Read this silliness in the NY Times and tell me what you think:
I have, believe it or not, my reasons. Summer heat in New York City isn’t usually that big a deal. Temperatures do reach into the three digits for a day or two every few years, but typically there are at worst a manageable number of days in the 90’s, with most in the 80’s and a few even lower than that. Room air-conditioners can get messy, loud and dirty, and they don’t always cool what you want them to. And I have always been conscious of the fact that previous generations could get by without artificial cooling, and somehow felt challenged to live up to their endurance. This had to do in part with my Aunt Josephine, who spent most of the 20th century in a small town in Kansas where summer heat drove residents out onto their porches most evenings, encouraging social interaction. Once air-conditioning arrived, she told me, socializing stopped as people retreated into their homes for relief. Under her influence, I came to regard home air-conditioning as unfriendly and isolating.
He is an idiot and should be isolated- hopefully by someone with a medical degree. This is type of moron who doesn’t own a television because it dulls the senses. We have people around here like him- they are called AMISH.
Today’s suffering city resident always has the option of ducking into a supermarket, a coffeehouse or a computer-supply store for a quick shot of the dry-and-cool. These are all sociable activities, at least to the extent that they send you moving toward places where other people congregate. And at the end of the day, if you have a bedroom ceiling fan, you can take a cooling shower and generally maintain a temperate zone until check-in at the Morpheus Arms.
Inviting people over to your air conditioned home to chat and have drinks or eat without them sweating onto their dinnner plate is sociable too, dipshit. I hope the heat makes him sterile.
*** Update ***
My brother notes that this is a particularly angry post and that perhaps my disgust with the Steelers performance may be spilling over. That may be true, but I just HATE the NY Times using their valuable real estate on stupidity like this. There is a lot going on- get a guest writer to talk, in depth, about Iran, Liberia, the Congo- christ, anything but this pretentious twaddle.
Andrew Lazarus
I’ve never quite understood why dimwits like this don’t notice people died at 45 then. Even now, elderly die in Chicago heat waves by the dozens, or one awful year by the scores.
What was REALLY happening is that the plutocratic class to which this writer thinks he would have belonged went to the POCONOS, the CATSKILLS, the HAMPTONS all summer, while the working class he really would have belonged to was hot and sick and miserable.