The Dog Days of Summer

We’re in the dog days of summer, the hottest, most enervating time of the year. These are the days “when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies” we are told in John Brady’s Clavis calendaria, a fascinating treatise on the history and lore of the calendar.

Originally, the dogs days were the time of year when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose above the horizon at or near dawn but a lot of time has passed, the stars themselves have altered in their courses, and that’s no longer the case.

During this time of year lots of people in the northern hemisphere take their vacations, the stock market is slow, and news is even slower although the news outlets will report the non-events of the next few weeks with all the intensity of wonders and portents.

At the end of this week the Olympics will begin in Beijing and I’m sure that the Chinese will do their best to ensure that they’re completely news-free. I doubt they’ll succeed.

I think there must be something to what Brady had to say. In the last week or so we’ve been treated to both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain abandoning their promises to wage clean, issue-oriented campaigns because, basically, they both want to be president and to do so they’re going to have to do what one needs to do to become president.

It will be quite a sad spectacle to watch each of them abandon the core values by which they’ve lived their lives to grasp that brass ring.

Sen. Obama has lived a life in pursuit of his identity, understandable, I think, under the circumstances. The complaints that he’s “played the race card” ignore the reality that he can’t do anything else but tread a narrow line between being a racial candidate and being a post-racial candidate. If he does the former, his candidacy is doomed, the latter too strongly and he abandons the search that’s occupied much of his adult life.

Sen. McCain has lived a life full of honor and the traditions he inherited from his ancestors. Little by little over the last few months he’s stretched that honor until it’s showing signs of wear in spots. At this point whether the candidates would want it to be that way or not the election is about Sen. Obama and in order to secure the presidency Sen. McCain will need to criticize Sen. Obama directly, not just his ideas but the man himself and his fitness for the office he seeks. John McCain, too, will tread a very narrow line between retaining his core values at the loss of the presidency or securing the office and losing the reason he’s seeking the office.

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  • sam Link

    The Dog Days of Summer

    “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

    Raymond Chandler – Red Wind.

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