Debate: Daylight Saving Time

By Jake & Glenn 

Daylight Saving Time entered our lives with the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Lyndon Johnson's bloody signature created a formal structure for what had previously been a mish-mash of rules governing time and its passage. In this week's debate, Jake and Glenn evaluate the usefulness of DST. If it's good enough for parts of Indiana, might it be good enough for us all? Only time will tell.

Jake: Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the closest I have ever gotten to traveling back in time, and I do not like it one bit! If I wanted to never be able to forget the past I wouldn't be addicted to Rophynal. In a perfect world, I would not even remember writing this debate.

I refuse to set my clock forward or back. It does not make any sense. In the end your time "evens out," but one still has all of the trauma associated with forced time travel, or as I call it, "time rape." If I wanted to be time raped I would go hang out at a Delorean factory with Kobe Bryant. DST is nothing but an invention by the liberal media in order to keep us disoriented. I say we break every clock that we see in order to escape the tyranny of time and not just DST. We are not slaves! That ended a long time ago.

Glenn: Usually in these debates, we gradually escalate our arguments to the points where Nazism or slavery (America's two greatest enemies) are unleashed. This time my time-dazed opponent has "leapt forward" before I even had a chance to compare Daylight Saving Time deniers to climate change or Holocaust deniers. As a child playing outside in my small town neighborhood, there was nothing better than having sunlight until upwards of 9:00pm during the summer. Similarly, as a full grown man playing outside in my urban neighborhood, there is nothing better than it getting dark at 5:00pm during the fall and winter. I use the extra hour of nighttime to look for people, if you catch my drift. None of this would be possible without DST. DST is better for people than DDT, the synthetic pesticides that we used to spray on children while they played outdoors in the summer. Thank you.

Jake: DST is just another tool of the bourgeoise to keep us disoriented and spending our money on things we don't need like reflectors for our bicycles, rims for our cars and diarrhea-inducing chalupas from Taco Bell for our dinners. They use DST to dissolve the middle class in a similar fashion to the way I use sulfuric acid to melt the flesh of the homeless people I kill. Frankly, I have had it up to here with it! I am by no means a class warrior, but every year when I have to fall back or spring forward, I get one step closer. Sometimes I feel like grabbing my nunchucks and smashing an aristocrat in the coconut, knocking the beluga caviar out of their gullets. Yet, thanks to Daylight Saving Time, I cannot remember where I put my ninja weaponry or even what fucking time it is!

Glenn: The entire point of Daylight Saving Time is to help the proletariat, who still toil in the fields day after day. During the summer they need more daylight to get more "farm work" done. Take it away from them and you might as well unleash Isaac, Malachai and the rest of the Children of the Corn on them. I don't like that movie and I don't like your class consciousness. What I do like is that extra hour we get the first Christian Sunday in November. That evening gives us a chance to live one hour over again. If you ruin a relationship with the love of your life at 1:30am on Saturday night, you'll have an extra hour to "fix" what went wrong the first time. This is similar to the movie 17 Again with Zac Efron, which had a surprising amount of heart in it. Who could be against a system that brings our lives closer to such a wonderful film?

Jake: So because a few sleepy farmers cannot wake up an hour earlier everybody has to suffer? They do not really get an extra hour. It is all smoke and mirrors like a David Copperfield act or chilling with Cheech and Chong in a carnival funhouse. They give you an hour and then take one away later. It's the same hour and it never really existed in the first place. I do not mean to get philosophical, but nothing exists, not even this debate about Daylight Saving Time or Zac Efron. What we should do, if we must have time, is to not spring or fall either way. Let's do what we are all doing in the first place: riding time out as we slowly die while watching the Coach Season 1 DVD. And really, Coach is the only thing that really has existed if you think about it.

Glenn: I'm glad that, like every debate, you have brought this back to Coach. No one here, with the possible exception of Craig T. Nelson's plastic surgeon, is arguing that time doesn't pass or that people don't age. The point of Daylight Saving Time is to adjust that hour for best possible impact. Anyone who makes a living during the summer months (ice cream vendors, life guards, peeping toms) needs that extra hour to make ends meet. Anyone who enjoys the summer months (ice cream purists, swimmers, young women) need that extra hour to enjoy the season that is a reprieve from the hell that is the rest of the year. Even as hard as it is to go without that extra hour of sleep in March when DST begins, it feels so good to get it back in November when we really need it: after staying up for 120 hours straight in celebration of massive Republican gains in Congress.