By The Campfire

July 30, 2008

It is the summer of our malcontents. No shortage of them in 2008. Most of my summers fit that category.

In reading newspapers and watching the TV and rooting around the web, it seems that about nine people think America is headed in a good direction. The rest see us sliding down a cheese grater into a bottle of alcohol.

Homeowners are losing their cul-de-sac addresses faster than the drop in public confidence in the president, congress and anyone who may have ever walked into a public building in Washington. Investors find themselves stuck in $330 billion worth of “auction rate securities” (also known as black holes for life savings). The price of gas is destroying everything from vacations (turning them into staycations in the backyard) to automobile companies to your bonus. I read talk about GM, Ford and Chrysler’s possible bankruptcy in the paper last week.

I was recently in the deep, deep South and the famous Southern Hospitality is on the wane as well. After a July 4th fireworks show in a small town, I was nearly run over by surly Southerners – 32 times. I counted. If I hadn’t have made a swift move to avoid being smooshed, I’d have been F-150’d into a sail human (see Sail Cat blog).

I went into a store and the woman behind the counter said, “What you wont?” It was like I’d interrupted her day by attempting to buy something.

The biggest change I see in the South is, no one waves anymore. This is a big shift in Southern culture. Used to be you’d get carpel tunnel syndrome driving down the highways from waving at everyone who waved at you first. Not anymore. Now people look at you like you shouldn’t be on the highway with them.

Political speeches these days focus on the things that matter most: Who is more patriotic. Excuse me? Is this what goes for deep policy discussion now? The candidates are running for president. They spend every waking moment trying to get to the most patriotic job in the world. There are 40,000 flags at every speech. Are they patriotic? Next question.

Sometimes it seems – as Frank Rich so beautifully wrote in the New York Times – that Wall-E (a Pixar’d mobile trash compactor) would be a better presidential candidate than the two fellows running. Sorry, but my cynicism has climbed up the flagpole next to one of the 40,000 flags. If the best thing our leaders can talk about is who loves the flag more, maybe it’s time we started a new 3rd party, one where the rest of taxpaying Americans are welcome.

So just how bad is it in the summer of 2008? This bad: I recently saw (on a 48-hour-a-day news channel) a woman lying dead on the floor of a hospital lobby, ignored by the staff for an hour or so. And why not? She clearly couldn’t pay the bill they would give her should they have actually treated her. This is called “customer service” in 2008.

In an effort to make things happier and less stressful on humans, bad things that happen around the world are now called “events” not disasters or catastrophes or screw-ups. Seems like Dave Matthews singing in a park or the Cowboys and Redskins facing off at Texas Stadium or the opening of Pixar’s Wall-E should be called “events,” not things that could wipe out all human life on the planet.

TV ANNOUNCER: “Today, an event happened in the Atlantic Ocean and it is now gone. The entire thing. Poof.”

Several days ago, there was an “event” near Los Angeles. It involved a fireball from space. A foreign object (chunk of rock, part of an alien space ship, piece of our own space junk, an extra from Wall-E) Chicken-Littled out of the sky and landed near one of the biggest metro areas in the U.S. Last September, a meteor the size of a basketball ripped a 60 foot-long crater in the earth in Peru. Another “event.”

Back in 1908, a chunk of something from space (a meteor) lit up Siberia with an explosion that decimated 800 square miles of forest. It is now called the “Tungusta event.”

Every time I go to a gas station, I experience an “event.” Last week I paid $100 to fill up my tank. I’d have paid more but the pump had a shut-off at $100. I have an old Suburban that has 190,000 miles on it and it’s still going strong. When it dies, I’m buying a scooter that gets 100 miles per gallon. Not sure where my family, their friends, their luggage and Rudy will ride, but I’m going to shrink my carbon footprint to the size of a chipmunk’s heiney.

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