The quickly-vanishing public that once read print newspapers every day likely recall the “dog days” of August, when year after year, unoriginal columnists declared it the “silly season.” It wasn’t really: the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 was held in August (aside from the brutality meted out to protestors, the lasting image to me was Sen. Abe Ribicoff, in support of George McGovern, denouncing Mayor Richard Daley’s “gestapo tactics”); the serial murders of 29 boys in Houston and Pasadena, TX, came to light in early-August 1973; and on August 2, 1990 Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting off the first Gulf War (and recriminations to follow in 2003 by President George W. Bush—and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld— a botched war). The phrase “silly season” was coined because so much of the media took their vacations, and if The Washington Post’s now-forgotten David Broder was fishing at Beaver Island in Michigan, “news” didn’t happen. (Broder, dubbed “the Dean” of the Washington press corps, wasn’t offensive, he just didn’t add anything that wasn’t “conventional wisdom”.)
That’s all passé, since the “silly season,” reporters and columnists writing about nothing in particular, looking for clicks, became year-round earlier this century. One recent example was Matthew Continetti’s Wall Street Journal column last week, “America Is the Best Brand,” which was a call for national unity this July 4th, the country’s semiquincentennial. Continetti has his ups and downs as a commentator (his book-length defense of Sarah Palin wasn’t a high-water mark), but this effort read like a Chamber of Commerce (I’m not sure if those local institutions still exist, or at least taken seriously) press release.
He writes: “Grand occasions to praise the United States of America are infrequent; let’s make the most of this one. Political considerations can wait. The country will benefit. So will posterity. And the public is ready. M. Booth, a public-relations agency, found in a recent survey that 62% of Americans say the semiquincentennial is personally important (just don’t ask them to spell it).”
His stupid joke aside, I don’t believe Continetti or M. Booth. How will “posterity” reap rewards from a (possibly) buoyant July 4th? It won’t, just the as the bicentennial in 1976 was promoted to the hilt (especially in car, booze and bedding commercials) and turned out to be a wet firecracker. There were the Tall Boats traveling from Harbor to Harbor that got attention (definitely not mine) and… I remember nothing else about that July 4th, except that since it was Sunday, I was off from a summer job at The Baltimore Sun, and spent the evening drinking $.25 cent Pabst draft beers at Godfrey’s Steer and Beer on Greenmount Ave. I was pissed that the Orioles were in Detroit playing the Tigers, but the game was on the overhead tube at Godfrey’s.
A lot of anti-Trump press releases posing as commentary come from The New York Times. Gail Collins, in a column headlined “Contemplating Trump at 80” (her age as well), blathered: “President Trump is giving old people a bad name… Want to talk a little about whether Trump is going to merge Oldest and Worst [U.S. president]? Let’s not. If we focus on that, there’s a grave danger I’ll lead you into a lengthy contemplation of the fact that we’ve still got nearly three more years of the Trump White House. Don’t dwell on it. Really. Stop.”
If Collins was concerned about her readers’ mental health why did she write this press release? Dwell on it. Really. Don’t stop “contemplating” that today’s media is only going to get worse. As she might say, “Let that sink in.”
This isn’t a press release: a local CVS on St. Paul St. in Baltimore (which I use) has been closed since April 2 because of “rodent infestation.” Last Saturday, after picking up some bagels on that block, my wife spied an exterminator, on a break outside the CVS. She asked what was going on, and the guy shrugged, said he was still trying to capture two rats that were gnawing away at bags of candy and chips and boxes of cereal on the shelves. CVS, like in many cities, has a near-monopoly on drugstores in Baltimore (and this one is adjacent to the Johns Hopkins campus), but money is money, and it baffles me why the local management didn’t send in six exterminators instead of one, blast the joint, and get the outlet up and running in two days. As it happened, I had a prescription ready, but had to find another CVS to collect it. Not a big deal, but the mood at this store on the 900 block of N. Charles St. was somber. The lady at the pick-up counter was working at triple-speed, and after I complimented her on this serious dexterity, she half-laughed and said, “Yeah, thanks to 3200 St. Paul. Not that I’ll see any kind of bonus.”
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023