Another Long, Hot Summer
History rhymes.
Editor’s Note: The summer still has a few weeks to go, and the election season is far from over. Needless to say, it’s been an eventful, even dramatic, period. Today we have a guest post from , who earlier this year wrote about her experience as a parent. Here, Kristina draws on the work of the great, late Joan Didion to make sense of our own time. What Didion saw in the late 1960s, Kristina sees today. Enjoy!
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All I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
— Joan Didion, “The White Album”
The latest picture: euphoric Democrats flipping over the Harris-Walz news, not far on the heels of the stock market crashing, an eerily slow-moving hurricane flooding the southeast, and the conflict rapidly expanding in the Middle East. An adorable photo of Governor Walz holding a piglet goes viral weeks after many of us would have said “Governor who”? This ecstatic joy is addictive — I feel it too — and it’s giving me whiplash after the lows we’ve experienced during this long, hot summer.
Take, for example, the moment the Trump assassination attempt showed up in my social media feed. I was sitting in a Denver airport bar; I think I gasped. Trump’s face was smeared with blood. My heart raced. I hate Trump, but here was a clip, here was a moment of violence that would inevitably be played on repeat throughout history, like the Kennedy assassination or the Reagan shooting at the Washington Hilton, Columbine or 9/11.
While record-breaking Olympians have made happy headlines, it’s been easy to forget how the assassination news hit like a tipping point on a mounting feeling of loss: the record-breaking, disorienting heat this summer, an aura of disillusionment around the election and our largely geriatric political leadership, the continuing war in Gaza, the echo of violence that comes with every summer season in this country. And, for me, my mother’s death from dementia at the age of 75.
I’m always looking for neat parallels, metaphors that make sense out of life’s oddities, and here too, there is comfort in the knowledge that summertime chaos isn’t new to 2024.
The phrase “long, hot summer” was coined in 1967 after hundreds of race riots boiled cities across the US. (The phrase was originally the title of a 1958 movie.) The following year, after President Johnson withdrew his intention to run again for president and Robert Kennedy was assassinated, more than a hundred thousand protesters showed up at the August Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, a police crack-down led to arrests, beatings, and copious use of tear gas. Then 1969 and 1970 played host to numerous campus protests, among other politically elevated activities, comparable to the Gaza war protests on campuses this past spring. Each year of the late 60s and early 70s played host to some mayhem messing with our country’s comfortable orderliness.
There are tempting parallels, despite historians denying the tendency to compare 1968 to this summer (before Biden withdrew from the race). Now, Vice President Harris is the presumptive nominee, not unlike Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. There is the same promise of anti-war protesters at another Chicago Democratic National Convention. Add in all the aforementioned events that have driven our country to a boiling point, and it’s hard not to see the similarities today.
Is this assonance comforting or unsettling? For me, it reframes one of my most returned-to essays, Joan Didion’s “The White Album.” In it, she writes about personal and public turmoil from 1966 to 1971, with that famous opening: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The 1960s, while very real for those who lived them, are just a story for those like me, born in 1980 on the cusp of two generations, Gen X and Millennial. Some of it is legend and some of it is true: the 60s were a time of hallucinogens, revolutionary rock music, and unbridled love. As I learned later, it was also a time of chaos, of feeling on-edge, when an assassination seemed just as likely to happen as a peaceful protest.
I studied the summer of 1968 as a reporter and producer at Colorado Public Radio in 2008, covering the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. At the time, the 40-year anniversary of Chicago’s raucous 1968 DNC felt like a place to draw comparisons, to look for lessons learned that might apply at Barack Obama’s historic nomination. If history repeated itself, it could mean racially-driven protests and police violence. But the 60s didn’t return that year; the Denver protests were peaceful, and despite a militaristic presence in the city, so were the police.
Back then, I was an idealistic 28 year-old, still a fairly green reporter who hadn’t lived much life yet — i.e. unable to appreciate the relief that comes from expecting a clash and getting nothing but a blip and a celebratory Black Eyed Peas performance onstage at Barack Obama’s crowning.
Today, again on the precipice of potential political disarray, I’m 44 and bring a different perspective to the table, one that aligns with Didion’s feelings. “In what would probably be the middle of my life,” she wrote, “I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience rather more electrical than ethical.” It’s a luxury to believe there might be some order to this disorder, some causality to the chaos.
That brings me back to the Denver airport bar and the assassination attempt. X was blowing up on my phone. Had this been a scene from the 1960s, the shooting of a president would be anything short of business as usual. We’re of a different era though, one conditioned by technology and apathy. Here, one woman sat in a corner reading a book (which I immediately envied, getting further sucked into my phone), while another complained to the waitress that her red wine had come in the wrong glass. I saw a boomer couple on their iPad and thought they, surely, had seen the news, but no, they were puzzling over the United app, trying to change their seats. The room was supine, while online breaking news energy frantically careened across one, long scroll. “It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.” These words, so close to how I felt that afternoon, come from a Rorschach test result that Didion took when she felt like she was losing her mind.
Today, we’re in a rubber band-taught time if only because it’s hotter than it’s ever been across the country. Sitting outdoors a few weeks ago, completely inert except for my full attention on my conversation partner, cascades of sweat poured down my forehead, chest, back, while mosquitos nipped at my ankles. Standing and dizzy, disorientation not only came from the weather but from an entire summer off-balance. This is well away from the American stereotype of vacation at the beach, dark tans, a cold Coca Cola, and July 4 fireworks. Nowhere in this script is the protagonist swimming in her own sweat. Nowhere did the plot include an assassination attempt, for Biden to step aside in the race, for tens of thousands of innocent lives to be taken in Gaza and Israel.
This, despite the well worn stories of our past. The 1960s begin to feel eerily familiar. Didion is shocked by middle age while society simmers, similar to the experience of this author today. Another long, hot summer, and perhaps it’s time for historians to revisit the parallels to make sense of the present.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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Thank you so much for this. Yes, our minds want desperately to concoct a tidy, neat story to alleviate the anxiety of the cognitive dissonance of the awesome emptiness of the present moment. I am old enough to have experienced the chaos of the 60’s and 70’s. We invented the story of a “counterculture” that would transform the nation into a utopia devoid of the misogyny, racism, and violence of our past. At least the cutting room floor montage had a good soundtrack.
Perhaps our stories are of existential importance. I think it was Jung who observed: “If you don’t know who you are then the world will decide for you.” I still remember the euphoria of a brief moment of time when we emerged from,our apathy and shared a story we were excited about. I am getting a sense of that vibe again. “Peace out…”