Summer is the season of sequels, prequels, parodies, takeoffs and cartoon remakes. In short, reruns. In summer, it's apparently impolite to do anything new; everything must be rescued from some decrepit red barn and restored to circulation. This explains our ease with the cliché, the stereotype, the knockoff, not to say "Antiques Roadshow." It's a metaphor for our times: With our brains on vacation, it's all we can do to follow the lazy drift of a vaguely familiar plot, or perhaps two plots, mashed together. What happens when you cross a cowboy movie with an alien invasion flick? You get a labradoodle of movies; a hybridized cliché. In summer you exhume Captain America, rescue Smurfs from baby boomer history and conjure up wax museum Hemingways in a Paris as authentic as a Kardashian. Summer resembles TV news fare or market prognostications: All new "news" dons the garb of old "news," as if the naked truth -- the news in its original meaning of "novelty" -- is too foreign for public consumption. Summer's currency is thus nostalgia, which explains the endless Little League World Series. The good thing about summer: You can escape to beach or forest. The bad thing: You have to listen to your brain age.

We had an earthquake the other day. I was taking a stroll and didn't notice any unusual heaving of Manhattan sidewalks. They often move. What were those who did get gently shaken like a martini thinking? Crap, Sept. 11. Damn, Fukushima. Whooh, End of Days? The Washington Monument developed cracks, which stirred Pat Robertson to wonder if this represented a heavenly critique of American politics. (Surprised this failed to get more play: The temblor occurred as Dominique Strauss-Kahn was getting sprung. Make of that what you will.) The quake followed weeks of yawing markets and was followed by a hurricane. Connection? In September 2008, when Wall Street nearly collapsed, the handiest interpretive metaphor was a) the dot-com bust and b) the Great Depression. The former proved an inadequate explanatory model; the latter existed on old newsreels and in dusty tomes. But now -- lucky us! -- every time the market skids we can chortle: Feels like 2008 again. When Bank of America shares fell, Internet geniuses channeled Lehman Brothers and flogged rumors that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., under orders from Tim Geithner, would take over BofA. Why not? It's happened before. But then what hasn't?

The trouble with summer is that it ends, dumping us in September. By the time you read this, dead leaves will be swirling from the sky. It's getting dark, earlier. Birds are gathering. Make of that what you will. What appears to be a vague glimmering of some familiar past while you're on holiday often turns into some truly fresh, frightening, novel reality in the fall. One of the problems with prediction is the infamous black swan, the improbable event no one anticipated. Summers demand white swans circling placid pools; in September black swans emerge, overturning cars and vandalizing coffee shops. Is this a prediction of grim times? Hell, no. Probabilities are a two-way street. A black swan may be improbably good. Our woes (macroeconomic, European, demographic, whatever) may pile up into a disaster, or they may race down separate avenues, allowing the world to stagger on. What is merely disturbing in August always looks more threatening in September when shadows lengthen over said swans. Pundits, reporters and economists will still try to interpret the present by an easily reachable, off-the-shelf past. But they will, as always, look foolish. The relationship between past and
present is a little more ambiguous than they or Glenn Beck might think.