Certain summer

For young people, it’s a time for recreation, renewal and reviewing school materials.

For politicians, it’s time to pay the bills from Cold Wars, Star Wars, and Gulf Wars ….

For us, consumers, it’s a time to conserve fuel and energy, or just to stay cool.

One quote sticks, uttered by a friend of those who were killed in Oslo “Think of so much hate in one man, and how much more love in all of us together”.

Darkness and light. In each of us. Grant us the serenity.

There is fortunately a certain summer in all the seasons.

I like mature voices (like Terry Jacks or Gordon Lightfoot) who sang about lost innocence.

They lamented about a time that had slipped away undetected. Call it romanticism. Call it naivete. But we need leaders who can rouse the dreams.

We know what reality is like. And since we don’t like it, we invent an alternate one (..like an old-time movie)  with the help of our “high priests”: singers, entertainers, preachers and politicians, all masters and  manipulators of symbols.

Stephen King made this point clear: to write is to create another world. Once he took us inside a vacated hotel in the thick of winter (the Shinning) and moved us through the degenerative process of a defunct writer.

With Earth 7 billion, we’ve got sustainability issues.

Living in an age of de-leveraging.

Summer time in Greece and not in Grease.

“Skinned our heads and skinned our knees”.

I am finishing up “How the West was Lost” which depicts current reality in hard numbers. (as of this edit, Stockman releases his the Great Deformation volume).

Who is ultimately responsible? Fannie Mae? Greenspan? Clinton?

The rich-poor gap is so widened that the only people who feel stinky rich are the nouveau  rich in China mainland,

(rich people in the US dress down quite deliberately to blend in as “the millionaire next door”) with their Bentley’s and Gucci’s.

Summer traveling, with French waiters and Chinese tourists.

New world order.

Modern historians will be chronicling about Chinese in Paris.

(BTW, they are the ones who can afford “classical” music and high arts).

Meanwhile, the latest Economist issue features Westerners as the new Japanese (lost decades).

This summer in Oslo is also a turning point for the once Nordic Paradise.

To find Seasons in the Sun, one has to go further than Somalia, Sarasota or Singapore.

Maybe it’s a Lonely Planet after all. It’s the summer in our selective memory while reality is that of a declining  West. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun… Mature voices, innocent times. If you can read my mind…, it’s like an old-time movie.