Silly Season

As we watch the presidential candidacy unfold, and as the stakes get higher and the polling gets frenzied and the media are, as Elton John sang, “searching for tidbits on the ground”, we're reminded there truly is a silly season. Brought to us by the Fourth Estate, it can be embarrassing if not downright discouraging.

Where I live, near a place called Eagle Harbor, a certain solitary eagle has a daily foray along the coastline allowing me to see where she lives. She sails through all sorts of skies and seasons, perhaps from the morning tidal bed full of tidbits to a noonday nest further off and higher up. It is a peculiar and hushed feeling, to see the symbol of American freedom in its be-feathered state going about its business, hopefully and probably blissfully unaware of the silliness that we humans are serving up to one another with an endless appetite for more.

But this season is necessary. Our personal silly seasons are necessary. It is from the ridiculous that we are able to compare the sublime. The contrast of the eagle’s silent and mostly unnoticed flight allows me to remember that the nest is full of screeching,  fuzzy, silly-looking and voracious babies who demand attention in unison over and again. This is part of what our democracy does, too, as we go through another birthing cycle of leadership change.

With the hope for true change, people feel their needs, their injustices, their disunity, and desire for camaraderie more keenly. They demand. If that means they have to resort to antics to get it, they will. Like the jester who keeps the king and his court challenged, they sideline, blindside, and backhand with ridicule, with manipulations of wordplay and visual acrobatics, saying black is white and back again. We have a two party system because we are drawn toward pairs of opposites who embody the mocking harlequin. If politics is simply theater, then we are the ones being played to. Its all about and for us. A common notion is that media coverage serves only as a distraction from what is really going on. But it can serve in other ways, to reveal what. Sometimes it can function as a mirror of what the representatives--the public projections of government and infotainment--thinks society wants to see and hear. Their performances are graded and modified their in response to gathered feedback.

The prevailing spirit of this age is one of conspiracy that breeds paranoia and contempt. If you think that someone is drinking the Kool-Aid, be assured that this same someone thinks that you’re drinking yours. If you think the spirit of the age you are in is trampling out the vintage of the memories you cherish, don’t fear: your kids will trample out what they don’t like about you, and wrathfully restore what they value about your parents’ era. The left foot crushes down, the right foot lifts up. The past is restored to the present.

The eagle is not a symbol to himself. He is a living being that is affected by what we humans decide. His kind were once nearly hunted out of existence. And now he is left alone, to just live along currents, no longer in peril from us, "where the dogs of society howl". Silly season has its purpose and allows us to right ourselves when we falter too far in one direction. It deflates solitary symbols and engages our humanity, releasing it back to the personal and the interconnected.

Democracy is ideally a self-regulating system, but as much as we need the majesty of an eagle to inspire us, we also need the foolish and the comedic to guide us along that dangerous highwire balancing act.  We check ourselves. It’s our way.