by P.J. O'Rourke
The logical argument contra summertime should be four words long: middle-age men in shorts. Q.E.D.
Alas, shorts are being worn year-round by us graying porkers with legs as ugly as stump fences—if stump fences had hairy varicose veins. But there are plenty of other things wrong with summer, starting with the fact that it comes at the wrong time of year.
In the contiguous 48 states, the best weather isn't in June, July and August. Spring is glorious in the South. Fall is splendid in the North. And winter is swell in Florida and the part of California where the four seasons are Smog, Mudslide, Brush Fire and Oscar.
Our summer weather in 2011 consisted of tornados, heat waves, an earthquake and a hurricane. For everyone this side of Nome, summer vacation in the summer is like having a coffee break at 2 a.m.
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
This is nonsense. The little helping hands of farm children were needed during spring planting and fall harvest. (And they must have been more helpful than the little hands of today's children, or our grandparents would have died of starvation.) Farm kids, if they went to school at all, went in midsummer and midwinter, when nothing much was doing around the barn.
Summer vacation is, in fact, based on horse crap. American urbanization predated the automobile. Horses and what they leave behind them clogged cities that were already insalubrious from coal smoke, industry and notional sewage systems. Come summer, it was vacation time because—if you had any sense, common or olfactory—you vacated.
Men who could afford it sent their wives, children and, if possible, themselves off to the mountains or the shore. I live in New Hampshire, several hours from Boston, which has been full of prosperous urbanites for longer than anyplace in America. Every summer, people who use "summer" as a verb dutifully peregrinate here to the middle of nowhere and take up residence in crumbling ancestral 30-room shingle cottages, although they can't quite remember why.
And what are Americans doing taking summer vacations anyway? Our economy is a shambles. U.S. debt has been downgraded. GDP has flat-lined. The unemployment rate—with everyone on vacation—is nearing 100%. We should be in the office right now, trying to get the price of small-cap stocks up, developing new techniques of program trading, maintaining confidence in dot-com start-ups, building a fire under the housing market and generally working our tails off the way we were in the summers of 1929, 1987, 2000 and 2008.
At the very least, our elected officials should be back on the job. They left some unfinished business—such as the survival of America into the second quarter of the 21st century, etc.
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The logical argument contra summertime should be four words long: middle-age men in shorts. Q.E.D.
Alas, shorts are being worn year-round by us graying porkers with legs as ugly as stump fences—if stump fences had hairy varicose veins. But there are plenty of other things wrong with summer, starting with the fact that it comes at the wrong time of year.
In the contiguous 48 states, the best weather isn't in June, July and August. Spring is glorious in the South. Fall is splendid in the North. And winter is swell in Florida and the part of California where the four seasons are Smog, Mudslide, Brush Fire and Oscar. Our summer weather in 2011 consisted of tornados, heat waves, an earthquake and a hurricane. For everyone this side of Nome, summer vacation in the summer is like having a coffee break at 2 a.m.
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
This is nonsense. The little helping hands of farm children were needed during spring planting and fall harvest. (And they must have been more helpful than the little hands of today's children, or our grandparents would have died of starvation.) Farm kids, if they went to school at all, went in midsummer and midwinter, when nothing much was doing around the barn.
Summer vacation is, in fact, based on horse crap. American urbanization predated the automobile. Horses and what they leave behind them clogged cities that were already insalubrious from coal smoke, industry and notional sewage systems. Come summer, it was vacation time because—if you had any sense, common or olfactory—you vacated.
Men who could afford it sent their wives, children and, if possible, themselves off to the mountains or the shore. I live in New Hampshire, several hours from Boston, which has been full of prosperous urbanites for longer than anyplace in America. Every summer, people who use "summer" as a verb dutifully peregrinate here to the middle of nowhere and take up residence in crumbling ancestral 30-room shingle cottages, although they can't quite remember why.
And what are Americans doing taking summer vacations anyway? Our economy is a shambles. U.S. debt has been downgraded. GDP has flat-lined. The unemployment rate—with everyone on vacation—is nearing 100%. We should be in the office right now, trying to get the price of small-cap stocks up, developing new techniques of program trading, maintaining confidence in dot-com start-ups, building a fire under the housing market and generally working our tails off the way we were in the summers of 1929, 1987, 2000 and 2008.
At the very least, our elected officials should be back on the job. They left some unfinished business—such as the survival of America into the second quarter of the 21st century, etc.
Read more:
