Difficult though it is to take Ireland's climatic conception of "summer" seriously, it is equally hard to take anything else seriously once the old digital calendar clicks over to July. Yes, the newspapers and airwaves are filled with "important" stories, but - at least on the domestic scene - all the talk about benchmarking, Ansbacher, the state of the public finances, and the prospect of another referendum has an almost placid air of "pending" lurking about it, each heated debate ending with an implied
All the same, the current heady rush of sound-and-furious stories makes for amusing juxtapositions. For example, has anyone really thought of the potentially dangerous political implications of calling our new currency the euro? Sure, it seemed like a logical enough unifier but, particularly in the context of something like the Nice referendum, the name strongly associates the European project with the money. And who, other than the loopiest of Tories, actually believes that affection for a particular brand of money is a dependable political mobiliser?
On the contrary, we already hate the euro, not in principle but in fact. How else are we supposed to feel about something that mainly features in sentences such as the following: "It costs how many euro?" The euro's timing is impeccable: it landed in our pockets just a few months before the media told us that it disappears from our pockets faster than if we lived in St Tropez, God help us. An average day's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) plagues us with bad news stories that happen to be euro-ridden, from public service pay to inflation to share-prices collapsing - and then when the Nice debate rolls around all the participants are still expected to be singing happy euro-paeans.
Judging by the tone of some reporters, we are meant to view the rise of the euro against the dollar as good news about "our" strong currency. Since this is meaninglessly trivial for most listeners - and most of the rest of us know better than to think it's actually something to be celebrated - it doesn't puncture my hypothesis about the prevailing euro-scepticism. Which is not to say we shouldn't expect a bit of populist patriotic gore about the battle of the billfolds in the months ahead.
Where was I? Ah yes, summertime. Take, for example, The Lunchtime Show with Damien Kiberd (NewsTalk 106, Monday to Friday). In a couple of months on-air, this has already established itself as possibly the most original, hardest-hitting current affairs programme available to Dublin listeners.
And now, what's serious Damien doing with the Ansbacher story? It being July and all, he's having some fun. Cleverly, too, in a way that flatters his audience that it's the savviest in town: the show has held a competition to see who can name the most account holders prior to the report's publication, with the best list-making listener getting the most extravagantly Ansbacher-esque dinner-for-two in Dublin. (At the time of writing I still eagerly await the list, when we can hear more inane journalistic please-just-react questions like the one put to an ex-player on Today at Wimbledon (BBC Radio 5 Live, Saturday to Friday): "This has been a tournament of shocks - has that surprised you?")
No, you would not be wise to mistake any of this for the height of culture. Any reaction, in particular, to the Kiberd approach that starts with the word "yuck" gets this column's sympathy, if not its assent. You wanted capitalism, bridle off, wearing its Amok-brand runners (registered trademark); then you're going to have to put up with the raging cynicism, and raving metaphors, that accompany it.
HERE'S a better metaphor, unmixed: "There are no choices. . . When a strong wind is coming, you cannot only choose the wind and not the garbage flying with the wind."
The windy metaphor-maker in this case is a young Muslim woman, and her quotable quote about breezy Western "modernity" was a provocative scene-setter for Roger Hardy's new series, Waiting for the Dawn - Muslims in the Modern World (BBC World Service, Friday). To judge by the first programme, this timely series might better be subtitled "Modernity in the Muslim World", as Hardy globetrots around Islamic communities, starting with Egypt, to tease out the arguments behind words like "conservative" and "reformer", and the hoary old concept of Islam's "crisis of modernity".
Egypt is a great starting place, because even as high-rises spring up like reeds along the Nile, many Westerners fear that the country is moving "backwards" into Islamicism from its highly secular recent past. Hardy, of course, didn't ask Westerners what they think. First stop, instead, was the offices of islamonline.net, where a staff composed of hijab-wearing women editors, their salaries paid by Gulf oil money, explains Islam to the web-browsing world - and fields the post-September 11th hate e-mails while they're at it.
Maybe you think you've heard all this stuff before, when last autumn's atrocity set off the Western media on a spate of "let's understand the Muslims" stories. Frankly, when you hear a series like this - flawed, still sketchy, but profoundly, intelligently inquisitive - you realise how half-cocked most of that stuff was, with one or two Muslims given a few minutes to answer questions about religion and cultures that span more than a millennium of time and hundreds of millions of people.
Do you remember all those radio discussions of "Islamic liberation theology"? I didn't think so. Here, however, was Hassan Hanafi, an Egyptian philosophy lecturer and an advocate of just that brand of theology, a tradition seeing Islam as "a revolt against colonialism from outside and oppression from inside", he tells us. Islam and modernity, he says, are the two lungs of his body.
Not everyone feels the same way, of course, and among the many good things about this programme is its insistence on complexity; its interest, for example, in the way the Egyptian state cannot be categorised simply as either secular or Muslim, but plays both "sides" against each other and oppresses both. Hardy moves around the sprawl of Cairo from a proud theology campus to an out-of-the-way women's rights organisation to the cluttered apartment of a marginalised dissident, asking clear, concerned questions (but not enough of them) and talking just a bit too much.
For the early July week that's in it, of course Hardy found plenty of "anti-Americanism" at, um, well, I'm afraid at the American University in Cairo, where lecturers and students complained of being talked-down-to and stereotyped from points west. No, it doesn't seem to help for some reason that these people can watch CNN; as one put it, referring to the history and reality of the US role in the region: "When we hear American officials speaking of freedom and democracy and these values, unfortunately they make words like freedom and democracy sound obscene."