Guest Commentary
Your time is up
Mack Hall

As we awaken in these dark spring mornings and fumble for the light switch we will want to raise high the green flag of revolution in honor of Al Gore's heated swimming pool.

Resetting our clocks every year, we are told, reduces energy consumption, saves us wheelbarrow loads of money, clears the arteries, purifies one's thoughts, and helps America take a Great Leap Forward or something.

Oh, yeah. Check your electric bill at the end of the month and anticipate paying off the car note with the savings.

If fiddling with the clocks in order to gain or lose an hour is so beneficial to the Republic, why not reset our calendars too? We could flip the pages forward to election day, thus bypassing over a year of reading about Candidate Snorkberger's parking tickets and Candidate Foobah's mistresses, and about the dead body in Candidate Ponsonthwarple's garage.

Imagine, my fellow citizens: we could wake up tomorrow morning and find that we are suddenly in November of 2008. We could visit the polls tomorrow, hold our noses, vote for the candidate who is least like a mucous-oozing invertebrate, and get back to serving humanity as God wants us to, by yakking about American Idol.

Or we could turn the calendar pages backward and make Anna Nicole Smith live again! And restore Brittney Spears' hair! We're saved!

One of the more annoying results of the semi-annual time-change is how it affects home appliances. This morning my refrigerator was very confused and my waterheater was sulky. I've called for a crack squad of computer experts to program a patch into my desk lamp.

Cars are computerized too - what if they don't want to start for an hour?

How does one re-set an hourglass?

How strange that a government can arbitrarily command time. One is reminded of King Canute standing on the shore and ordering the tide to stop. In fairness to Canute, he was simply making a point to his fulsome courtiers. Our Ozymandian ("Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair") Congress does not share Canute's humility, but instead stands "upon this bank and shoal of time" and arbitrarily commands the hours to skip and dance about the space-time continuum, maybe by saying "So let it be written; so let it be done." Then they look at their Swiss watches and say "Yes, it is so; time has changed."

The measurement of time is but a human conceit; the stars in their courses take no notice of my Timex, even though when I push a little button it lights up prettily. The moon wobbles around the earth in an irregular orbit and the earth wobbles around the sun in its own irregular orbit. I forget what the sun wobbles around. The ancients, with no television to watch, observed how stars and the sun and the moon danced in the heavens, correlated these events to the seasons, and made judicious use of their conclusions for the sake of agriculture and work.

Now, after some 6,000 years of human civilization, we want to know what time Grey's Anatomy is coming on.

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville