The Silly Season - News With Views

by Lee Duigon

July 18, 2024

It ran from Fourth of July to Labor Day weekend. Most people called it “summer.” But those of us who worked on newspapers called it “the Silly Season.”

Well, heck—the schools were closed, families went on vacation, public agencies slowed down their business… and the few TV networks that we used to have… showed reruns.

If you were a newspaper editor or reporter, as I was, once upon a time, you still had to fill up the pages of your newspaper, even if the regular flow of news slowed to a trickle. BROTHER, SISTER, FIND DEAD SHARK. Yee-hah. We had to call out our photographer for that one. You couldn’t tell from the pictures that the shark was less than 18 inches long. Meanwhile, other newshawks covered an “Indian burial” that had nobody in it, a local sewer authority director’s model trains, and a tourist who didn’t care much for the canned food in England and then was furious when we quoted her. Come to think of it, there was no sign that the “burial” had ever been anything but a hole in the ground. ARCHAEOLOGIST FINDS HOLE IN GROUND didn’t do much to excite the readers.

We local journalists kind of enjoyed the Silly Season. You could have a lot of fun trying to grind a news story out of those non-events. It was a challenge—and a welcome change from sitting in on rancorous town council meetings that went on till midnight.

But where is the Silly Season now?

For a while there it was replaced by Global Warming. HOTTEST SUMMER EVER! NEW YORK CITY TO BE UNDERWATER BY 2005! Ad nauseum. No one ever believed those stories but arch-liberals and globalist hacks. Give me a washed-up shark any day.

True, the nooze media still had to cover a presidential election every four years. They had to help Democrats win, so the political reporting was heavily spiced with “Climate Change,” Global Warming’s new, and much more elastic, a.k.a.

But then along came the 2024 election cycle, and all hell broke loose. SloJo’s disastrous debate non-performance, Democrats feuding ferociously over whether he should step down or not—and then the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump—and suddenly Climbit Change was blown clean off the front pages, all but entirely forgotten.

Oh, blazes, what to do! If Biden goes, what do they do with Kacklin’ Kamala? Buy her off with a federal judgeship? And then what? Nominate another Far Left Crazy—or someone whom the rest of the country never heard of? How do they keep their stranglehold on America?

Whatever they decide, Climate Change is last week’s moldy spinach. The national economy is reeling, wars are breaking out all over, millions of illegals violate our borders, and it’s all the Democrats’ fault. They did this to us—and they mean to do more.

A big part of me yearns for the good old Silly Season.

I don’t believe it’s going too far to say “Bring back the Silly Season!” It was fun. In its own small way, it was a sanity break.

The silliness we’re getting now just isn’t that amusing.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://www.leeduigon.com/ . Click the link and join in the fun; maybe we can create our own Silly Season. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net