I hate the end of summer. 

That’s because­—simple math—I love summer. Like the song goes, it’s my time of year. Part of it is just me, part of it is being a water sports guy (ha ha, I know), part of it is the seasonal scaries that so many of us have as the grind of regular life beckons with the falling leaves and falling temperatures. 

I am also of the feral child generation, when summer meant unstructured and nearly unrestricted freedom of a sort that these days would get Child Protective Services called on you. That’s a kind of muscle memory that never goes away, which is why for many of us it will always be associated with the season. Atop all that, I was an Army brat, and moved almost every May, so fall meant starting over yet again in yet another new school, which wasn’t exactly super fun, but built character, as they say. (Don’t get me started on “New Kid in Town,” and not just because it’s an Eagles song, but because it’s written from the perspective of a local kid moaning woe-is-me over the eponymous new arrival, who, in the narrator’s telling, is an instant hero. Gimme a fucking break.)

But I digress. 

Three years ago in these pages I wrote a piece called “Summer’s End” in which I covered a lot of that same ground, but added two other factors that made the looming autumn of 2020 especially worrisome. 

The first was the fear of returning to the dark days of the COVID-19 lockdown, from which we had only tentatively begun to emerge, as the warm weather receded and we were forced back indoors again. (As I wrote back then, thanks to the pandemic, my then-nine-year-old daughter’s unscheduled, free-range summer of 2020 resembled those of my own childhood more than in any previous year.) Apropos of that summertime respite, and how COVID would ultimately play out, I asked which Bergman movie it would turn out we were in, The Seventh Seal, with its medieval plague, or Smiles of a Summer Night, with its uncharacteristically lighthearted, un-Bergman-like farce? (Though speaking of summer, if we’re picking Bergman movies to inhabit, can I just be in Summer with Monika please?)

The other factor weighing on me, like so many of us, was the presidential election. 

But in the end the former issue was avoided because of the latter, and because of the return of competent adult leadership to the White House, which at last got the pandemic under control thanks to rational adherence to science, rather than a magical belief in horse tranquilizer. 

Even so, we were right to be anxious, as I wrote ahead of the looming election:

I am still deeply worried that (Trump) will still manage to ratfuck his way to a second term, even if it means fighting in the streets….

The only way to avoid that fate is to keep working as hard as we can for an electoral blowout that minimizes Trump’s intention—the one that he has overtly been signaling—that he intends to remain in office regardless.  

As it turned out, even an electoral blowout—Biden won by seven million votes—was not enough to forestall that fate. What transpired next was almost that worst case scenario, or at least second place, one shy of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and martial law in an effort to get the US military into the streets to keep him in power. Even now he remains the most dire threat to the republic since Elvis shook his hips on “Ed Sullivan.”

But I do feel better than I did three Augusts ago. The pandemic is behind us now and COVID is just another manageable virus. While the threat of future pandemics remains, a new one doesn’t feel imminent, and our understanding and capacity to respond have improved. 

As for the next presidential race, I remain concerned —very concerned—but am guardedly optimistic. The wheels of justice have ground very slowly—very slowly—but Donald Trump is now under indictment in four separate criminal cases at both the federal and state levels, and for some of the most serious crimes imaginable. I am by no means certain that any of that, or even the accumulated weight of all of it taken together, will keep him out of the White House for a return engagement (notice how we’ve stopped even talking about the delusion that he might not be the Republican nominee?), but I do believe that it is significantly hurting his general election prospects. The GOP base and fundraising are a different story, which just speaks to the depths of Republican insanity and the danger it still poses. But Donny does seem to be on his heels.  

Then again, I have learned not to discount any possibility, no matter how far-fetched, as it’s clear that my own powers of political prognostication are poor. (I learned that on November 8, 2016.) 

The election is still a little over a year away, so my anxiety has not yet peaked, and a shit-ton can happen between now and then. In fact, this trending against the GOP may prove to be the very thing that we have to worry about—that the Republicans, knowing that they can’t win a free and fair presidential election, will find a way to rig the game, and/or contest the results in an even more violent and destabilizing way than last time. Do you put it past them?

So check with me next Labor Day for an update on my blood pressure and ulcer. 

FEEL FLOWS

The irony of my late summer dread is that I quite like the autumn, once it is undeniably upon us and I’ve made my annual peace with it. 

(Stick with me here, because I’m still down at the shore for the bitter end of the season, and edibles are legal in Jersey now.)

In 2004 the New York Times Magazine published a memorable interview with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Like most surfers, I harbor a real animosity for the Beach Boys and the insipid music that is permanently associated with the sport, thanks in large part to them. (Dick Dale, though—that’s cool.) 

I feel a little better, spitefully so, that it’s been a curse for the band, too, or at least for Brian, a passing fad that he and the band were involuntarily wedded to, and that indelibly stamped their public image. It’s an association that they’ve spent years trying to shake, with self-consciously arty LPs like the decades-in-the-making Smile, or 1971’s ironically titled Surf’s Up, with its cover art referencing the 19^th century sculptor James Earle Fraser’s “The End of the Trail,” a grim depiction of a weary Native American on an emaciated horse standing on the western edge of the continent, an image so stark and at odds with summertime fun fun fun that you can almost hear the cold wind blowing. For my money Surf’s Up is also far and away their best album, beating—yes—the perfectly fine but overplayed and overrated Pet Sounds. (Fight me.)

