Who Said August is a Slow News Month?

Oslo bombed. The Euro in crisis. Washington DC consumed by debt crisis - all as we head into the so-called dog days of summer, the alleged slowest news week of the year.

When they roll me out from the nursing home to offer advice to aspiring young journalists, I’ll concentrate all my accumulated experience into a single sentence: “Never plan a vacation for August.”

I learned this lesson the hard way in 1989. I was one of group of friends, all journalists, who rented a beach house together in the third week of August. Those were the olden days before email, cell phones, and the Internet. A couple of days into the vacation, we got word that Hungary had opened its border to the West, allowing the emigration of thousands of visiting East Germans: the first step in a drama that would end with the collapse of the communist regimes of Central Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany.

Good news for humanity, but bad news for our house party, which spent most of its daytime hours in the nearest town, dictating copy by telephone, reading proofs on curly-paged thermal fax paper.

Our house party would have had the same bad luck if we’d vacationed in 1990 (Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). Or 1991 (overthrow of the Soviet Union). Or … well you get the idea.

As I review the pages of my almanac, I realize high summer may well be the single most news-intense SEASON of the year.

Never mind the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 and the dropping of the atomic bombs that ended World War II in August 1945. Looking only at post-1945 events, I see the alleged quiet of the August doldrums interrupted:

in 1966, when the Texas sniper Charles Whitman opened fire from the university bell-tower on August 1, killing 17 and wounding 31 in the first mass shooting spree in American history;

in 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers – confirming his presidential authority – on August 5;

in 1998, when al Qaeda carried out its embassy bombings on August 7, killing 212;

in 1974, when President Richard Nixon resigned on August 8;

in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murragh building in Oklahoma City on August 10;

in 1965, when the first of the terrible American race riots erupted in Watts, California, on August 11;

in 1982, when Mexico defaulted on its debt August 12, triggering the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression;

in 1980, when Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement launched their first strikes on August 14;

again in 1998, when the worst of all the IRA atrocities – the Omagh bombing – killed 29 people and wounded 220 on August 16;

also in 1998, when President Bill Clinton admitted he had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky on August 17;

in 1991, when Communist plotters seized Mikhail Gorbachev in an attempted coup and the Soviet Union was at last dissolved on August 18-19;

in 1993, when the Oslo peace accords were signed on the South Lawn of the White House on August 20;

in 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, crushing the Prague spring;

in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 28;

in 1997,when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash on August 31.

It's simply too dangerous to absent yourself during what is often a literally and tragically explosive month.

So if asked, through what remains of my fading memory and blurry eyes, I’ll croak out: “Listen you whippersnappers, and listen carefully. Always take your holidays in June.”

Originally published in the National Post

Update: It's the Murrah building of course, and it was attacked on April 19, not August 10 as I wrongly stated. An inexcusable, stupid mistake. Shame-faced regrets.