The long, hot summer trope

Oh dear. I really wish infantile writers would retire melodramatic cliches. From Another Long, Hot Summer in America by Ian Buruma.

It was probably sometime in the early or mid-eighties when I first heard somber warnings of a "long, hot summer" with connotations of racial violence. In that case it was Jesse Jackson who had been in some spot of bother involving marital infidelity or financial questions or anti-semitic remarks or some such controversy.

At the same time there was some political issue with racial overtones roiling the newspapers. Jackson seized on the racial issue and thundered a number of portentous warnings of a long, hot summer in the cities. It was transparently an effort to insert himself into a controversy in which he was not involved in order to shift the focus away from whatever his personal shortcoming was that was on uncomfortable display.

It came off as a cynical and calculated effort to stir up racial rancor in order to cover his personal shame.

And of course it did not work. There is always some roiling political crisis. It is easy to tar anything with the universal accusation of racism. But people aren't stupid and even then Jackson was only marginally relevant. Whatever the issue was, blew over. There was no long, hot summer of racial dread in the cities.

In the near forty years since then, the threat of "long, hot summers" of racial discord is perennially trotted out and perennially (thankfully) never occurs.

The frequency of the deployment of the cliche is an unpleasant reminder of just how much academics, journalists, and pundits really wish for bad things to happen to indict a country and system of governance they so despise. You would think they might learn to put away childish cliches.