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AugustLet's get rid of it.

By David PlotzPosted Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, at 3:59 PM ET

With all due respect to T.S. Eliot, this year's August could give April a run for its money in the cruelest month category, what with the gross weather, transportation meltdowns, and collapses of infrastructure. In 2001, David Plotz assessed August in all its humid misery and suggested that the eighth month would best serve the calendar in an abbreviated form. That article, "August," is reprinted below.

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August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

August is when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Anne Frank was arrested, when the first income tax was collected, when Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe died. Wings and Jefferson Airplane were formed in August. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted in August. (No August, no Sonny and Cher!)

August is the time when thugs and dictators think they can get away with it. World War I started in August 1914. The Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990. August is a popular month for coups and violent crime. Why August? Perhaps the villains assume we'll be too distracted by vacations or humidity to notice.

August is the vast sandy wasteland of American culture. Publishers stop releasing books. Movie theaters are clogged with the egregious action movies that studios wouldn't dare release in June. Television is all reruns (or worse—new episodes of Sex and the City). The sports pages wither into nothingness. Pre-pennant-race baseball—if that can even be called a sport—is all that remains. We have to feign interest in NFL training camps.

Newspapers are thin in August, but not thin enough. They still print ghastly vacation columns: David Broder musing on world peace from his summer home on Lake Michigan? Even Martha Stewart (born Aug. 3) can't think of anything to do in August. Her Martha Stewart Living calendar, usually so sprightly, overflows with ennui. Aug. 14: "If it rains, organize basement." Aug. 16: "Reseed bare patches in lawn." Aug. 27: "Change batteries in smoke and heat detectors."

You can't get a day off from August, because it is the only month without a real holiday. Instead, the other months have shunted onto this weak sister all the lame celebrations they didn't want. Air Conditioning Appreciation Week, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist Week, National Religious Software Week, Carpenter Ant Awareness Week: All these grand American celebrations belong to August. Is it any accident that National Lazy Day, Relaxation Day, Deadwood Day, and Failures Day are commemorated in August?

August is the month of vagueness. October is the 10^th month, March is the third month. What's August—bet you can't remember. Does it have 30 days or 31? You have to recite the rhyme to figure that one out. The great writers of history forget August: It rates three mentions in Bartlett's Quotations, compared with a dozen for December and two dozen for March.

The people with August birthdays are a sorry bunch. Sure, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton* were born in August, but the other presidential Augustans are Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Harrison. Film is represented by Robert Redford and Robert De Niro—but also by John Holmes and Harry Reems. Third-raters populate August: George Hamilton, Danny Bonaduce, Rick Springfield, and Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford were born then. August gave us Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. In art, August offers Leni Riefenstahl, Michael Jackson, and Danielle Steele. (To be sure, not everything that happens in August is so terrible. Raoul Wallenberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Herman Melville, and Mae West were born in August. Richard Nixon resigned in August. MTV launched in August. And Jerry Garcia died in August.)

August can't even master the things it is supposed to do well. Despite its slothful reputation, it is not the top vacation month, July is. Nor is August the hottest month (on the East Coast, at least). That crown, too, is July's. August is when the garden starts to wither, and when the long summer days cruelly vanish.

We should rage, rage against the dying of the light. The United States desperately needs August Reform. Purists will insist that we shouldn't tinker with the months, that August should be left alone because it has done workmanlike service for 2,000 years. That's nonsense. Calendars are always fluxing. August itself was a whimsical invention. In 46 B.C., as part of a broad calendar change, Julius Caesar added two days to Sextilis, an old 29-day month. In the reign of his successor, Augustus Caesar, the Senate voted to change Sextilis' name to "Augustus" (as the Senate under Julius Caesar had renamed the month before, "Quintilis," "Julius").

August was created by politics, and it can be undone by politics. For too long, bureaucrats in Washington have been telling you how you must divide up your calendar. But these are your months, and you should be able to do with them what you like. Genuine August Reform will be hard. It will require tough compromises to protect the special interests of September and July. (And who better to sponsor this revolution, incidentally, than Sen. John McCain—birthday Aug. 29?)

