“The family asks that in honor of (name withheld) that you write your Congressman and ask for the repeal of Income Tax and Day Light Savings Time.”
-- From a recent Washington Post obituary
One of 2021’s most surprising political stories was the revolt over Daylight Savings Time. While ordinarily a simple, administrative gesture moving sunlight hours to later in the day when workers and families might enjoy them, Daylight Savings Time in 2021 triggered an insurgency from the far right, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly-elected, QAnon-supporter from pre-Holocene Georgia, and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a champion of the Constitutional vision of three branches of government -- Congress, Smith, and Wesson.
The first signs of the battle to come were seen at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida late last February. “This is how our freedoms disappear,” said Representative Boebert during a deeply personal speech laying out her core beliefs of unceasing, undiluted anger. “Biden and his antifa socialist friends start out with little infringements, like moving the clock back and forth, or giving your package a tracking number at the Post Office, or using your posts on Parler to follow you through the Capitol while you’re shooting bear spray at cops. Before you know it, they’re silencing you when you shout there’s fire in a crowded theater – even though other people in that very theater have heard that there might be such a fire because you told them it seemed likely. This is not about an extra hour of sun, or whatever the Fake News says. It’s about freedom,” Representative Boebert says, her eyes bright with frenzied enthusiasm as she embraced a gilded statue of Donald Trump wearing a variant of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders outfit.
Representative Greene was just as emphatic. “The deep state has decided to set everybody’s clock back every Spring, regardless of whether or not they have the right to do so. The nanny-state doesn’t care if it still light outside when your numerous, identical-looking kids have to go to bed, or if it’s dark as night when it’s time to let the dog out in the morning before not going to the job you don’t have anymore because China sent us a virus they made in a lab. It’s even more oppressive than wearing a mask to save your life. How long do we have to endure these attempts to deny real Americans our basic freedoms? If we can’t even put an end to this, how will we ever we get to the truth about Satanic child-molesters in the basements of pizza joints?”
The two legislators returned to Washington and formed a Free Time Now! Caucus and went to the House floor with their complaint. “Daylight Savings Time does not appear in our Constitution,” Greene argued. “The truth the socialists are trying to hide is there was no national time standard until 1882. Up until then, each municipality had the right and the duty to establish its own time standard, based on when the sun was directly overhead, the way God intended it and our theocratically-obsessed Founding Fathers affirmed through omission. In fact, historians say a person traveling from one coast to the other in the middle of the nineteenth century would encounter as many as twenty different time standards on their journey, but that did not prevent America from having a Golden Era, including a civil war in which 600,000 people died, an epidemic of racist vigilante violence, the growth of economy-choking monopolistic Trusts, and the impoverishment of the nation’s small farmers at the hands of Eastern banks and railroad interests. It’s a vivid reminder America was once great, and is now confronted with a pandemic of government overreach. You can argue facts all you like, but here’s a fact – I’m mad as hell!”
After making their case on such familiar outlets as Parler, Rumble, Newsmaxx, and Russian state television, the two advocates quickly amassed a loyal following of “Time Choosers,” a ragtag bunch drawn from such groups as Three Percenters (who oppose fat-free milk), Elks Club competitor The Oath Keepers, sidewalk dance team the Boogaloo Boys, LGBTQ pride allies The Proud Boys (and their more woke variant, the Proud Cis-Boys), and several people who claimed to be Q him- or herself (“And, just like the letter Q, I have the tail to prove it,” claimed one).
The Time Choosers then shocked the nation when an angry mob of them appeared at the Gaithersburg, Maryland headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at 2 AM on Sunday morning, March 14 to stop the switch to Daylight Savings Time from happening.
Given the late hour and the belief that a crowd would never desecrate a place as sacred, or bother with a facility as boring, as NIST, security was unprepared for what ensued. Storming the front door and overwhelming the security guard as he watched television and ate an egg salad sandwich, the mob tore through the building, searching for the atomic clock that maintains the world’s “official” time so they could prevent it from being reset. But once they had broken into the room where the clock was kept, there was confusion. Some exclaimed irately the clock did not look like a clock at all. “It looks like some kind of a gizmo in an OK, Go video,” complained one rioter. Another protested he could not find “the little windy thing” on the side of the clock that moved its hands, while others searched in vain for “the button you press for five seconds before the dial stars blinking.” A member of the West Virginia State Legislature, who was only there as a peaceful citizen-journalist to memorialize the event, argued in favor of “smashing the fucking thing to bits.” But others in the mob reported it contained radioactive cesium, which was, according to one participant, “one of the two most dangerous elements, along with desistium.” Another noted cesium had been replaced with the element ytterbium for greater clock accuracy. “This proves it’s all completely bogus!” one of the patriots said, “since there’s obviously no such word as ytterbium! It might as well be upsidaisium!” The rioters then disbursed, but not before chopping down the famous apple tree in NIST’s courtyard, one grown from a cutting of Newton’s original apple tree. “Gravity is a theory, man,” one freedom fighter noted, “just another form of tyranny.” “I’m mad as hell,” said another.
The Free Time Now Caucus then brought a stunning maneuver to the House floor. Speaker Pelosi had announced that the House would resume session at 10:00 AM the next day, and Boebert and Greene were on the floor and ready when the House was gaveled into order. They immediately rose to announce the rules of the House had been broken. Insofar as they had “made the deeply personal choice not to avail themselves” of daylight savings time, they held it was really 9:00 AM, not 10:00 AM, for them and their fellow Free Timers, and asked that calling the House to order be deferred for an hour. When they were ruled out of order, they walked dramatically off the House floor and filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court claiming their rights had been abridged by the Chair’s failure to ask them what time they wanted it to be.
A three-judge panel ruled against them, but the Caucus petitioned the Supreme Court for review. The Supreme Court surprised many with a 7-2 decision against the petitioners. Their petition was accepted by Justices Samuel Alito (“I’m mad as hell,” the sourpuss jurist remarked) and Clarence Thomas (“Virginia liked it, so I’m good with it”). The reasoning among the majority varied. “Don’t bother me with this stuff. I’m busy, trying to guarantee every woman who copulates be forced to carry any and all unintended reproductive products to completion, even if against their will,” said Justice Comey Barrett in her concurring statement. “Wish you well, but I’m trying to preserve the little dignity have left,” argued Justice Kavanaugh. “I didn’t think I was a liberal until this morning,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts.
And so, Daylight Savings Time was preserved, at least for now. Yet the signs of revolt are everywhere. “Ask Me What Time It Is” T-shirts, ballcaps, and Kevlar vests can be seen across rural America. Local city councils and other governing bodies have ordered the clocks in their colorful town squares be preserved on Standard Time. Senator Rand Paul has taken to wearing two watches “to demonstrate his commitment to the ‘time diversity’ inherent in our Constitution.” The movement adopted rock band Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” as an anthem, although a radical minority favored the same group’s “25 or 6 to 4,” and one rogue member’s suggestion of The Jive Five’s classic “What Time Is It?” was hooted down.
And rallies have sprung up around the country, although there is always an element of confusion as to when they start. But they are surely all as mad as hell.
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