"What Is It About August?" (A Capsule in Time, from '93 --a NYT Article)

[KoKo]

WHAT IS IT ABOUT AUGUST?
By BRUCE HANDY;

The common wisdom: nothing happens in August. It's the Sunday of months -- lazy, dull, ineluctably spoiled by anticipation of September's Monday. Plus, it's too hot. Worse, it's the title of an unreadable novel by Judith Rossner.

Journalists know August as "the silly season," the uneventful time of year when newspapers are especially desperate for copy and so rely -- more so than usual -- on fluff. No surprise, then, that the Aug. 24, 1939, edition of this newspaper devoted an entire page to the previous day's goings-on at the World's Fair then filling Flushing Meadows. Readers were apprised that a sneezing contest had taken place at the Carrier Corporation's "Igloo of Tomorrow" -- part of a special event that also included a demonstration of the "hay fever hop" by a group of Arthur Murray dancers. Elsewhere in that day's Times was a six-inch report about an unusually large sea turtle that had escaped from the Fulton Fish Market, attracting crowds as it swam to freedom in the East River. "Half a dozen Chinese," the paper reported, "were heard to sigh audibly." The story went on for three more paragraphs. In short, a slow news day.

Unfortunately, if Aug. 23, 1939, was a big day for impolite contests and determined terrapins, it was also a big day for Nazis: in Moscow, the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, stunned the world by flying to Moscow to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, which paved the way for Germany's invasion of Poland, World War II and the deaths of millions. Not such a slow news day.

And there you have the August paradox: a month when robust, substantive news -- "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour" news! -- is assumed to be in short supply, a month when front pages are traditionally given over to lunch-break photos of female office workers hiking their skirts to beat the heat, August is all too frequently rocked by global crisis. Year after year we expect Kenny G. Year after year we get Axl Rose.

True, for the fortunate among us, August's special irritations are largely limited to humidity, tick scares and whimsical New Yorker covers involving sand castles. For journalists and world leaders, however, the month has historically presented more vexing challenges. "What is it about August?" demanded an exasperated George Bush after his second consecutive summer vacation was disrupted by global crisis -- the first instance being the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the second the 1991 Soviet coup. This bears examination. Not only is "What is it about August?" one of the former President's rare diagramable sentences, it might easily have been uttered by any number of his predecessors: by Woodrow Wilson as World War I gathered speed in August 1914; by John F. Kennedy when East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961; by Warren G. Harding when he unexpectedly died in office in August 1923.

August is batting a thousand in the 1990's. Following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Soviet coup, August last year visited South Florida and Louisiana with the ravages of Hurricane Andrew, the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States. (Intriguingly, the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the Roman Empire also occurred in August, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii in 79 A.D.)

And there's more:

On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb -- or "cosmic bomb," as it was christened by the War Department in an odd, proto-new ageism -- fell on Hiroshima. Three days later, the second fell on Nagasaki.

In August 1959, Chinese troops crossed into northeastern India during a now-forgotten border dispute. (Obscure, yes, but it still counts.)

An American destroyer was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, provoking the UnitedStates Congress to pass the resolution that would provide the legal justification for our involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as a rationale for Oliver Stone's career.

The Watts riots occurred in August 1965.

In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. This was the same month that saw violence and flag desecration at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

On Aug. 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency, ushering in what historians now refer to as "the turbulent Mayaguez years."

Benigno Aquino was assassinated moments after returning to the Philippines on Aug. 21, 1983.

Of course, not everything that happens in August is the stuff of dinnertime conversation at Zbigniew Brzezinski's. The month has also been a time of revolution in popular culture. Indeed, a disquieting if uniquely American art form got its start in August 1922 when a New York station, WEAF, broadcast the first commercial in radio history. (It was for the Queensboro Realty Company of Jackson Heights, Queens, and lasted a full 10 minutes.) Another uniquely American art form -- the fetishization of celebrity death -- found its two greatest subjects in the August passings of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. The Beatles' last concert tour ended in August 1966, and a cherished tradition of even longer stature was lost on Aug. 8, 1988, when the first night game at Wrigley Field in Chicago was played. But August's most pernicious legacy is the ongoing traumatization of American children that began on Aug. 13, 1942, with the Radio City Music Hall premiere of what many 4-year-olds consider the single most frightening film ever made: "Bambi."

WHEN FLESHING OUT CAMPAIGN biographies or responding to queries from Scholastic magazine, politicians invariably note that their hobbies include reading history. But half-thumbed copies of David McCullough's "Truman" notwithstanding, this plainly isn't so. Because if our leaders really were students of history, why would they continue to insist on vacationing in August?

Ronald Reagan, to be fair, insisted on vacationing most every month, so he doesn't merit discussion here. George Bush, on the other hand, brought to the White House a lifelong habit of spending much of August at his summer home in Kennebunkport, Me.; during the invasion of Kuwait, he stubbornly continued to race around in his cigarette boat, and was roundly criticized. Thus, during the next August's Soviet coup, he made a point of flying back to Washington and manifesting Presidential-ish concern. "I'm going to spend a little more time -- maybe quite a bit more time -- in various formal ways that you will see unveiled in staying on top of this situation," he sort of explained. Fortunately, the coup was overturned with quick dispatch, freeing the President for guilt-free golf with Arnold Palmer. Of course, the whole contretemps had been timed to coincide with Mikhail Gorbachev's own August vacation. It's easy to imagine the former Soviet President slapping his forehead and muttering to himself, as gun-toting apparatchiks placed him under house arrest, No, you don't visit your Crimean dacha during the height of coup season. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The current White House appears to take August with as much seriousness as it took the middle-class tax cut. Reports the deputy press secretary, Arthur Jones: "I don't think the President has given much attention to the idea that there's been some < ominous > coincidence in August. His intention is to vacation." Where the President will do that is, at this writing, undecided. "It's going to be someplace where, obviously, he can relax and play golf," says Jones, "and where Chelsea will be entertained and enjoy it as well." Club Med, he confirms, has been ruled out. But no matter where the President goes, Jones insists, "He is going to be prepared to deal with such matters < as inexplicable August bedevilments > ." In fact, Clinton demonstrated his abilities in this regard just last month, when he resolutely cut short a Hawaiian vacation (by 12 hours) in order to see and be seen at the Mississippi flood plain.

