Where I live, in the north midwest, we have been enjoying an
extended period of so-called Indian Summer, a late-autumn interval
that occurs most (but not all) years just before winter arrives with its
full force of cold and snow. In these parts, winters are frequently
bitter, and the weather forecasters are predicting a very bitter one
this year.

A really vintage Indian Summer, and I would rate this year’s as one
of those, is like a vintage wine. It’s more complex, richer and deeper
than most Indian Summers, and it is meant to savor, to indulge the
self in, to participate with the landscape which harbors it for a brief
time. We have Indian Summers where I grew up, along Lake Erie,
beautiful and warm, but not so much premonitions of the reversal of
climate that is to come.

Most of my readers know me as a journalist who writes about
American politics and international affairs. A smaller number know I
am also a literary writer who has created a body of work in poetry
and short fiction, as well as a few efforts in theater. The path I took
to write as a journalist was one of economic survival, but I did not
abandon the poems and short stories. Nevertheless, my second
education in the “real” world of elections, business, and campaigns
often trumped my education as an artist.

We have all observed a remarkable interval in our country, and in the
world, in the past 20 years, as we left the so-called Cold War behind us,
and proceeded without a road map to the next circumstances on our
little planet. My journalist self has dominated my consciousness and my
daily attention, as the fascinating details of new relationships, new
wars, new political personalities, and life’s mysterious way of always
surprising us with unplanned events have overtaken us.

I notice lately, however, that my literary self is stirring, and I believe
this is no accident. Some persons think of themselves, and appear to
others, as pessimists. Others say they are, and appear to others, as
optimists. To paraphrase a line from Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” I see
see the pessimism, but optimism is also “nice, and would suffice.” My
journalist self writes about an orderly world combating disorder. My
literary self responds to those moments in time when disorder seems
out of control. It is less logical and more intuitive.

This is a long way of saying that disorder and human vulnerability is
growing all around us. We have been inundated with such constant new
information, mechanical technologies, changed velocities of virtually all
the tools our species uses every day, and provocations of our senses,
that we seem to be losing some of the natural and necessary processes
that keep life in some kind of balance.

Does this mean revolutions and social upheaval? Does it mean more or
less totalitarian regimes and ideologies? Does it mean new forms of
violence and repression? To be honest, I don’t know what it means.
But the reordering of the conditions of the world means that it is not
going to be business as usual in the years and decades ahead.

Readers who would rather read about my analyses of the 2010 elections
and the 2012 presidential contest, and I suspect that is most of my
readers, need not worry that I will now send out on The Prairie Editor
and my website a plethora of unfathomable and portentous diatribes
and prophecies. I will return to the here-and-now of our curious
political life soon enough.

But I thought I might mention, as I savor the Indian Summer of 2009,
my intuitions of something bigger and perhaps more ominous also
waiting for us ahead.

Copyright (c) by Barry Casselman
All rights reserved.