And when will these agonies be over?
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I don’t feel like going out today. Will you wear my FitBit while you’re at lunch?” Woman to woman, overheard in Burlingame by Michael Malekos
While everyone else is wallowing in Summer of Love memories, Don Lattin was talking with pals he describes as “aging hippies” about a phrase that would describe this summer. “I voted for ‘The Summer of Lies,’ ” writes Lattin. “Should we start planning the 50th anniversary?” (Lattin’s something of an authority on the cultural aftermath of the Summer of Love. His latest book is “Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy.’’)
And while the subject is mind alterations, there’s good reason to yearn for them now. Call it a Summer of Lies, as Lattin suggests, or a Summer of Disbelief or a Summer of Masochism or a Summer of Misdirection.
Am I referring to the Trump administration or am I referring to the San Francisco Giants? Let us compare and contrast the miseries:
Administration harps for months on what it deems miscalculated estimates of inauguration attendance figures. It takes Giants until mid-summer to admit that every game is not a sellout.
Citizens waste hours in front of the TV watching horrifying news reports from White House; fans waste hours in front of the TV watching inning after inning with no reason to cheer.
President unable to execute normal handshake; Giants unable to inspire fans to high-fives.
White House focuses hopes and dreams on Anthony Scaramucci ,a dashing Wall Street maestro of hair gel; Giants brass focus hopes and dreams on Pablo Sandoval, who at least inspired a cute hat. As to nickname comparisons, “Mooch” has a negative connotation, but everybody likes a “Panda.”
Voters feel guilty for administration they can’t control; fans feel guilty for team they can’t control.
President picks his own team, then throws it under the bus, leaving the public wondering whether they should hope for or dread Jeff Sessions’ departure.
Bruce Bochy is not known for throwing anyone under the bus, but nonetheless,
Eduardo Nuñez gets traded to Boston in the middle of Tuesday’s game.
Trump contemplates bringing back Rudy Giuliani; Giants pay homage to Barry Bonds.
Trump touts Buy American week; Giants plan Hello Kitty night.
Trump wears white pants for golf; Bochy wears white pants to work. Who wears them better? The Giants manager, in better shape, perhaps, for all those calories burned running up dugout stairs.
Trump critics nurture dreams that he may be kicked out of office. Giants fans nurture dreams that the season will turn around. In baseball, as opposed to politics, it really is possible to keep hope alive.
Several readers looked up Scaramuccia or Scaramouche on Wikipedia, and based on that site’s entry, sent suggestions for an item making fun of the president’s new communications director. But for you, dear reader, Wikipedia is not classy enough. So here, from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
“Scaramouche, Italian Scaramuccia, stock character of the Italian theatrical form known as the commedia dell’arte; an unscrupulous and unreliable servant. His affinity for intrigue often landed him in difficult situations, yet he always managed to extricate himself, usually leaving an innocent bystander as his victim.”
As to that innocent bystander: Spicer?
Jane Ciabattari, former president of the National Book Critics Circle, Zyzzyva editor Laura Cogan and Managing Editor Oscar Villalon threw a literary soiree on Monday, July 24. It was the seventh year they’d hosted such an event, a kind of mixer for the book critics and the literary journal. One stated that the aim this year was to celebrate the circle’s new emerging critics program, which encourages lovers of literature to find and express their critical voices.
Among the well-known literary figures on hand: Litquake co-founder Jack Boulware, Berkeleyside co-founder Frances Dinkelspiel, Chronicle Books chief Nion McEvoy and Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books.
Wasserman, a co-founder of the Los Angeles Book Festival, was longtime book editor of the Los Angeles Times. Like a new dad proffering a celebratory cigar, he was excited to be offering a look at a copy of his new baby, Heyday’s first “instant book,” he said. It was “Our Dishonest President,” a collection of six editorials published in the Los Angeles Times last spring. The jacket copy says the book was published to “encourage thoughtful people everywhere to oppose the brazen acts of a man who is patently unfit to preside over the American republic.” It’s fair to say it wouldn’t be a good Christmas gift for your Republican uncle.
When I got the book home, I found tucked inside a clipping that Wasserman had saved, of an editorial in the usually conservative Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump somehow seems to believe that his outsize personality and social media following make him larger than the Presidency. He’s wrong.”