Journalists are no luckier with their times off than are world leaders. Indeed, their lore is full of tales of reporters forced to abandon remote fishing holes by the inconsiderate actions of foreign potentates. Serge Schmemann, the Times's Moscow bureau chief, had a trip to Canada cut short by the Soviet coup, which also forced the NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw to cancel a planned break. Dan Rather had fishing expeditions aborted in 1990 and again last year by Hurricane Andrew. Tempting fate, Rather is planning yet another vacation this August. Though he now has Connie Chung to spell him, he jokes that he will nevertheless be "especially nervous" while away from his desk. "Beware the sign of Leo," he intones, as if he were saying, "Courage."

HISTORIANS OFFER NO explanations for the August paradox -- at least the one this reporter contacted didn't. "I haven't any deep thoughts about it offhand," Arthur Schlesinger Jr. confessed, despite having lived through 75 Augusts -- and having written a book entitled "The Cycles of American History" to boot. Perhaps a 20th-century scholar can't make out what would have been all too clear to any leading thinker of the Dark Ages: August must be cursed.

Or maybe one or more of these equally well-considered theories will make sense: So many bad things happen in August because August is too hot and most of the good summer movies have already been released. It's a statistically proven fact that tempers flare in hot weather -- according to F.B.I. figures, August and July invariably lead the year in incidents of violent crime -- and the only refuge for many is "Weekend at Bernie's II." Perhaps the heat and bad movies got to Saddam Hussein in much the same way they get to civilian larcenists and aggravated assaulters. Hot or not, the weather in August is better for invasion-launching and coup-hatching than is the weather in, say, January or February. Touted by Dan Rather, among others, this, too, is a sound explanation, though it betrays a cultural bias running through this article, applying as it does only to the Northern Hemisphere. So many bad things happen in August because people's guards are down. Gorbachev learned this lesson. The cunning troublemaker will strike when the target is preoccupied with deterring weekend house guests. So many bad things happen in August because shrinks are away on vacation. This well-known exodus may account for a certain added tetchiness in the aisles of Fairway, the Upper West Side fruit-and-vegetable bazaar, but is less reliable as an explanation for "acting out" by world leaders, most of whom are not in analysis, according to James Chace, the editor of World Policy Journal and a professor at Bard College. He adds: "I can't think of anything worse for a world leader than being in analysis. You either lead or don't lead. But if you start thinking about it. . . ." August is an unfortunate month astrologically. Michael Lutin, who writes an astrology column for Vanity Fair, contends that as the sun moves into Leo each year, people generally become more assertive -- a dangerous tendency in a species not known for selflessness. This influence is said to be doubly explosive when combined with, say, a "Uranus-Neptune conjunction," like the one we have been laboring under since Saddam invaded Kuwait. The tragic events leading to World War II can be similarly blamed on a "Saturn-Pluto square." So many bad things happen in August because that's the way the little men who live deep below the earth's crust and control our thoughts like it. Overheard on a sidewalk near the corner of West 103d Street and Broadway, this theory is offered in the spirit of inclusiveness. So many bad things happen in August because so many bad things happen every month. Claiming that a noteworthy amount of them occur in August is like claiming that a noteworthy amount of minutes occur in the third quarter of a football game. As it happens, a survey of the randomly chosen months of April and November, which was intended to "prove" August's paramount position with regard to convulsive news events, instead led to the discovery that other months enjoy equally impressive catalogues of debacle. Aprils past have seen America's entry into World War I, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the Bay of Pigs expedition, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and last year's riots in Los Angeles, among many other mishaps. November can boast of Russia's October Revolution (November by our calendar), the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis and the revelation of the Iran-contra affair. And April and November only have 30 days.

Oh well, you've read this far.

ARE WE NOW heading into a fourth consecutive August of bloodshed, turmoil and unhappy anchormen? James Chace's best guess for a potential August catastrophe is a new Serbo-Croatian war. Joan Quigley, the San Francisco woman who cast astrological charts for the Ronald Reagans, predicts an especially disastrous August sometime before the end of the century -- although, Hil- lary Rodham Clinton-like, she declines to reveal any specifics just yet. That would be "a little dangerous," she avers. One frightening certainty: this August, the Mets will be playing 15 home games.

One can only hope that President Clinton's vacation won't be as troubled as were his predecessor's. "Please, please understand," President Bush begged as he tried to brush away reporters who were dogging his golf game the day after the Soviet coup collapsed, "we've been through an awful lot here" -- no doubt the most heartfelt statement of his Administration.

Oh, and by the way: scientists at the International Astronomical Union last year issued a warning that there is a "small but nonnegligible chance" that a newly discovered comet might collide with the earth in the 22d century -- not in April, not in November, but in August 2126. The 14th, to be precise.