August Doldrums

Since this is a post on early-August doldrums, it's obvious that I'm getting to it a little late. James Carroll in his column titled, American Disconnection, dated August 6, 2007, writes in The Boston Globe of the sense of "lonely alienation" that came over him during the summers when he was a child:

From June into July, the delights of freedom from homework and schedule trumped any sense of dislocation I might have felt, and beginning in mid-August the sweet anticipation of return to school at Labor Day began to carry me along. But the height of summer, just about now, was a time of lonely alienation, when ties to meaning went slack.

Now he's no longer a school boy, but a grown man, with his career as a writer, a network of connections, and satisfying relationships with family and friends.

Yet here I am feeling ambushed by a sensation, exactly, of ineffectual isolation. The endless midafternoon of an August summer day seems all at once the whole of life. Disconnectedness is the heart of it, and that points from the intensely private to the very public, for the largest experience of being cut off from what matters of which I am aware involves the American crisis in the Middle East.

Carroll speaks of the many troubled areas in the Middle East - Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and, of course, Iraq.

Here is the disconnect that matters this August: A vast population of shamed US citizens, seeing the war as key to multiple unfolding disasters, regard it as the most pressing issue in the world. But so what? Private brooding desperately seeks a mode of public action, yet is thwarted.

I feel the same August doldrums. Shouldn't we be doing something? Dick Cheney wants to launch an attack on Iran. The Bushies are ratcheting up their bellicose rhetoric vis-à-vis Iran, which causes me to fear that the Bush maladministration might actually attack Iran, without consulting Congress, based on a trumped up emergency.

We are nowhere near an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. The Democratic controlled Congress has passed a bill that gives the Bush maladministration more power to spy on the citizens of the country. In fact, according to this story in the New York Times yesterday, they gave Bush more power than they meant to in their haste to get off to their August recess.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.
....

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought.

Ah, yes. It's for just this sort of thing that we elect them to their exalted positions - to pass laws that they did not mean to pass. First the Democrats cave in to pressure from the White House and give the maladministration permission to spy on us without oversight. Then they can't even get the cave-in right, but give Bush even more power than he asked for.

Should we, the citizens of the country, be doing something? What should we be doing? I don't know the answer, but sitting around brooding through the August doldrums seems insufficient. Moaning about the sorry state of things on a blog seems insufficient, too.