Time zones, Islam, Capito-Anarchism, the usual
In Tunis, it seems that everyone speaks French, and if they don't speak French, they speak Arabic with accents out of the tenth arrondisement. I, misnamed as I am, do not, so communication could at times be dicey. I understood our cab driver when he told us (en Francais), as he whizzed an inch by the fender of the car stopped in the fast lane (they're all fast lanes), that he was the Schumacher of Tunisia, and was tuned-in enough to pun (in English) that I'd almost rather he be Willie than Michael. (Shoemaker, you see.) But I was much less confident that any understanding was reached when we asked him if he would return to the Bardo Musum at five o'clock. Partly this doubt was due to my confusion over whether our proffered "cinq heures" would lead him to arrive not at 5 p.m. but after five hours, but mostly I was worried that we should have mangled "dix et sept" instead as the twelve-hour clock might be to him nothing but a long-abandoned anachronistic chronometer.
See, I'd been reading Charles Stross's Singularity Sky, and I'd gotten to the bit where Martin Springfield is being held by the secret police for committing a political infraction the nature of which no one will tell him. Stross writes, "Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred [ . . . ]" For some unlikely reason, my mind stretched back to the opening line of Orwell's 1984, which was always an eerie and ominous annoucement to this American reader, the clocks striking thirteen carrying a sense of otherworldly strangeness, plain wrongness, and invoking a hint of triskaidekaphobia. But had I grown up with the twenty-four hour clock, I may not have noticed any peculiarity.
I have no idea when the United Kingdom or the rest of Europe adopted the twenty-four hour clock for civilian time, so I have no idea whether Orwell intended the reference as a frightening anomaly, an allusion to the weird way they do things on the Continent, a symbol of the regimentation of Oceanic society, or an only slightly futuristic bit of realism. Britain, though, has a history of resistance to such government imposed rationalizations. Famously, for a hundred and seventy years it regarded as suspicious popishness. I remember as a child encountering generation-old Punch cartoons lampooning the opposition to decimalization of the Pound, and I think the metric system was rejected for some time as being too closely associated with the French Revolution. My ignorant impression is that the British, or elements of British society at least, look at government-imposed rationalizations as perniciously continental. Then a generation grows up with the new system, and people are incredulous that their elders could ever have been such paranoid, parochial provincials.
Over here in America, we have a civic ethos built on our inalienable right to be paranoid, parochial provincials. We're lucky that the Revolution took place after the UK adopted the Gregorian calendar, or we might have obstinately stuck with the Julian at least until the Red Scare. We still treat applications of the metric system as a Euro-weenification roughly tantamount to letting the UN land black helicopters on our front lawns and force us to listen to Robbie Williams. And though we've since relented, we initially regarded one of the most widespread government-imposed rationalizations as a Wilsonian internationalism as threatening to the American way of life as the League of Nations. I speak of daylight savings.
(Some will argue that the time zone, being legendarily invented by Benjamin Franklin, is thus quintessentially American; but one should note that of those usually called America's Founders, Franklin was the most urbane, the least agrarian, and personally the closest to France's revolutionary vanguard.)
I can get a little cranky on the subject of time zones and daylight savings. On the one hand, I'm as urbane and unagrarian as they come, and I like knowing what time to show up for things without reference to the longitude; Cleveland in particular is blessed with late but not outrageously late summer sunsets. On the other hand, part of me thinks the whole issue constitutes lying about where the sun is -- hell, I might reject even mean solar time if I didn't think analemmas were pretty. And when I see proposals to move Indiana, which is really too far west already for Eastern Standard Time, an hour ahead during the summer, or see that Congress is extending Daylight Savings well into March and November, I remember those early April days when I'd wait for the schoolbus in darkness. And when I go to Chartres at the end of June, and I have to wait until well after eleven at night for them to illuminate the cathedral because Paris believes there's some economic benefit to having the same time Berlin, I wonder whether or not there is some folly there. And then there's the case of Western China, where the face of your watch becomes a stand-in for ethnic resentment and complicity with colonial power:KASHGAR, China -- In this far western outpost, where a Muslim majority lives restively under Chinese rule, you can tell a lot about a man's politics by how he sets his clock.
For the last half-century, China's Communist leaders have required the entire country to mark the hours by Beijing time, even though this far-flung city of veiled women, spice markets and donkey carts should be two, probably three, time zones behind. In Kashgar, in Xinjiang Province, really living by Beijing time would mean getting up in total darkness nearly 365 days a year.
So many local Muslims, defiant and increasingly disaffected, set their watches two hours behind Beijing, a nod both to nature and their separate identity. ''The Chinese want us to follow Beijing time, but most of us are unwilling,'' said a young soda vender named Abduljim, whose timepiece on a recent morning read 7:45, when the official time was 9:45. ''We are Uighurs -- Muslims -- we should follow Xinjiang time, our time, here.''
