When I was a kid, I learned that “Indian Summer” described that surprising last clutch of warm days that arrived even though autumn’s chill was already looming.
I also learned that Indian Summer was a chimera, nature’s way of teasing us that she had really relented and decided to give us perpetual July and August.
In County Karen, where I live, I’m witnessing “Boomer Summer,” where the autumnal travails of arthritic knees, balding pates, sagging mammaries, and the horrific loss of Joyful Kamala to the dark machinations of the GOP can be temporarily held at bay by milling around at heavily trafficked intersections or on freeway overpasses flapping “Save Democracy” banners.
You have to understand that County Karen has the second oldest median population in California. There are as many people who are over age 38 as there are under. (I’m 77, so I have some standing here.)
When you have that many old people, most of them affluent and retired, living a life of ease in a very rich county, they start looking around to create shenanigans — especially shenanigans that remind them of the glory days, when Bill Ayers cruised around bombing things, Eldridge Cleaver extemporized on the revolutionary beauty of rape, and a demonstration against the war in Vietnam draw 500,000 Boomers to D.C. for a memorable weekend of preening and hooking up.
The years since have been a slowly unfolding bummer for the Boomers. Sex is now a blue-pilled, artificially lubricated, once-a-month struggle to re-enact all those great moves they had in their 20s. Drugs have morphed from psilocybin and mescaline into statins and laxatives. And rock ’n’ roll has been steamrollered by rap’s and hip-hop’s incredibly eloquent and authentic POC singers and lyrics.
Rather than accept that their time in the sun of youth is gone, a few weeks ago, County Karen’s Boomers started trying to recover the golden past by standing in front of Tesla dealerships and chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go!” Never mind that nobody could hear those chants as they sped by in their cars at 30 or 40 miles per hour. Never mind that incantations and shouted slogans are the stuff immature minds believe can somehow magically change things.
They didn't realize it, but their Boomer Power was now really just pipsqueakery.
But oh, my, doesn't it feel so good to stand next to your creaking fellow husks, yelling out taunts as lustily as you can in your croaky old man or old woman’s voice? “Take that, Orange Hitler! Hit the road, Nazi ICEmen!”
Then they go home and fill social media with smartphone photos of beer-bellied men and sagging earth mothers holding Trump-defying placards, while forcing arthritic fingers to make the old peace sign.
There’s a sprinkling of younger faces, including kids under 10 who’ve been dragooned by Grandma or Grandpa. Most of them seem bemused. The demonstrators in their 20s and 30s have a lost look, perhaps wondering why they decided that marching with fossils was a brave, bold, effective thing.
Might they even be starting to suspect that the old farts they’re hanging out with are the ones who’ve had the biggest hand in destroying the American Dream?
No matter. Boomer Summer is icumin in! Caucasian love handles and rotund bodies are young again! And you can be sure they won’t let real autumn and winter — or that man in the White House — stop them from carrying out their righteous (and only somewhat inclusive and diverse) protests.