August is the cruelest month

By Edward Cone

8-24-03

News & Record

Summer was over and school was starting and there were lamentations throughout the land, or at least those parts of the land that we drove through on our way back from a final-fling trip to the beach.

Much of the lamenting, it must be said, was coming from the driver’s seat. Who do I talk to about getting the rest of my August back?

When I was a kid we had to walk to school, uphill both ways, often through the snow, lugging our stone tablets and chisels. But at least we didn’t go back before summer had properly ended.

Call me old fashioned, but premature matriculation is one unnatural act that the state should never sanction. School before Labor Day is an offense to family values, especially for a family that values moving at its own stately pace instead of rushing to finish last night’s homework before the frozen waffles burn.

Americans work more than people of other industrialized nations, and now we’re passing that vice along to our children. This may be the hidden reason that the French stiffed us on the war in Iraq: it’s hard to respect a country that doesn’t know how to take a decent vacation. Sure, we get to run the New World Order, but they get to spend the rest of August on paid holiday at a topless beach.

Everywhere you look, the dog days are going to the dogs. Lord Byron said that the English winter ends in July to recommence in August, and that’s the direction our 24/7 culture is headed.

The media used to call this the silly season, a time for trivial stories instead of hard news. Now it’s silly season all year round, featuring generous portions of true crime and Bill O’Reilly. At least O’Reilly is doing his part by participating in a silly season classic, the Fox News lawsuit against Al Franken’s new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Relax, Bill, nobody’s going to confuse your work with Franken’s – he’s the one who’s funny on purpose.

Meanwhile the real news sounds pretty silly, too. Last week I listened as another Fox star, Sean Hannity, duked it out with tiny California gubernatorial candidate Gary Coleman. Hannity, firm of jaw and dim of bulb, kept asking the kid from Diff’rent Strokes if things would be better if Saddam was still alive. Coleman kept failing to point out that as far as we know, Saddam is still alive. Everyone else seemed to be piling on Arnold Schwarzenegger for not being a real conservative. Wait til they find out he’s not a real Terminator, either.

The beach seemed a good place to stage our last-ditch resistance to the annexation of August by September. There is a timeless quality to a family beach trip, a sense of watching a tape loop as your kids do the same things in the water and the sand that you used to do, and that their kids will probably do someday, too.

A few things do change from year to year -- the shoot-paintballs-at-the-crazy-guy game on the boardwalk is now a shoot-paintballs-at-Saddam game, and one of the stands nearby was selling Freedom Fries -- but sitting by the ocean made me feel like I’d been there forever, and could stay there forever without much missing much of importance.

Unless, that is, you count the opening of school when summertime should still be playing its eighth inning as important. The event was greeted with surprising enthusiasm by the actual students at our house, not to mention their mother. Not wanting to spoil the mood and eager as always to set a positive example, I’ve tried to keep my bad attitude to myself. That’s why I’m only telling you.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com) contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

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