It’s mid-August and the signs of summer’s end are everywhere. Back-to-school commercials are on TV, my inbox is flooded with hundreds of 2010-11 Skirball Center events and my Long Island home away from home is starting to look like the upside-down Paris from “Inception”.
Although the time away from essays, Blackboard and Bobst Library has been relaxing, it’s about time to return to the Big Apple for another year of mayhem. These months off have been different than past summers, however, and I’m not saying that in a reflective, corny, first-summer-back-from-college sense. I don’t know if it’s the record-breaking heat waves or fumes from the Gulf frying this country’s brains, but the events that have happened over the past several weeks have been strange and twisted, to say the least.
The other morning, I woke up in my usual fashion: stumbled out of bed with a headache from the night before, chugged some coffee and started a crossword with the dull voices of MSNBC news anchors yapping away in the background. Then I looked up and almost spit my coffee all over the kitchen table.
The clip playing on the tube showed none other than the cast of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” banging on the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange. Snooki, JWOWW and The Situation were starting the engine for the day’s capital ventures across the world. As I slowly regained consciousness after fainting from the stupidity of it all, news from the Black Lagoon continued to crawl across the screen, ESPN-style. Lindsay Lohan is in jail, President Obama’s approval ratings are sinking lower than BP stock and more people are concentrating on LeBron James’ decision than the oil-stricken coasts in the Gulf.
It is now a daily occurrence for me to say to myself, “Wow, that was the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen” — only to be corrected seconds later. Why does ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich still compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr. on the witness stand? Bristol Palin is marrying Levi Johnston, her infamous baby daddy, and Sarah had no idea? But now he’s not because he fathered another child? Why do ‘top kill’ and ‘static kill’ sound so awesome?
Aside from the Hitchcockian summer we’ve been having, there were several things that kept my hopes up in May, June and July. Elena Kagan has become the fourth woman to become a Supreme Court Justice. The decision to overturn Proposition 8 in California demonstrated that the religious right is a lot more dangerous to the “traditional family” than homosexuals are. The White House announced that 75 percent of the oil in the Gulf is already gone. Wall Street and the auto industry are on a hiring spree for the first time in years. The U.S. Senate is starting to look like … a productive legislative body.
Progress is progress. Still, the only adjective that could reasonably be used to describe this summer — a summer of strange twists and turns more than ups and downs — is confusing. Maybe it’s good that vacation is coming to an end. It’s about time for this country to sober up before the semester begins.