Clockenspiel

Start now!
Okay, no matter where you are, and what time you think it is, while you’re reading this it’s Hammer Time.
No, not M.C. Hammer, - the guy with the harem pants who was secretly funded by the Ritalin Manufacturers of America, but instead, an actual hammer. A hammer with a wooden handle and a metal head to be gripped firmly and brought down like Thor’s Hammer on any and all clocks in the room, the house, the neighborhood.
In my personal time zone where I am writing this right now, the glass and plastic opaque faces of three alarm clocks are in pieces on the floor. In this region, 21 hands, representing seven analog timepieces – hours, minutes, seconds, have been broken off and piled like kindling in the fireplace. In each of three computers, the prying eyes of digital time have been banished from the screen.
I’ve had all I can take and I just can’t take it anymore.
While you’re reading this the moments that you are wasting cannot be catalogued under Eastern Standard or Rocky Mountain or Greenwich Mean or any government controlled time.
This is my time.
I’ve got all the time in the world.
This is my world.
And you are free now - while you read this, to count off the moments on your own. How long have you been reading this now? Sixty seconds? Are you beginning to feel a little skittish? Do you feel the pressure of Big Brother’s time, weighing on you?
Relax. If you are usually bound, which most of you usually are – like the White Rabbit by his Red Queen, know that here and now the Queen is dead.
If last Saturday night you dutifully switched all your clocks one hour forward or two hours back, or stood on your hands or your head, or barked at the moon because that’s what the weatherman said you should do, know that this is a duty free zone.
That sound you hear is not a bomb about to go off, or a race about to begin, or a life about to end. That sound is the ticking of your own heart. You can move to its beat, you know. You don’t need to jump up at the alarm, make a mad dash to fit the train schedule, eat your lunch within the time that other’s prescribe for you, or take your week’s vacation at the same time every year: is there even such a thing as the same time every year?
And God knows you don’t need to save any daylight.
The sad truth Chuckles, is that you can’t save any daylight: never could. It is a ruse, a game, a joke on you my friend. It was originally the Kaiser’s bright idea, don’t you know: a way for the Prussians to put one over on the French. They wanted a little extra time to blow each other into eternity (now that’s my idea of daylight savings time). Daylight Savings was and is an absurdity worthy of Dr. Seuss – like the Butter Battle game. And now, war or not, it is a joke played on you to demonstrate how gullible you are – and always will be.
They move the clock forward, they move the clock backward, and you go right along with it like the life-sized figures that dance under the Glockenspiel on the Munich Rathaus tower.
Today the Kaiser and his descendants are sitting up there in their Dirigible Pilots Men’s Club drawing room on the uppitiest floor of the emptiest building on Wall Street, clinking glasses and having a laugh at your expense.
And do you think for a moment that these Helium-voiced lords abide by the conventions of time that they have you dancing to? Of course not. They are floating on the ether, far above the clouds, eating bonbons and petit fours, drinking absinthe and peering out the window at the peons far below. The faster they make you run, the more time they have to kill.
But at least here, and now – within the white spaces between each word you are free to spend your time any way you choose. You don’t have to spend it all.
I personally prefer to use a stopwatch, letting out only as much time as I need for the things that I love.
My time is my own.
I will not, under any circumstances, bend my time to suit your schedule.
I will not rise a moment earlier or go to bed a moment later.
I refuse to save time, or Leap years, or celebrate any of their fabricated holidays.
I can spare only so much.
And guess what: your time is up.

