Abstract

Spectacle is one thing money really can buy.-Terrence Rafferty (1995, p. 84) 1 Summer is the season for spectacle.In America, at least, it is a time for captivating the distracted attention of citizens through the outré, the outsized, and the outrageous.From hype for hurricanes to blockbusters from Hollywood, summer spectacles resist yet also reinforce the centrifugal spirals of privatizing pursuits.Vacations from work, school, government, even first-run television have traditionally taken people away from supposedly responsible preoccupations with public topics of business, education, politics, perhaps religion.Summer in America is for families, we say, but it entertains them with vistas and stories far larger than everyday life.2 On the political calendar, the season of spectacle stretches from Memorial Day to Labor Day, with fireworks for Independence Day between.Thanksgiving gets pageants and dinners, New Year's Day parades and football bowls, Christmas nativity scenes and services, Halloween the trick-or-treat trail of costumed kids.Even at this level, spectacle is nothing like an exclusive prerogative of summer.Still the elective affinity is hard to miss.Summer gets Shakespeare in the park and movies after dark.It means fairs at the state capital, concert tours across the country, and adventures at Six Flags Over Somewhere.It indulges in the pastoral epic of baseball and the sunshine roar of stockcars.Even best-sellers on the beach reach for hyper-realities to draw us beyond mundane endeavors.3 Spectacle is the form and setting targeted by the essays for this summer issue of Poroi.Writing in Wisconsin, Michelle Brophy-Baermannexamines love on the sensational screens of reality television.Contributing from Virginia, Joseph H. Lane Jr. explores uses of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War for panoramic defenses of imperial action by America, especially in