The Digital Clock and the Welfare Bill

Though invented in 1956, it took time for the digital clock to be become a ubiquitous piece of home and office furnishing and thus it took time for it to change the way time was conceived. Time, as Thomas Mann has the character Hans Castorp note in his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, is measured by space: the way space is broken up on a clock, watch (or sundial) tell the viewer what time it is. When time was measured by space, it was more controllable and perhaps less menacing. Perhaps, it was even considered a little arbitrary (with all the physical labor - the winding of watches) and therefore needed not to be invested with undue power.

The digital clock, perhaps, is to blame for some of the current attitudes toward time and for the Welfare Bill of 1996. When time is separated from space and becomes nothing but ominous red numbers on an alarm clock or black numbers menacingly glaring out of a dashboard, it has become a metaphor of sorts. At first the spaces were collapsed. Now, time is no longer earthbound. On the newest cell phones, the time on the phone is kept accurate by a satellite. (Or so I've heard. My ancient Samsung phone dates from 2004.)

With time no longer controlled by say, a railroad conductor with a pocket watch, it has become something to worship. Time, for the most part, (and especially in those most important clocks: alarm and cell phone) has entered the microscopic regions of electronics and also flies through the darkness of outer space. Time, to a certain extent, has become a ghost; something terrible and invisible.

Therefore, since the advent of the digital clock, a neo-Puritanical time-worship has taken over. Recreation is regarded with more and more suspicion by the get-ahead classes. Work weeks have gotten longer for white collar employees. Productively trying to stay ahead of the
time-ghost is the order of the day. (Why the middling classes were the first to intuit something had changed, I cannot explain.) From a certain point of view this is not necessarily a bad thing. There had to be some sort of correlation between the old three martini lunch and the lethargic movement of capital in the mid-twentieth century. Now that there is a quick lunch or no lunch, money moves faster and more of it is made (sometimes).

But I think there may have been a "moralistic" outcome to the digitization of time: the Welfare Bill of 1996, which overhauled the welfare system. Certainly welfare was imperfect and corrupt, but the heavy rumbling over it in the early 1990s had to come from somewhere else. It was imperfect and corrupt in the 1970s also. Maybe it came from a new fear of time and a tendency to regard those who did not use it productively with suspicion. The Welfare Bill led to the resignations of high-level Department of Health and Human Services functionaries Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane and Wendell Primus (see The Washington Post, 9/17/96). They quit because they believed that the bill was going to be hard on the poor. They quit because they believed their liberal convictions were being compromised. But perhaps they also quit becaused they sensed something else afoot. Who knows, I am idly speculating.

I am certainly not advocating laziness, welfare, wasting time, or three martini lunches. I am simply pointing out that the contemporary obsession with productivity might just becoming from a silly place, from a microchip that makes people forget that those blockish numbers are "metaphor" for a clock with hands which is a "metaphor" for a sundial which is a "metaphor" for the movement of the earth around the sun.

The writers of the 1930s tune "Five O'Clock Whistle" (Gannon, Myron, and Irwin) might have figured this out as regards the old factory whistle. The last verse is as follows:

"You ought to hear what my mommy said / When papa came home and sneaked into bed /And told her he worked till half past two / Cause the five o'clock whistle never blew."

Ha!

(The difference between a digital clock and a factory whistle is that most people did not own several factory whistles. The same goes for the church bell. And besides, everyone knew there was a physical bell-ringer, probably watching a sundial, then ringing the bell.)

As for "Five O'Clock Whistle", I prefer the Don Redman arrangement for Count Basie and His Orchestra, recorded November 19, 1940.