Wampum's War

I’m not surprised that many residents of Plymouth are convinced that there is a cancer in our ‘body politick’, a malignancy that needs to rooted out, and that only a wholesale change in our form of government will do the trick.
Plymouth’s history is filled with instances of paranoia, of intolerance, and fear mongering.
Like most people who have, at one time or another, been treated unjustly because of how they looked, what language they spoke, or what religion they practiced, given the opportunity the original settlers of this community transitioned quickly from being oppressed, to repressing others.
For decades after the original landing in 1620, it was illegal to bring ‘outsiders’ to Plymouth, or for recently freed servants or even single people to build their own homes, without the knowledge and consent of the local government, and to do so could earn you a time in the stocks, a hefty fine, or even expulsion from the community.
In the latter part of the 17th century residents were forbidden to even ‘entertain’ Quakers, three of whom were actually hung in Boston at the peak of the anti-Friends hysteria.
And when the revolution against England began, there were numerous instances where otherwise upstanding citizens with long, respected histories of service and loyalty to the community, were tarred and feathered, hoisted to the tops of polls, beaten and otherwise abused for expressing the belief that the colonies should retain their allegiance to England.
And of course all this was in addition to the dismissive attitudes, disenfranchising ordinances, and outright injustices experienced by native peoples.
The paranoia and xenophobia of locals came to its dramatic, and somewhat comical climax on March 30, 1741, when Joseph Wampum – a native who then lived in what is now known as Manomet, told churchgoers gathered in Plymouth that day that he had been visited in his home the previous night by eight Spaniards.
He might as well have said that devils had descended from the sky. England was at the time, officially at war with Spain so – despite their philosophical and physical separation from the motherland; Wampum’s words became the spark that ignited the tinder of the community’s fears of all things foreign and unusual.
Bells were rung, and drums sounded to alert the populace, and the militia gathered in full regalia in the town square, awaiting instructions, ready for war. Don’t scratch your head and tickle your chin, trying to coax forth some lost elementary school lesson describing the carnage that followed, for your instincts are correct this time: there was no war.
Despite a century of, often-justified paranoia, the colonists were able to keep their ‘powder dry’. The hardships they had endured had done something more than filled them with fear: it had given them a deep respect for pragmatism and rationality.
They did not immediately launch their boats, or march off in search of a fight.
No one was strung up.
No one was taken off to Clark’s island for interrogation.
And the government and rules that had governed their lives for the last 120 years were not suddenly abandoned, and martial law put in its place.
They waited, watched and, when no confirmation of the Spanish Armada’s approach was received, no smoke seen on the horizon, and no sign of troops descending over the Pine Hills was detected – they unbuckled their swords and went back home and had something warm to eat.
The event itself was known from that day on as, ‘Wampum’s War’.
And that is how I choose to think of the decade of whining, personal attacks, and fear mongering that is coming to a climax now, in present day Plymouth, with the latest call to throw out our historic and – by objective standards, effective form of government.
This is just another Wampum’s War.
If the rumors and whispered innuendos – the alleged ‘talk of the town’ were true, an army of volunteers, board members, and town government employees should already have come screaming over Cole’s Hill, looking for our scalps.
If even a small portion of the dire predictions of the fear mongers had come to pass, Plymouth should already be a smoldering ruin.
And yet, even in these grim economic times, the schools remain intact, the lights are still on, and the Mayflower is still afloat in the harbor.
Still, maybe it is a good thing, this irrational fear. Maybe it is a natural phenomenon.
Perhaps we need to be brought to the brink of disaster every generation or so, so we can look out over the harbor, up into the Pine Hills, and over the State Forest and take note of… the absence of an enemy.
Perhaps Wampum was just giving the colonists what - though they didn’t realize it themselves, they most wanted in their lives – drama! There were many accounts during the first hundred years of the Plymouth colony, of the native inhabitants deliberately lying to locals for effect. Wampum’s warning may have been one of those. On another occasion natives informed the Pilgrims that Edward Winslow had died of fever, while on a mission to Connecticut. When he arrived in good health a few days later, the natives were surprised that the Pilgrims were angry with them for their ‘little lie’. After all, had not the Pilgrim’s joy at seeing Winslow alive, been all the more sweet for their sorrow at his supposed passing?
I believe that the natives realized that feelings like fear and sorrow were the kind of emotional seasoning favored by the ‘English’, and they knew that salty tears bring out the flavors of life that we often take for granted.
Certainly we can now see more clearly – as we consider this momentous change in our historic government, that Plymouth is a community that has been blessed in many ways.
Certainly now, with the cries of those who claim our community is in disarray still reverberating in our ears, we can see that few if any other towns can boast of so many recreational opportunities, so many natural wonders, so rich and authentic a history – and how few of us take advantage of all that this town has to offer.
And certainly now, we can grudgingly admit that despite their lack of perfection as both individuals and administrators, those who have served as members of elected boards and committees in the past 10, 20, even 100 years, have done a remarkable job of preserving our resources. Just look around, for comparison, at the untidy sprawl of the communities that we are supposed to emulate, Braintree, Weymouth, and Taunton.
But the alarm has been sounded, and sounded, and sounded again.
And certain militias have been assembled and waiting in the town square for nearly a decade.
We have to put someone in the stocks, don’t we? We have to burn a witch or two, right?
If, as we have been told time and time again, our demise is imminent and inescapable, we need to root out the infidels amongst us and institute a kind of permanent martial law: government by the fewest, for the loudest!
Then again, considering that there are really no devils on Lincoln Street, maybe we should just unbuckle our swords and go home.