Summer in the City

Hot town, isn’t it a pity?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/15/07

Everyone gets out of Paris in August. The whole town shuts down, and everyone who can leave departs for the countryside or chilly British beaches or just about anywhere that is Not Paris.

Mind you, there are a lot of cities that get a lot hotter and more miserable in high summer. Washington is hotter and even more humid, and prior to the widespread use of air-conditioning, it too would shut down completely during the hot months. In high summer, everyone stays inside air conditioned buildings, and if they must venture outside, it is to air-conditioned cars kept in air-conditioned parking floors. Thus, a well-connected and alert Washington bureaucrat may never personally experience a temperature above about 75 during the entire summer.

Nonetheless, people complain about the heat and try to escape out into the country, where there is shade and running water and, of course, more air-conditioning.

Then there’s Baghdad. Baghdad tends to be a bit warmish in the summer, with lows around 90. And highs around 115 on average. (In Celsius, that would equate to “Damn, that’s hot!” and “Christ, are you fricking KIDDING?!”). Highs of 125 are common, and unofficial highs of 150 aren’t unknown. Forget the old egg-on-the-sidewalk bit. Put a chicken out on the sidewalk at dawn, and you would have perfectly edible roast chicken by sunset. Assuming someone didn’t blow it up first, of course.

The humidity’s low, of course, and that makes a huge difference. Sweating is actually an effective way of cooling off in low humidity, because the sweat evaporates almost instantly. Swamp coolers are useful for the same reason. It’s still nasty and fatal to the careless, but it isn’t the cloying and inescapable wet blanket that afflicts Paris and Washington and other hot, damp cities.

Air conditioning was never very widespread in Baghdad – under Saddam, such niceties tended to congregate to the richest 5% of the population. So even with the electricity out, the locals know how to stay comfortable, from swimming in the Tigris to sleeping on the roofs of their homes.

But nobody wants to spend hot days cooped up with several hundred people doing something you know is perfectly useless, and so Iraq’s parliament agreed sometime back that they would just take some of July and much of August off. The delusional Putsch Junta (the group the Times of London refers to as “those American crazies”) is meowing that if they keep running off on vacations like that, they’ll never bring peace and democracy to Iraq. Putsch even complained about it from his vacation ranch in central Texas. (If you need any proof the man is totally nuts, reflect on the fact that he has his summer vacation getaway in central Texas).

The administration made clucking noises and indicated that Iraqi lack of concern was probably the main reason why Iraq had failed to meet any of the goals needed to become a free and democratic society, like America used to be.

Of course, the Iraqi parliament is a Vichy regime in an occupied country, a Potemkin legislature. It’s there for the inept Bushies to blame for the continued lack of success in said occupation, and they proceed to blame the Iraqis for being chaotic and violent and just generally acting like an occupied country, and thus could provide stern warnings that if the Iraqi parliament doesn’t shape up, the Americans might just leave in a huff, having concluded that the natives can’t benefit from the wisdom of the great white juju.

This was the cue for the Iraqi leader of Parliament, al-Maliki, to suggest that perhaps the Americans should leave and thus teach his country a well-deserved lesson. At that point, administration officials snorted disgustedly and changed the subject. Apparently suggesting that the Americans are free to leave at any time that they wish to is just another bad example of that pouty, teenage attitude that occupied people always seem to get. Then they get to acting out, blowing things up and just generally causing mischief.

It leaves you wondering if it was really worth invading their country in the first place when they so deliberately refuse to learn from your good example. Parents with teenagers everywhere will sympathize.

Tony Snow, chief delusionist for the White House, was indignant that the parliament was taking off for the summer, leaving American troops to carry on in the 130 degree heat. That gave me an idea.

Well, why not give every soldier a six-week pass and send them to the southern California beaches, Tony? It’s really nice there this time of year. You get the night-and-morning low clouds, known to locals as “the fog monster,” but that keeps temperatures cool and moist, and the ocean waters are bracing, which translated from Chamber-of-Commerce-speak, means, “If you sit in that water, you’ll never see your testicles again.” As an added bonus, the soldiers will hardly ever get shot at, and never encounter roadside bombs. The savings from no dead SUVs and no half-dead soldiers would more than cover the cost of sending them all to Santa Barbara for a month.

Tony, Suggest it to the boss. Note that sending the troops to Santa Barbara will really boost his standings in the polls, except, of course, for Santa Barbara, which is Democratic anyway.

The Iraqis might get some work done since they won’t have Americans to pot-shot, and the death-toll should drop significantly during that time, both in Iraq and in Santa Barbara.

And who knows? By the time Labor Day rolls around, everyone may have decided that occupying Iraq really wasn’t working in everyone’s best interest, and the adminstration might decide to occupy Santa Barbara instead. There are several pluses to this, in that Santa Barbara has a) oil, b) immense amounts of money, c) babes in bikinis, d) cold beer, e) nice summer weather and f) the locals speak a dialect of English. In the meantime, some budding young Haroun al-Rashid might arise in Bagdad and put the city to rights.

Best of all, the Republicans might lose less than a hundred seats in the House next year, since the voters have short memories and no apparent brains.

In the meantime, Tony, stop wanking at the Iraqi parliament for taking time off. After all, that could work against you.

U.S. Congress will be on vacation from Aug. 3 to Sept. 4. Unless, of course, all this talk about taking time off in the summer embarrasses them into staying, and they decide that since they are stuck in Washington in August and in a really vile mood as a result, they may as well press all those investigations they have going against your boss.

Then he would be feeling a type of heat even central Texas and Baghdad combined couldn’t duplicate.



Zeppnote: The title, of course, comes from Loving Spoonful’s “Summer in the City”