PERHAPS it is my imagination, but it seems as though we are in the midst of a full-blown summer funk. While trend writers and editorialists will have you believe this is related to the anticlimax of the war on terrorism or the free-falling Dow, astute culture vultures know what is really ailing us: the dissolution of the marriage of Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton.

Since Jolie filed for divorce earlier this month, citing irreconcilable differences, I, like most Americans (especially those who get paid to feed on human folly), have taken it rather hard. When I’m not drinking to make the pain stop, there’s the dyspepsia, the dysphasia, the dysphoria–all the dys-‘es really. When I sleep, if I sleep, it is fitfully, until I’m roused by my own involuntary cries in the night of, “Why, God, why?”