The strange month of August is finally over. Europeans were on vacation, while Americans were busy yelling. Do Americans go weird in August because we have less time off than other western societies? There must be some explanation.

Particularly interesting was the tussle over whether Boston police officers need assault rifles. What kept coming into my mind was a vision of the taciturn District A-1 Captain Bernie O’Rourke trying to keep an AK-47 from banging his thigh as he was chasing a downtown criminal who had just snatched a woman’s purse. Surely his pistol would do.

The FBI’s prediction that Boston would be a likelier terrorist target than LA because its cops weren’t packing automatic combat weapons was a thought I hadn’t considered before. Was this really a possibility? Or was it more like John Ashcroft’s Orange Levels—a scare tactic to keep us in line? Or a testosterone-fuelled fantasy that some grown men are prone to?

I know the FBI has our safety at heart. But now that August has shown us that a remarkable number of our fellow Americans believe they need to carry loaded guns, sometimes concealed, into national parks, bars and even presidential talks, why is the FBI worrying about Pakistani terrorists? Don’t they have enough to do keeping us safe from the fanatics at home?

The health care debate—a better word might be brawl—has been another fascinating process to watch. The woman snarling at a Pennsylvania forum was a throwback to the twisted faces of whites in Selma in the 1960s. One wondered: is this really about health care? Or is it about a Hobbesian group of Americans for whom the final insult was that a black man actually become president?

My personal favorite wasn’t the screamers, but a calm, respectful Georgian named Bob Collier who, the New York Times reported, went out of his way to speak against health care legislation at a public meeting with his congressman. He admitted that he got his news from Rush Limbaugh, and he was afraid of the government rationing health care. He didn’t seem to have taken into account that his employer-sponsored insurance plan had refused to pay for radiation treatments for his wife when she had breast cancer, leaving him with a $63,000 bill. If that wasn’t rationing, I don’t know what is. Luckily, since his wife is 60 years of age, she may survive long enough to become eligible for Medicare. That would be a good thing because if Bob lost or changed his job his wife would be uninsurable. And the New York Times called Bob “reasonable.”

It was perplexing to listen to people in the forums complaining that government-run entities are the worst possible thing since Noah’s Flood. One wonders if they have been put on hold with Mastercard recently. Or maybe they didn’t take an American Airlines flight this summer. Perhaps they don’t have Comcast. They must not have been paying attention when AIG executives and Wall Street wizards did in our economy. Or maybe they didn’t notice that General Motors and Chrysler took perfectly good American products and made them prone to repair and guzzle gas and trimmed them in cheap materials that fell off. Some of these private-sector companies make government look like a well-oiled machine.

Our wonder at the weirdness of August was fueled by looking for evidence of a campaign for mayor and finding none. It’s true that Michael Flaherty complained about a few things. Sam Yoon sent around a picture of himself playing the piano. Mayor Menino actually sounded articulate when in a radio interview he spoke about what Senator Kennedy meant to him. There was a debate scheduled, of course, but then postponed due to Senator Kennedy’s death. Since half the city was gone the last week of August, there would have been few around to hear a debate anyway.

The same day the newspapers reported that Kennedy had died they also described Dick Cheney emerging from his lair to claim that his torture tactics had prevented another attack on America. I guess Pinochet might have said something similar about protecting Chile when he pushed people out of helicopters.

Maybe September will be less weird. We’re hoping for that.