Sweat bee days can’t be over soon enough

During the third week of August four years ago, we rented a lake cabin. It was a bad summer for “sweat” bees, a weird kind of bee. The bees didn’t sting, but they dive-bombed us from every direction.

We placed a can of tuna fish on a ledge to distract them. The bees swarmed the tuna can and within minutes, every morsel of tuna was devoured.

Some call these the “dog days” of August, but I call them the “sweat bee days.” It’s much more descriptive, because weird stuff always seems to happen these final two weeks before school starts up again.

Kids are burned out on summer and dive-bomb their parents with requests. Adults go a little nuts, too. An anonymous woman caller didn’t like my Saturday column. She left a message informing me I was going to get killed, along with my editors and the entire newspaper. I’m sure she meant “killed” in a metaphorical way, and I understood her anger. It’s sweat bee time.

The weather is always funky, too. In the Inland Northwest, fires blaze. A year ago, Hurricane Katrina was forming off the Bahamas and would decimate New Orleans before the end of sweat bee days.

Sweat bees are attracted to the salt in human perspiration, hence their name. It seems like sweat bee stories often break in August, and journalists swarm the people involved. This year we have John Mark Karr. He says he was present when 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was killed “accidentally” a decade ago. He says it with a half smile as empty as that tuna can.

On Monday morning’s news, an NBC reporter chatted with KHQ anchors here and they exchanged phrases like: “It doesn’t get more exciting than this, does it?” And “This is going to be huge!” Their reporting on the story, compared with cable TV, was restrained.

We have an old Time magazine propping up our computer monitor at home, and on the corner of the cover is a photo of Gary Condit, who was a congressman from California in the sweat bee days of 2001. A 24-year-old intern in his office, Chandra Levy, was missing.

Inside the magazine, a cutline next to a photo of swarming photographers reads: “It’s all Chandra, all the time, as a news-starved press corps stays on the story and dogs Condit. For all the hype, there’s little information about Levy’s disappearance.”

Journalist Connie Chung’s exclusive interview with Condit took place exactly five years ago today; 20 million viewers watched. It was the hottest story of the sweat bee days, because little else in the world seemed urgent.

That same Time magazine with Condit on the cover featured a story on worries about the incredibly shrinking budget surplus. It was down to $160 billion.

An article on anarchists described men and women protesting meetings of world leaders. Some were bombing gas-guzzling SUVs. Most were from the United States, Canada and Europe. Not a Muslim in the bunch.

Condit’s story got blown off cable TV by Sept. 11. After that horrific event, I figured we’d never have a Condit-style story again, because it flourished in a news vacuum. The world was relatively peaceful; there was money in the U.S. bank.

In this post-Sept. 11 world, horrific news surrounds the world. Thousands of children and young people have died in literal and metaphorical ways in the Middle East. The U.S. faces a $260 billion deficit mostly because of the war in Iraq.

Our president said Monday that we’re in Iraq for the long haul. This is ludicrous to me, as is the focused TV media attention on John Mark Karr while the world’s going apocalyptic.

But these are the sweat bee days, and that explains a lot. Can’t wait until they’re over. They’re killing us.