Time, like almost everything else here in Kashgar, has become suffused with questions of power, control and ethnic divisions -- between the dominant Chinese and the native Muslims, Uighurs who speak a Turkic language and are culturally related to the peoples of nearby Central Asia. And in recent years, those divisions have intensified greatly, as more Chinese move into the region and local Uighurs have fallen on economic hard times.
[ . . . ]
Then there is the issue of the time. Big stores, or those owned by Chinese, mostly quote opening hours in Beijing time, as if it were their umbilical cord to civilization. Those owned by Muslims, which tend to be small businesses, are two hours behind.
''We Chinese go by Beijing time,'' said a bartender named Wang, whose father was sent here to work 20 years ago. ''But the Uighurs do not.''
Of course, nature -- the sunrises and sunsets -- favors the Uighur point of view on this one, and in practice the Chinese here have had to make a thousand little adjustments in order to live formally by Beijing's clock.
Government offices wait until 10 a.m. Beijing time to open and stay open until 7:30 p.m. The state schools don't start until 9:30 a.m. for example, and even with that, some people grumble that in winter it is too dark for kids to go to school.
''Of course, they should start at 7:30 or 8 like everywhere else in China,'' said a Uighur man who gave only his first name, Imamu. ''But they can't do that because of the sun problem. You can't have children riding to school in the dark.''
(Like they do in Cleveland.)
According to today's New York Times, a similar split is cleaving Iran, where the cabinet of President Ahmadinejad has suspended the observation of daylight savings (instead opening schools and government offices an hour earlier, which sort of dilutes the righteousness of the stance). Though this seems to me that it's a clear example of agrarian populism at the expense of the urban elites -- playing to Ahmadinejad's base (with an added tension between the religious, who have to get up an hour before dawn to pray no matter what the clock says, and the secular, who get to sleep in) -- The public welfare minister, Parviz Kazemi, said the government had the country's 20 million farmers in mind when it decided not to move to daylight saving time. "They usually start their work with the daylight, and changing the time does not affect their lives," the daily newspaper Shargh quoted him as saying.
But opponents of the decision have contended that the government has ignored the benefits of the change for 18 million students and others.
-- the government is casting this in terms of conservation, claiming that the energy savings don't merit the disruption. Experts dispute this, saying that not going on daylight savings will "cost the government $3.3 billion in additional energy costs." Of course, when I was in Iran in 2004, gasoline was subsidized at seven cents a liter, and I suspect that energy inefficiency is national policy there; the more energy they are able to waste, the more realistic their claims that their nuclear ambitions are peaceful and in response to a genuine need for electric power might appear.
To fully disclose my bias, I feel a little possessive of Iran's use of daylight savings, as the day I arrived there, the autumnal equinox and the mid-point of the Persian year, was the day they went back onto standard time. No one had told us, or British Airline's schedulers, that this would be the case, and it took a while for us to figure out what was going on. The time displayed on BA's GPS map and the airport's computerized arrivals board was an hour behind what we had expected and what was displayed on the airport's analog clocks. I got into my first argument with my tour group's know-it-all (other know-it-all) after he said we should trust the analog clocks due to the possibility of computer error. Anyway, as London, the origin of our flight, would not go off of daylight savings for another month, we had arrived an hour before we were expected, and we spent a frustrating hour curbside waiting for our tour bus to arrive at the airport.
Returning to my most recent trip, I had a similar experience flying from Tripoli to Tunis; we had been scheduled to depart at 7 and arrive at 7:05, but were surprised to actually land, without delay, at 8:05. Tunisia had just gone on daylight savings, which Libya does not observe, and the people who wrote the schedule again didn't bother to confirm this fact. Of course confirmation may have been difficult; I had been entertained in that incongruous internet cafe in the middle of the Sahara by listening to an eclipse chaser try to browbeat the aggravatingly confused but endearingly bemused Libyan staff into telling her whether or not the country would shift into daylight savings that coming Sunday, as Europe would. But Tripoli is at the far western extreme of both its country and its time zone, and almost a thousand miles from Cairo, whose time zone it shares, and going on daylight savings time in April would mean that people might have to leave for work before the muezzin called.
But the Iranian situation is a bit of a revelation. I am used to groaning when I hear about daylight saving time being extended into early March, as a government imposition, or when I hear about Indiana going onto daylight saving, as a government imposition. But that I groan when I hear that Iran's government is imposing an abolition of daylight savings demonstrates that it's not so much the time saving scheme to which I object as it is the governmental meddling. I suppose I should take another page from Stross's Singularity Sky; the citizens of his future Earth, all staunchly libertarian, buy what little government they feel they need. Perhaps a capito-anarchist solution exists in which each individual purchases his or her time zone from a private contractor. Of course, this would mean that the rich would be able to purchase calendars with extra weekends and in which Spring Break seems to never end, while the poor would get stuck with all the Wednesdays; this may be indistinguishable from our current system. Moreover, time-shifting was a technology that trickled down from rich to poor as the VCR became progressively less expensive, and I know certain individuals who seem to test as spoiled who are able, through the purchase of DVD box sets, to compress what had been previously thought to be entire years, or at least from September until May sweeps, into a single weekend.
