It would be funny if we all were limousine liberals indulging in a noxious kind of unselfconscious hypocrisy. But by and large our guests are teachers who don’t have a lot of money and who are splurging for a couple of days of relaxation in the midst of pastoral beauty before they go back to a school year filled with long hours and low wages, in cities overhung by clouds of smog. Or they’re construction workers who have just finished their work on another Sun Valley vacation mansion. Or they’re physicians with a day off between seventy-hour weeks. Or, if they’re comfortably retired, they’ve gotten that way through hard work and self-denial.

Of necessity, they tend to be deeply conservative financially. They tend to be rigidly honest. They tend to pay their taxes. In a world full of people who aren’t raising their kids right, they are loving and stern parents who equip their children with backbones. They’re professionally if not financially successful, and generous with new people trying to get a start in their professions. They tend to be self-aware. They are the responsible members of our civilization, who, with others of their own kind, keep our civilization from going belly-up. They just want to have a little fun and relaxation before school starts.

Without exception, they can be tempted into a conversation about how bad things are going to get because of the continuing war in Iraq, the continuing huge federal deficit, the continuing huge balance-of-payments deficit, increasing attacks by Christian Fundamentalists on the educational and judicial systems, and the unselfconscious arrogance of our national leaders. I admit that I have a morbid nature that attracts me to these subjects, but I rarely have to bring them up. Responsible people, looking at the world around them in the summer of 2005, are coming to the conclusion that this country is being led poorly and irresponsibly and without much thoughtful and humble self-consciousness.

It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. Occasionally, looking around at our guests and listening to their talk and worried laughter, I wonder what it was like in Roman villas above the Mediterranean during the summer of the year 400. Or on the river in Baghdad in the early fall of 1256. Or in sumptuous homes outside of Constantinople in 1450. Or in London, at a pre-theater fete on a bright-lit midsummer’s eve in 1914. Guests must have brought food and wine even then, and it must have been very good, and it must have seemed to those hosts that the summers would always return, and the guests would always be kind and good and intelligent and aware people, bearing gifts.