a treaty with the arch enemy Iranian mullahs, Obama made an agreement that didn’t require Senate approval as demanded in the Constitution, and flaunted the laws placed to prevent paying ransom for hostages, making Americans everywhere at risk for the long arm of terrorists. So much for the checks and balances. Its current candidates for the executive office, Hillary Clinton, the felonious sieve of our nation’s security, continues in a pattern typical for her entire public life, to lie and deceive with the intent to exhaust ear, and eventually the rectitude of the voter. The water canon Donald Trump, spews out conflicted concepts unburdened by circumspect thought, suggesting only The Donald is capable of solving an infinity of national problems. Not with solutions, mind you, simply the power of extra-constitutional will. Sounds pretty “strong man” to me. The two party system that propelled these two anti-democratic poseurs has made a shambles of the idea of principled democracy. It will not be enough to simply roll up in a ball. We are going to need a significant shower to wash off the rhetorical dung.
Out there exists more of the same. A disconnected populous takes selfies to record their own existence, not their society’s accomplishment. People carelessly give up their unique identity more and more to nefarious software parasites that steal identity like they used to steal jewels, destroying the trust in the marketplace, the concept of citizenry, and the power of the vote. Athletic contests are tainted with doping and men are running as women to defeat women running as women, to alter artificially the concept of competition, and more fundamentally the idea of envisioning the accomplishment of an outcome based on the concept of effort, dedication, and equal opportunity. Judges seek to actively overrule laws that offend their political senses, not their training, regarding the process of law and the importance of rule of law in a democracy. The somnolence extends to the “governmentalizing” of health care, where life prolonging decisions will be made on politically correct behaviors, not by practitioners and patients objectively dealing in a private way with disease and mortality.
Oh, the dog days. Its hard to look at them as anything other than something to be tolerated rather than overcome. A nice secure place to roll up in a ball and sleep it off seems to definitely have its merits. Of course, at some point, we are going to have to wake up, stretch, look around, and get to work and start fixing this mess.
Not today. Maybe tomorrow.
