Happy Summer, Y'all!

The Summer Solstice is here again. Time to reflect on the change of seasons, summer fun, golf and what this guy at Stonehenge represents.

When I lived in San Diego I often heard friends in the Midwest ask, "Don't you miss the change of seasons?" My candid answer was: "Not in the least. When the weather's perfect, why would you want it to change?"

Now that I'm again in a clime that actually has changing seasons, I have come to welcome the transitions: from the heat of summer to the cooler (but usually not too cold) days of Atlanta's fall and winter, and back to springtime and the lazy time of July and August.

Having lived in Florida's perpetual summer for more than a decade, "Hotlanta's" seasons are a bit of a change. It gets both hot and cold here at various times; but it was worse in St. Louis where we counted the number of days with triple digit temps and the number of inches of snow and ice. In my ten years in Orlando, the temperature was never over 100 degrees. Never. And it never snowed.

Then there was Baton Rouge, where summer scenes like this one (at right) were enough to scare me right back to my air conditioning.

So it's good to be enjoying summer in Atlanta. Although we have no ocean, there's major league baseball, and golf, and my apartment's pool. What more could a fella want?

Speaking of golf ... didja hear about the controversy NBC stirred up with its opening vignette for the U.S. Open telecast on Sunday? It was a montage of golf and patriotism that included school children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while footage of American flags, marching soldiers, the Washington Monument, etc., played on the screen. The problem was that the 30-second piece was edited in such a way that the words "under God" were omitted. Twice.

It was subtle, and I didn't notice it at the time, but the blogosphere noticed and went ballistic. People were all aTwitter with righteous indignation, having apparently taken personal offense at this "selective patriotism" and the supposed slight done to "our heritage, our ideals, and the sacrifice of those who have fought to protect our freedoms." (Washington Post, 6/20/2011)

NBC issued an on-air apology during the telecast and went even further on Monday saying, "We are aware of the distress this has caused many of our viewers and are taking the issue very seriously. ... This was a bad decision." 

I entirely agree, but not for the reason NBC and the Washington Post and others cite. It was a bad decision because the U.S. Open needn't be an occasion for patriotism. It's a golf tournament, by jingo! It's held on Father's Day weekend -- not Memorial Day, not Veterans Day, not the Fourth of July. Do we need always to be bombarded by chauvinistic patriotism and ceremonial deism? I know that the tourney was held near DC at Congressional Country Club, and obviously NBC thought the setting was appropriate for a little flag-waving. The PGA will be held in Atlanta this summer; maybe they'll play "Dixie" and show the battle flag of the Confederacy. 

The Washington Post and the red-blooded Americans who got their panties in a wad over this imagined insult need to remember that the Pledge of Allegiance is primarily a loyalty oath used in citizenship ceremonies. It's not something Jefferson brought down from a mountain top on stone tablets. Congress didn't adopt it until 1942, and "under God" wasn't added until 1954 during the Eisenhower administration and the Red Scare days of Joseph McCarthy. It's not exactly one of our founding documents.

So, let us return to the summer solstice and the picture at the very beginning of this post. If we want to pledge loyalty to something, how about to our First Amendment? To that part of our national heritage that lets people decide for themselves whether they are "under God" or not; that lets Wiccans or anyone else practice their religion here as if they were at Stonehenge; that lets patriots dress up and wave flags. Let us pledge loyalty to our freedom of speech and our ability to go crazy on Facebook and Twitter and blog spots like this one without fear of censorship. God bless the USA! 

And thank heaven for summer!

Curmudgeonly Musings

News Flash! Anthony Weiner is an Idiot.   

‘Nuff said. What’s interesting (to me at least) is to think about how different today’s news climate is compared to 50 or 75 years ago. The media didn’t excoriate Kennedy for his dalliances. They didn’t even photograph FDR in his wheelchair. But now anything salacious is considered “news.” 

And the media – the children of Hamelin – follow Sarah Palin’s huge ‘non-campaign’ bus everywhere waiting for the next dumb thing she’ll say so they can report it because that’s the kind of stuff people want to hear.

As a Forbes columnist wrote earlier this week, “Is anyone embarrassed by this?  Is anyone embarrassed that we now have a TV game show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, where contestants let the world know what they don’t know?” 

It’s the dumbing-down of America. But whose fault is it? The media wouldn’t feed us this stuff if people didn’t eat it up. The media make us stupid. One author sums it up this way: 

The problem with the media has become a chicken-and-egg question. It delivers crap to us; the crap mesmerizes us (i.e. it generates high ratings); the media gives us more, and – oops – we’ve all become dazzled and distracted and unfocused. [Lisa Bloom, Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World.]

I haven’t watched local news programs for at least 20 years, and I seldom watch national news any more either. With help from CNN, The Weather Channel gives a good review of current events at 6 a.m., and skimming the front section of the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal plus a few minutes of NPR or CNN at the top of any hour is about all the information one needs. Who cares about the rest of the stuff masquerading as news? Just move on to the sports page. (See my posts back in February and March about the media, Marshal McLuhan, the movie Blowup, etc.)

Speaking of Dumbing-Down

It was prom season recently. "Glee" had an entire episode on it, and the NYT had a story about proms for adults, of all things. The headline read, "Second Shot to Have the Best Night of Their Lives." Their best night! Really?

All over the country young couples like this one spent hundreds of dollars for clothes, corsages, limos, etc., in search of that elusive "best night." Gag me! I thought proms were stupid when I went to them (credit peer pressure for my going), and I feel even more so now. And proms for adults? Puh-leeze!

 

Ya Gets What Ya Pays For

Here's another curmudgeonly perspective: people who live in swamps shouldn't complain about water. Sure they got flooded out in Morgan City and Houma and other towns in the downstream parishes of Louisiana: that's what they get for living in a flood plain. They should be thankful they weren't washed away years ago, which they would have been but for government efforts at flood "control." (When will we ever learn that Nature always wins in the long run?)

And While I'm At It

All the folks who got flooded and hit by tornadoes or scorched by wild fires, and all those who will likely feel hurricanes' wrath this summer and fall ... where will they go to seek assistance? Washington of course. So much for the Reagan/Tea Party mantra, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."