Summary Summery Summary
for release 06-13-05
Washington D.C.
While the boys and girls inside the Beltway get down to their serious Summer Stealing, the rest of America is looking for more entertaining diversions than worrying about chasing the foxes out of the hen house.
We're tired of hearing about Tom DeLay having both hands in the cookie jar and if he could grow another one it would be in there too, or whether or not the intelligence that got us into this pointless war was cooked. We would rather hear about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes being all gushy in love and finding true happiness via May-September sex and Scientology. We want light beach-reading novels and Summer blockbuster movies that will be forgotten by the Fall. We don't want to consider the fact that the Bushies have sold out to the oil cartels on the global warming agreements, hell it's Summertime, we Want global warming, right?
We've had it up to the gills with Social Security reform or watching our
pension system crumble before our eyes because our government is more concerned with the interests of big business than with the interests of its citizens. We're sick of hearing about those pesky road-side bombs in Iraq and about those evildoers in Iran and Korea who even as we speak are assembling nukes that are waiting to be either loaded on rickshaws or camels, which represent the states of their respective delivery systems. We want to think about beer and barbeque and the beach.
We don't want to think about imminent terror, the porosity of our ports
and borders, no, we want to hook the jet-ski or the four-wheeler trailer
up to the back of our big bad SUVs and make for the lakes and to hell with the price of gas. If we really want an orgy of fuel burning we can go to a Nascar race where we can sit on a tailgate with the charcoal and gas fumes in the air and the engines blasting louder than a Howard Dean speech in an ecstatic groan of clattering pistons. This is Summertime.
You know, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of Summer when all the kids are off visiting their non-custodial parents and Disney World is a teeming mass of vacation crazed step-parents in Hawiian shirts and ghastly shorts that are as frenetic and meaningless as the latest action movie epic.
Oh yes, these are the days of slathering sun-blockers and mosquito repellent and mowing lawns and watching reruns on television. It's the season when the gentlemanly stand-up sport of baseball is ascendant over the crass contact of football. These are the dog days when we eat our hotdogs while our legislators take first base on balls and then steal second, third and home.
By the time the World Series rolls around we will have a new Hummer version of the rights-stealing Patriot Act, probably will have dumped another fifty or sixty billion down the black hole of Iraq and maybe will even have acquiesced to cuts in Social Security. It should be a grand Summer.
We can just turn off the television and the radio and the internet and forget about troublesome things like our officials using the Koran for toilet paper at Gitmo or rights abuses in Afghanistan or wherever it is that they take people to abuse their rights, and we don't want to hear about the plight of non-vacationers in Darfur Sudan or rampant AIDS in the rest of Africa, no no no no no. It's Summertime and the livin' is easy.
The Poet's Eye squints in the mid-June brightness, and hopes that the pirates don't burglarize our houses while we are on vacation. They don't even need a warrant anymore.
Just fill your basket full of sandwiches and weenies
Then lock the house up, now you’re set
And on the beach you’ll see the girls in their bikinis
As cute as ever but they never get ’em wet
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
You’ll wish that summer could always be here
----as sung by Nat Cole, words by Charles Tobias and music by Hans Carste
