The summer of George -- fans of Seinfeld need no explanation, but for those of you who do, click here. This is the essence: The summer of George winds up being a suckfest of epic proportions.
I was thinking about the summer of George as I sat, elevating my left foot (the one with the matching set of black and purple broken toes) on the ottoman and waiting, waiting, waiting for the air conditioner repairman to arrive. First heat wave of the season = high number of newly discovered malfunctioning air conditioners = record number of calls for repairmen = 4 1/2-day wait.
The first day it was just the heat that got to me; the second day it was the heat and the humidity; the third day it was the stagnant gray-green BosNYWash ozone shroud draped around my house; the fourth day it was the newly broken toes (indirectly heat-related casualties) and the cumulative effects of sweaty sleep deprivation.
All in all, an excellent time to start reading David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine. So far, here's my favorite part, an excerpt from a Newsday article by psychologist Paul Ginnetty describing Rush Limbaugh's core audience:
Their certitude consigns them to what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called the state of psychic foreclosure. Foreclosed persons are easily attracted to the beguilingly simple, one-size-fits-all belief system of powerful others that they adopt as their own so as to avoid the sometimes lonely rigors of personal searching. The foreclosed are the ready disciples of demagogues in every age. . . . What they sacrifice in terms of individuality and intellectual integrity is seemingly more than offset by the potent narcotic of reassuring simplicity.Mega-dittoes to Paul Ginnetty.
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