Summer of Anxiety Eclipses the ‘Silly Season’ of Years Past

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/world/europe/terrorism-brexit-europe-eu.html

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LONDON — Almost to the day, in August 2009, an article appeared in this space saying: You know the silly season has arrived when The Times of London devotes a front-page obituary to the death of a fish called Benson.

It seems harder to be silly now.

By long tradition in what was once called Fleet Street, August was the apex of the absurd. It was a time when newspaper pages, bereft of hard news, yawned open to devour tales of, say, “killer” Siberian chipmunks attacking humans in England — as The Sun recounted seven years ago.

The digitalized heirs to that legacy have not lost their fondness for stories whose lightness of being seems only to enhance their ability to titillate. Consider the attention accruing since the weekend over whether a photo had been doctored to remove a champagne flute from the hand of Damien, the 14-year-old son of the actress Elizabeth Hurley. Shock! Horror!

But, compared with the not-too-distant days of Benson, a 64-pound carp found mysteriously dead at a fishery in the English Midlands, the silly season seems more ambiguous, challenged by atrocities that redefine the theater of the absurd as the spectacle of the macabre.

“The idea of silliness requires shared assumptions about what is sensible,” the columnist Rafael Behr wrote in The Guardian, focusing on the rise of Donald J. Trump. By any objective definition, these are not sensible times.

This year, the centennial of the Battle of the Somme, will most likely be recalled as a time when the slaughter of trench warfare found its echo in the spread of terror.

My colleague Steven Erlanger wrote about what some are calling a summer of anxiety, in which “death and injury have been dealt out by truck, ax, handgun, machete and bomb.”

Indeed, the banality of the weaponry has magnified the brutality of attacks in France and Germany that left many in Europe and beyond looking over their shoulder.

Barrel bombs tear through the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. Explosives rend flesh from Kabul to Baghdad. A truck plows through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. A priest in Normandy has his throat slit at the altar.

There has been a deep shift, too, in how the news is framed and broadcast. In the past, the silly season lay within the fief of the mainstream media, calibrated to the calendar of mainstream politicians whose long vacations closed Parliament and stilled their fractious debate.

But politics has been sidestepped by populism. The checks and balances of parliamentary democracy have given way to rule by numbers. When Britons voted in June to leave the European Union, they did so by plebiscite, not by parliamentary ballot. The outcome was uncompromising: 52 percent in favor, 48 percent against.

As Britain’s Labour Party fights internally over its leadership, the choice will fall to its hundreds of thousands of members, not to elected lawmakers. The House of Commons has become disconnected from the will of the people.

The emblems of this season of unease and unpredictability have been relayed in the jittery, jerky images of cellphone cameras and video streaming apps that tell only an unmediated fraction of the story.

When an 18-year-old German of Iranian descent killed nine people at a shopping center in Munich, Boris Johnson, Britain’s recently appointed foreign secretary, said what many were thinking: The attack appeared to be the work of Islamist terrorists.

Instead, the gunman was identified as a disturbed 18-year-old, Ali Sonboly, who was said to be obsessed with mass shootings — spreading terror, but not in the name of the terrorism that has come to define the times.

Even seven years ago, Benson the carp competed for space with darker news of fallen soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. As the article in this space concluded: “No silliness there at all.”

Then or now.