Whoa, these edibles are no joke. Remind me to take only a half next time.

Let me qualify that bit about how the band hates its “surf music” image. The sensitive, famously bedridden Brian certainly did, but his odious cousin Mike Love—a Trump supporter, whom the comedian John Mulaney called “simultaneously the leader of the band and its least important member”—has always seemed fine with it, on the band’s perennial, Brian-less, cash cow oldies tours. 

(In fact Mulaney has eviscerated Love on several occasions, including his assessment of Love’s speech on the occasion of the band’s 1988 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: “That was like an uncle giving a toast at a wedding and the uncle hadn’t been invited,” Mulaney quipped. “He dressed like he rents speedboats. He had that hat with a tux—and he thinks Brian’s the unstable one.”)

Anyway, that Times interview ends with the reporter—Deborah Solomon—asking Brian about the surf music thing, and he notes that he’s never surfed in his life, never wanted to, and hasn’t even been to the beach in a decade.

“Is summer your favorite season?” Solomon asks.

“No,” Brian answers. “I like fall.” 

It’s so heartbreaking: this genius who was exploited and abused—even by his own father—and is permanently associated with a season and a sport and a whole bullshit fake lifestyle that he never wanted and that never represented who he was. You can feel his melancholy as surely as you can hear the howling wind battering that Seneca warrior on the cover of Surf’s Up. And the Times knew it, because they ended the piece with it. 

Then again, in that same interview Brian also opines that Phil Spector would be acquitted of murder because it was all just an accident. So maybe he wasn’t yet 100% well in ’04.

ARE WE GREAT AGAIN YET?

Which brings us back to the shortening days of summer, and the uncertainty that looms ahead. 

In that 2020 piece, I wrote about being down at the Jersey shore in May of that year, for the first time since the lockdown began:

The weather was still raw, and the boardwalk was a ghost town, spooky and depopulated. A Cessna flew over towing a banner reading TRUMP PENCE 2020: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Irony, thy name is Donald. 

I also wrote about the likely circumstances we would face after that November’s election:

The best case scenario—let’s not fool ourselves—is a protracted legal battle and constitutional crisis; the worst, a new civil war. Alarmism, you say? I invite your attention to the news. Increasingly frequent clashes between armed supporters of the two sides—the most recent just last weekend, in Louisville, on Kentucky Derby Day—has made that once absurd and unthinkable possibility feel more and more plausible.

Political violence in the US has only accelerated since then, most recently this week with the homophobic murder in cold blood of a San Bernardino County shop owner, shot dead by an angry right wing stranger for the crime of displaying the rainbow flag outside her own store. 

As I have written before, it’s time we stop viewing these acts as isolated incidents, or dismissing them as the irrational acts of angry loners, and recognize them for what they are: part of an insurgency, an ongoing campaign of ideologically-driven violent extremism, even if the ideology is nothing more than hateful retrograde nihilism. 

Since 2020 the fanatic far right has seized upon the trans community as its favorite target, casting its members—our fellow Americans—in the role of scapegoat, a prerequisite in all neo-fascist movements. But like all neo-fascist movements, it is the craven, nodding complicity of mainstream conservatives that allows that hate to metastasize, making those allegedly “moderate” accomplices just as culpable as the extremists, and even more dangerous.

Then there was this, also from my 2020 piece:

And of course Trump might win, legitimately or not. But it will be a disaster of another kind even if he loses, because he has openly announced that he will view any Biden victory as fraudulent by definition.

The Big Lie has since become the defining issue of contemporary American life. It was adjudicated to death in 62 court cases that Trump brought, losing in resounding fashion in 61 of them (the only exception being a brief TRO in one Georgia recount). It will be adjudicated again in the Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and—indirectly—Alvin Bragg prosecutions. But the verdict that will count the most is the one at the ballot box on November 6, 2024, and not even shackles and an orange jumpsuit (or more likely, an ankle monitor and exile to Elba-Lago) will necessarily tip that.

Let’s be clear. The United States is dealing with a domestic terrorist movement, and Donald Trump is at its head. That’s right: a mentally deficient D-list celebrity / slash / con man-turned-game show host turned politician is at the front of a racist, homo- and transphobic White nationalist theocratic movement that represents a lethal threat to American democracy. And it ain’t going away any time soon, whether he goes to prison or not.

The people who support Trump, even now, even after all we’ve seen, even in mulish denial of objective facts, are so deep down the rabbit hole that we’ve lost all radio communication. They are unreachable, and would be irrelevant…..except that the leadership of the GOP remains in Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style thrall to them, and too few of the aforementioned moderates are willing to break ranks. One recent poll shows Trump voters trust him more than their own family members or religious leaders. (Yes, and Dracula should be in charge of the blood bank.)

The mind reels. 

So yeah, things are a lot better than they were three years ago this time. But only a fool would relax. 

FLIPPER DROPPED IN ON ME

Last week I was surfing in the early morning before the beach came to life, and there was a pod of dolphins swimming within 25 meters of me, which actually happens with some frequency. That is the kind of moment when I am not thinking about politics at all. But it’s also a psychological luxury—one that can’t be maintained forever. 

We have one more trip around the sun before another crucial decision point for our democracy. So leave me alone in the ocean for a few more weeks, and then bring on the red and orange leaves, drifting down lazily from the treelimbs, and blanketing the streets and lawns. I like fall, too….which is a good thing because it’s coming whether we like it or not.

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Copy editing by the great Gina Patacca