Here is a framework for compromise. Cede the first 10 days of August back to July, thus extending holiday revelry for more than a week. September would claim the last 10 days of August, mollifying the folks who can't wait to get back to serious work. Labor Day would come 10 days earlier, the school year would run longer, and the rush of fall activity could get jump-started. August itself will keep 10 days. That is just enough: Every summer we'll be able to toot happily, "Gosh, August went by so quickly this year!"

And as for the 31^st day, it will be designated a holiday independent from any month. It will fall after the 10^th and last day of August, and it will celebrate the end of that most useless month.

Correction, Aug. 23, 2004: This article originally omitted Bill Clinton from the list of presidents born in August. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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David Plotz is Slate's editor. He is the author of Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. You can e-mail him at .

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Only in the US, would you take an entire month of summer and not even provide a single damn long weekend. Seriously, only in the US; in Canada, they even invented a holiday just so's you could have one long weekend in August. And of course, just try to find a European country where anybody is at work or even at home during August.

Of course, that doesn't mean anything actually gets done during August; only the worker bees are held to the tyranny of the 2 week annual vacation. Enough people have the luxury of taking time off more or less at will, and management is so inept at arranging for people to cover for each other, that employees just sit at their desks all month despendently posting sour crap to the Fray.

--gzuckier

(To reply, click here.)

August is cruel. Schoolkids feel school breathing down their necks. Sports stink--baseball's already gone far too long, pre-season football is a joke. You have to wait until fall for the good movies (summer having been "blockbuster" time)...the pool scene has lost its luster. Work doldrums aren't as bad as a February winter, but they're close. Many places want to have their summer festivals in August--nothing like being surrounded by sticky human animals on scorching pavement and listening to a third-tier band from 1978 (with the bassist the only remaining original member).

Yep. August sucks.

--Hellzapoppin

(To reply, click here.)

Just because August has been misused is no reason to blame August. I love August. I love the heat shimmering off the streets, the empty offices and hallways, and the outdoor athletic opportunities. This is when the bike trails are best - for the fair weather riders are inside, enjoying their air conditioning. These days, I cry for the people and the generation that is unable to appreciate the heat - those who sit inside, hiding from the heat as though it were an enemy. I walk through the neighborhoods where 30 years ago children enjoyed the cooler (by comparison) evenings and chased lightening bugs or threw a ball with friends, and I feel sorry for them now - tucked away inside playing video games because they are afraid of the heat. Every neighborhood is as still as death, every person runs from the heat and hides indoors. Last year I lived in a country - much poorer than ours, where the people enjoyed August with an enthusiasm that was refreshing. Most had no air conditioing in their homes, so they took to the streets and cafes in the evenings, and stayed up late. They could sit in a cafe with friends for hours, over one cup of coffee, and enjoy the evening air. As I walked down the street near my home, I often hear peels of laughter from children - outside and running around in their yards or along the streets. And then - I would hear the same clack-slam-clack from each garden - as older men played backgammon until 1:00 a.m. These folks might not have had much, but they sure knew how to enjoy August. August gives us time to stop and think, and relax. It is the Sunday before the Monday of school. It is the calm before the post-Labor Day political season. So it doesn't have it's own three day holiday - so what? You can always back your August vacation into Labor Day with little fanfare. Give me 6 weeks of August and cut January in half. I'd be a whole lot happier.

--yerevan2

(To reply, click here.)

Geez, what did Mississippi ever do to David Plotz? I live here, and I take exception to the scorching assertions that nothing ever happens here and that my entire country would be better off if I, along with most of the people I know and love, didn't exist.

Doesn't Plotz know that, in addition to being astonishingly rude to those who've lived their lives here and struggled with dignity and integrity for equal civil rights, it's intellectually lazy to vilify the state with sweeping and dismissive statements like the one above? It's easy for those who live elsewhere to sum up Mississippi with a quick and dirty caricature and saves having to come to grips with any complexities.

Here's the interesting thing: this quick summing up and dismissal of an entire socio-cultural group is exactly the kind of thinking that undergirded segregation. Exclusion of a culturally devalued group is always easier than struggling to understand and value them. In this case it allowed an author to go for an easy laugh, but one whose shallow mean-spiritedness ultimately rings hollow.

--sage marlowe

(To reply, click here.)

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