See, I'd been reading Charles Stross's Singularity Sky, and I'd gotten to the bit where Martin Springfield is being held by the secret police for committing a political infraction the nature of which no one will tell him. Stross writes, "Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred [ . . . ]" For some unlikely reason, my mind stretched back to the opening line of Orwell's 1984, which was always an eerie and ominous annoucement to this American reader, the clocks striking thirteen carrying a sense of otherworldly strangeness, plain wrongness, and invoking a hint of triskaidekaphobia. But had I grown up with the twenty-four hour clock, I may not have noticed any peculiarity.
I have no idea when the United Kingdom or the rest of Europe adopted the twenty-four hour clock for civilian time, so I have no idea whether Orwell intended the reference as a frightening anomaly, an allusion to the weird way they do things on the Continent, a symbol of the regimentation of Oceanic society, or an only slightly futuristic bit of realism. Britain, though, has a history of resistance to such government imposed rationalizations. Famously, for a hundred and seventy years it regarded as suspicious popishness. I remember as a child encountering generation-old Punch cartoons lampooning the opposition to decimalization of the Pound, and I think the metric system was rejected for some time as being too closely associated with the French Revolution. My ignorant impression is that the British, or elements of British society at least, look at government-imposed rationalizations as perniciously continental. Then a generation grows up with the new system, and people are incredulous that their elders could ever have been such paranoid, parochial provincials.
Over here in America, we have a civic ethos built on our inalienable right to be paranoid, parochial provincials. We're lucky that the Revolution took place after the UK adopted the Gregorian calendar, or we might have obstinately stuck with the Julian at least until the Red Scare. We still treat applications of the metric system as a Euro-weenification roughly tantamount to letting the UN land black helicopters on our front lawns and force us to listen to Robbie Williams. And though we've since relented, we initially regarded one of the most widespread government-imposed rationalizations as a Wilsonian internationalism as threatening to the American way of life as the League of Nations. I speak of daylight savings.
(Some will argue that the time zone, being legendarily invented by Benjamin Franklin, is thus quintessentially American; but one should note that of those usually called America's Founders, Franklin was the most urbane, the least agrarian, and personally the closest to France's revolutionary vanguard.)
I can get a little cranky on the subject of time zones and daylight savings. On the one hand, I'm as urbane and unagrarian as they come, and I like knowing what time to show up for things without reference to the longitude; Cleveland in particular is blessed with late but not outrageously late summer sunsets. On the other hand, part of me thinks the whole issue constitutes lying about where the sun is -- hell, I might reject even mean solar time if I didn't think analemmas were pretty. And when I see proposals to move Indiana, which is really too far west already for Eastern Standard Time, an hour ahead during the summer, or see that Congress is extending Daylight Savings well into March and November, I remember those early April days when I'd wait for the schoolbus in darkness. And when I go to Chartres at the end of June, and I have to wait until well after eleven at night for them to illuminate the cathedral because Paris believes there's some economic benefit to having the same time Berlin, I wonder whether or not there is some folly there. And then there's the case of Western China, where the face of your watch becomes a stand-in for ethnic resentment and complicity with colonial power:KASHGAR, China -- In this far western outpost, where a Muslim majority lives restively under Chinese rule, you can tell a lot about a man's politics by how he sets his clock.
For the last half-century, China's Communist leaders have required the entire country to mark the hours by Beijing time, even though this far-flung city of veiled women, spice markets and donkey carts should be two, probably three, time zones behind. In Kashgar, in Xinjiang Province, really living by Beijing time would mean getting up in total darkness nearly 365 days a year.
So many local Muslims, defiant and increasingly disaffected, set their watches two hours behind Beijing, a nod both to nature and their separate identity. ''The Chinese want us to follow Beijing time, but most of us are unwilling,'' said a young soda vender named Abduljim, whose timepiece on a recent morning read 7:45, when the official time was 9:45. ''We are Uighurs -- Muslims -- we should follow Xinjiang time, our time, here.''
Time, like almost everything else here in Kashgar, has become suffused with questions of power, control and ethnic divisions -- between the dominant Chinese and the native Muslims, Uighurs who speak a Turkic language and are culturally related to the peoples of nearby Central Asia. And in recent years, those divisions have intensified greatly, as more Chinese move into the region and local Uighurs have fallen on economic hard times.
