Silly Season

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

Where I live, near a place called Eagle Harbor, a certain solitary eagle has a daily route that allows me to see her sail through all sorts of skies, perhaps from the tidal bed full of tidbits to a nest further off and higher up. It is a peculiar and hushed feeling I get, to see the symbol of American freedom in its be-feathered flesh 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 simply part of what our democracy does, too, as we go through another birthing cycle of leadership change.

We suddenly feel our needs, our injustices, our disunity, and desire for camaraderie more keenly. We demand. If that means we have to resort to antics to get it, we will. Like the jester who keeps the king and his court informed and challenged, we sideline, blindside, and backhand with ridicule, with manipulations of wordplay and acrobatics, making black seem white and back again. Except in democracy, the leaders are the jesters, and we are the kings. People often say that politics is simply theater, but if that is true, then we are the ones being played to.

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, then 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’ age. 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.