Here Comes Summer: A COMFORTABLE SEASON

Whatever Jimmy Carter says about the energy crisis, the summer of '77 does not look anything like the moral equivalent of war. Not for years, even decades, has the nation approached its vacation time in such a collectively peaceful disposition—a mood of relief, resignation, exuberant ease and a bit of hedonism. The season feels like something from the middle years of Eisenhower—or, since the '50s had the cold war and other bad weather, maybe the analogy should go farther back, to a vague, green period sometime in the '20s.

Americans are in the mood to relax; they may feel that they have earned it. Much of the nation spent the spring thawing out from the coldest American winter in two centuries. Now, with a new President and a cautious Administration just entering its sixth month, the U.S. seems in full moral convalescence from the years that gave it assassinations, urban riots, a lost war, an abdicated President, severe recession, inflation and an oil embargo.

Last week some loose ends were being tied up: H.R. Haldeman and John Mitchell became the last of the indicted Watergaters to go to prison. After a 320-day trial, the Black Panthers lost their civil suit against the Chicago police who raided their quarters several ages ago—it was 1969—and killed Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. As Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observes, "This is the first time in ten years that nothing disastrous is occurring." Americans may not believe that they are embarked on a new age, but at least they are savoring a historical pause.

Some of last year's Bicentennial spirit, a startling extravagance of good feeling after so much bad, has spilled over into the 201st birthday. Wellesley, Mass., an expensive suburb of Boston, had such an unexpectedly good time with itself last year that it decided to devote this entire summer to community dances, concerts and other parties. The town's weekly newspaper editorialized: "This is the summer to find out what a home town is all about." Last year's tall ships are scattered around the world now, but on the weekend of the Fourth, New York will have an armada of smaller vessels parading up the Hudson from the harbor.

Hundreds of towns have their boostering stunts. Tiny Pittsfield, Me., will hold the Central Maine Egg Festival, with 600 eggs being scrambled simultaneously in one frying pan 10 ft. in diameter. Jacksonville, Fla., just turned out to celebrate the end of pollution in the Saint Johns River, with stunt flyers, hot-air balloons, parachute jumping, the mayor waterskiing, and trucks dumping hundreds of fish into the cleaned-up waterway. In the Texas hill country, the tiny town of Luckenbach (pop. 6), now made famous by Waylon Jennings' country-and-western song about the simple life there, is holding Saturday night dances that attract as many as 2,000 outsiders.