[ . . . ]
Then there is the issue of the time. Big stores, or those owned by Chinese, mostly quote opening hours in Beijing time, as if it were their umbilical cord to civilization. Those owned by Muslims, which tend to be small businesses, are two hours behind.
''We Chinese go by Beijing time,'' said a bartender named Wang, whose father was sent here to work 20 years ago. ''But the Uighurs do not.''
Of course, nature -- the sunrises and sunsets -- favors the Uighur point of view on this one, and in practice the Chinese here have had to make a thousand little adjustments in order to live formally by Beijing's clock.
Government offices wait until 10 a.m. Beijing time to open and stay open until 7:30 p.m. The state schools don't start until 9:30 a.m. for example, and even with that, some people grumble that in winter it is too dark for kids to go to school.
''Of course, they should start at 7:30 or 8 like everywhere else in China,'' said a Uighur man who gave only his first name, Imamu. ''But they can't do that because of the sun problem. You can't have children riding to school in the dark.''
(Like they do in Cleveland.)
According to today's New York Times, a similar split is cleaving Iran, where the cabinet of President Ahmadinejad has suspended the observation of daylight savings (instead opening schools and government offices an hour earlier, which sort of dilutes the righteousness of the stance). Though this seems to me that it's a clear example of agrarian populism at the expense of the urban elites -- playing to Ahmadinejad's base (with an added tension between the religious, who have to get up an hour before dawn to pray no matter what the clock says, and the secular, who get to sleep in) -- The public welfare minister, Parviz Kazemi, said the government had the country's 20 million farmers in mind when it decided not to move to daylight saving time. "They usually start their work with the daylight, and changing the time does not affect their lives," the daily newspaper Shargh quoted him as saying.
But opponents of the decision have contended that the government has ignored the benefits of the change for 18 million students and others.
-- the government is casting this in terms of conservation, claiming that the energy savings don't merit the disruption. Experts dispute this, saying that not going on daylight savings will "cost the government $3.3 billion in additional energy costs." Of course, when I was in Iran in 2004, gasoline was subsidized at seven cents a liter, and I suspect that energy inefficiency is national policy there; the more energy they are able to waste, the more realistic their claims that their nuclear ambitions are peaceful and in response to a genuine need for electric power might appear.
To fully disclose my bias, I feel a little possessive of Iran's use of daylight savings, as the day I arrived there, the autumnal equinox and the mid-point of the Persian year, was the day they went back onto standard time. No one had told us, or British Airline's schedulers, that this would be the case, and it took a while for us to figure out what was going on. The time displayed on BA's GPS map and the airport's computerized arrivals board was an hour behind what we had expected and what was displayed on the airport's analog clocks. I got into my first argument with my tour group's know-it-all (other know-it-all) after he said we should trust the analog clocks due to the possibility of computer error. Anyway, as London, the origin of our flight, would not go off of daylight savings for another month, we had arrived an hour before we were expected, and we spent a frustrating hour curbside waiting for our tour bus to arrive at the airport.
Returning to my most recent trip, I had a similar experience flying from Tripoli to Tunis; we had been scheduled to depart at 7 and arrive at 7:05, but were surprised to actually land, without delay, at 8:05. Tunisia had just gone on daylight savings, which Libya does not observe, and the people who wrote the schedule again didn't bother to confirm this fact. Of course confirmation may have been difficult; I had been entertained in that incongruous internet cafe in the middle of the Sahara by listening to an eclipse chaser try to browbeat the aggravatingly confused but endearingly bemused Libyan staff into telling her whether or not the country would shift into daylight savings that coming Sunday, as Europe would. But Tripoli is at the far western extreme of both its country and its time zone, and almost a thousand miles from Cairo, whose time zone it shares, and going on daylight savings time in April would mean that people might have to leave for work before the muezzin called.
But the Iranian situation is a bit of a revelation. I am used to groaning when I hear about daylight saving time being extended into early March, as a government imposition, or when I hear about Indiana going onto daylight saving, as a government imposition. But that I groan when I hear that Iran's government is imposing an abolition of daylight savings demonstrates that it's not so much the time saving scheme to which I object as it is the governmental meddling. I suppose I should take another page from Stross's Singularity Sky; the citizens of his future Earth, all staunchly libertarian, buy what little government they feel they need. Perhaps a capito-anarchist solution exists in which each individual purchases his or her time zone from a private contractor. Of course, this would mean that the rich would be able to purchase calendars with extra weekends and in which Spring Break seems to never end, while the poor would get stuck with all the Wednesdays; this may be indistinguishable from our current system. Moreover, time-shifting was a technology that trickled down from rich to poor as the VCR became progressively less expensive, and I know certain individuals who seem to test as spoiled who are able, through the purchase of DVD box sets, to compress what had been previously thought to be entire years, or at least from September until May sweeps, into a single weekend.