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April 3, 2006
Daylight Saving Time Sucks
Yesterday morning I went through that strange ritual of setting my clocks ahead. I have many clocks: at least two in every room except the bathroom (just one in there, but you can see it from the bathtub), plus a clock in the basement and one of the back porch. Typically when Daylight Saving Time rolls around or goes away, I adjust all my clocks BEFORE I go to bed, but I was suffering from a cold Saturday night, went to bed early and so forgot. I hacked, coughed, sneezed, snorted, tossed and turned in the darkness; when I awoke fully to glorious daylight, I glanced at the clock and saw that it was only 6:57 a.m. I felt a moment of satisfaction when I realized that it was early enough that I didn't need to get up, that I could luxuriate in my warm bed a while longer--until I remembered that DST had started and a full hour had been lost during the night.
OK, I know that within a given time zone, places in the east are, relative to actual solar time, earlier than places in the west. I'm not at all in favor of every major city figuring out exactly when noon is, then setting its clocks to be precisely accurate in terms of that. I don't mind time zones--I can live with the fact that Detroit and New York are on the same clock, even though they're more than 600 miles apart and on opposite sides of the Eastern Time Zone. (There are repeated announcements in the Detroit Airport informing you that it's in the Eastern Time Zone--apparently a lot of people think it's in Central.)
But once we accept that the sun moves around the earth in 24 hours and mark that movement in 24 slices, why screw with the system by having everyone Spring Forward and Fall Back? I don't understand why it makes life better to decree that for almost seven months out of the year a particular point in the progress of a day is 9 a.m. when that same point is 8 a.m. for the five or so months remaining. Most people have trouble getting up in the morning, so what good does it do to make them wake up earlier? Why can't we just say that what we call 8 a.m. shall remain 8 a.m., and start our day later or earlier, as convenience dictates? (I vote later: I heartily applaud those schools that have done away with 8 a.m. classes, and wish my institution would do the same.) Why do I have to move all my clocks ahead in April and back in October?
In the 18th century, dinner was generally served in the afternoon, so that it could be prepared, eaten and cleaned up after by natural light. Candles and lamp oil being very expensive, it was a real status symbol to eat dinner late enough that you had to use artificial light in order to see your meal and your companions (root pan, bread; prefix com, with; the word originally meant "the ones you eat bread with")--and imagine the expense involved in providing candles for the help to wash the dishes by! One justification for DST is that it saves energy in that more things can be done by natural light, but given how much people drive, how many people work in buildings without much natural light, and how much people use electronic equipment throughout their day, I doubt DST saves much energy, if any.
I once checked out a book from the university library called Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, kept it for two or three semesters, then returned it unread. I plan on doing something similar with Seize the Day: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau. I learned this from reading the dust jackets and on-line summaries of the two books: DST has little to do with agriculture (farmers generally resent it) and plenty to do with military and industry. It is the dumbest idea Benjamin Franklin (whose other inventions include the fire department, bi-focals and, of course, the Franklin stove) ever had, and a strange custom we should get rid of.
Posted by holly at April 3, 2006 9:43 AM
Right ON, Holly!! This is the time of year that I miss Arizona the most. When I lived there I positively reveled in not messing with my clocks.
I hope you don’t mind a very self-indulgent comment but this topic touches on something I’m working on myself. Unfortunately, what I have been doing is awfully abstract (maybe that’s code for ‘boring’). You cited books here that suggest that DST was instituted for the convenience of industry and the military. That would probably be a more concrete (less boring?) way of putting a project I’m working on, which is to understand Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. In the English-speaking academic world, Lefebvre is better known for his theory of space but even in The Production of Space he was pretty adamant that space and time have to the thought of together. He uses the notion of ‘rhythms’ to try to account for the material, sensible world in a way that does not suspend movement or change – the way, say, statistics does by taking static ‘snapshots’ of the world and then stringing them together to make a picture of change.
Rhythms can be cyclical – as most organic rhythms are, such as those of the body or the tides – or linear, such as the rhythms of the industrial production process. (I might be wrong but I think Lefebvre takes this distinction between cyclical and linear time from Nietzsche. Lefebvre tries to give it a more concrete foundation by thinking about time in terms of rhythms). For Lefebvre, linear rhythms come to dominate organic rhythms through industrialism, urbanism and capitalism; that is, the demands of a technocratically ordered world dominate the intimate and organic world of the body. He discusses this in terms of ‘dressage’. E. P. Thompson makes a very similar argument in ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ (my books are still all akimbo so I can’t provide a proper citation; the essay is reprinted in his Customs in Common) where he provides an historical account of changes in the measurement of time – jeez, I am boring, why didn’t I just say ‘the clock’? – as industrialism proceeded in England. For Thompson, the more precise measurement of hours, minutes and seconds was driven by the need to control (discipline) the industrial workers newly arrived in the cities after losing access to land in the industrial revolution. The work rhythms of the countryside were demanding but more under the control of the communities that lived there; to keep the machines running constantly, workers had to be more closely regulated and the clock was the main tool for doing this.
An overly long comment – I know I ought to just put this on my own blog, sorry – can’t be made too much worse by one more book citation: Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde. DST makes no appearance in the index. Indeed, you get a flavour of the book from the d’s: Dasein; death; death drive; DeBord, Guy; decline; decision; decisionism; deconstruction; Deleuze, Gilles; Della Volpe, Galvano; democracy; Derrida, Jacques; Descarte, René; desire; destiny; development; diachrony; dialectic…etc. The book is much less postmodernist than such a list of authorities might suggest. It’s not exactly a rollicking page-turner but it is pretty provocative – and yeah, I know, I should use my own space to explain why.
Hey, Spike--I'm thrilled to have the long, thoughtful comment on my blog. No apologies necessary on your part, whereas gratitude is necessary on mine! Thanks for taking the time to add such depth to my own posting.
Hey Holly--my pleasure and I will let you know when I manage to continue the conversation in sin titulo. By the way, I hope you're feeling better.
Fascinating, Spike. And Holly, your natural rhythms really are being screwed with. Part of the problem is the regulation of time to suit the needs of the machine, but also we're a species that evolved in the tropics.
I live in Hawaii at 19 degrees latitude, where the seasonal variation between the longest and shortest days is only 3 1/2 hours and where we don't have Daylight Savings time. I'm up between six and seven and in bed between ten and eleven, and I don't even have to look at the clock to know when it's time to get up and time to go to bed. Also it's very bright in the day and very dark at night, which helps to regulate the circadian rhythms which are natural to us humans.
I do enjoy long summer evenings when I'm on the Mainland, but I do get this strange limbo-like feeling of not being quite awake.
Hattie--your schedule sounds easy, sensible and healthy. In my younger days--especially my late 20s/ early 30s--I liked to stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. and still until ten. Now I like to go to bed--like you--around 10 or 11, but I like to get up around 8--I like a lot of sleep when I can get it, especially since I sometimes have trouble with insomnia. I'm really lucky to have a life where I don't have to set an alarm clock most days--I just get up when I wake up.
Please add me to the DST-sucks petition. Hattie is so right when she writes: “your natural rhythms really are being screwed with” - so many Americans have sleep problems as it is – why add more duress to our bodies? A revolution against DST is long overdue.
Thanks for letting me know you share my feelings, Frankengirl. Since I do occasionally meet people who, for whatever reason, LOVE DST, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who doesn't.