Dog days of Dallas

Dallas is hot. The TV series Dallas is about to be remade with Larry Hagman of the ‘Who killed J.R. Ewing” fame reprising an elder Ewing role with more than just cameo walk-ins for Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray as well.

We are, however, referring to the heat wave that is bedeviling the U.S. Midwest and the southwest. In June, the thermometer registered a 100F benchmark; it is averaging 105 F ever since. Not only are the afternoons hot and humid, the nights sometimes hit low ’70s, which is quite taxing on the respiratory system.

(The canine reference on the title is the ancient calendar designation of the period when Serius the brightest dog star in the Canis Major constellation was closest to the sun, which earned the two months of July and August in the southern hemisphere as diēs caniculārēs, dog days of summer.)

“Dog days” has traditionally meant slow and often boring hot days. Not in the current usage. There is a wide gyration of stock prices since S&P downgraded Uncle Sam’s credit rating, with all the political finger pointing reminiscent of Time magazine’s “who lost China” question post-WWII. There is a noticeable turn of Amerika into a full blown confrontational society.

We recall an anecdote in the last days of Mikhael Gorbachev’s waning days of the Soviet Union when he was heckled after a public speech. Smiling, he stopped before one of the hecklers and said: “Just remember that I was the one that guaranteed your right to heckle without fear of being punished for it.”

With freedom of speech deeply entrenched in the American constitutional psyche, we will protect the right of even those whose ideas we find despicable. Right now, the tolerance threshold is being heavily challenged!

To be sure, Uncle Sam is used to dialectical confrontations. Baseball brawls, football fights, soccer scuffles, and ice hockey eye-gashers are common fare. Wrestling fights are staged to look real; boxing is glorified. NASCAR “demolition” races goes with the pop and the popcorn in the sun. Divide and rule is an honored ideology, which our military strategy keeps close to their vests in keeping the Koreas apart, Vietnam away from their cousins in Zhongguo, Afghanistan and Iraq in line, and enticing/supporting Filipinos to stick their patriotism on Spratly.

Media sells print and time on airing controversies, and the alarming spread of copycat crimes across the country now confronts law enforcement agencies as “breaking news” extend coverage, prolong images of violence until it becomes inane and commonplace, then wash their hands for any accountability. The runaway train on the networking media has added text-posting challenge to the legal melee when private tweeting spills over to the public domain.

A Caucasian Chicago lady was pointed on the current tea party and GOP assault on Obama. “If it was Hillary Clinton or John McCain at the helm, dialogue would be open. I hate to admit it, but many treat Obama as a ‘nigger’ and cannot transcend the historical implications of one’s skin color,” she said. A Chicago daily listed a long list of Obama accomplishments along with what antagonists’ focus on what he “failed to do.” Current GOP presidential candidates’ claim that Obama killed jobs and only GOP’s sudden affinity to labor is worth considering in the yearlong steamy horse race to election 2012. This is before we get to hear the President’s job creation strategy slated for unveiling when Congress convenes after its summer break!

We are now in Dallas with Texas Gov. Rick Perry going head-to-head v. Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachmann on the GOP trail, and big D’s sentiment has not changed much since we were last here in the early ’70s.

We took a drive through our alma mater SMU in predominantly lily-white Highland Park in Dallas; the school kept its signature architecture (Ivy League) with the controversial George W. Bush presidential library not too far from the U’s famed fraternity/sorority row. I wondered if the racial undertow that we lived through while being a token foreign student in the late ’60s still prevails. Sadly, informal tiered racial stratification remains. Not as blatant as the society outside the university since a liberal oasis does exist on Mockingbird Lane, and I do recall picketing a “for white only” washateria in our first semester at the university, but big D with oil barons, financial giants, and livestock ranchers have deep-seated “prejudices” of immense influence. It does not appear that much change has occurred.

We are headed in this last stop of our summer spirit voyage and pilgrimage trek to a Lutheran retreat grounds north of Dallas-Ft. Worth with folks from the Institute of Realistic Living where such practices as radical honesty and transparency of spirit are encouraged. The effect of the current loss of civility in the political scene will obviously come to fore.

MLK still bellows “I still have a dream” in TV airings, just before the memorial park in his honor opens late August in Washington, D.C. We might be reminded that we are a nation whose vision of racial equality and democratic civility remains at the forefront of the emerging definition of humanness around the world. We might continue dreaming, dog days and ever.