The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
OK, fine, I guess I’ll put all of my thoughts on Daylight Saving Time here, since there’s a really good chance we’re going to adopt Permanent DST in the United States, which seems to me a terrible idea. This is in no particular order and is not structured in any way.
:: It is simply beyond dispute at this point that from a standpoint of human health, maintaining permanent standard time would be the best option. Circadian rhythms are best reflected by standard time, and doing away with the disruptive effects of twice-annual clock changes would also be a good thing. There is simply no questioning the biology on this.
:: Americans worship a lot of things: cars, guns, the military. We also worship sunlight, and oppositely, we generally do not like the night very much. This is a very odd cultural artifact that leads us to doing things like pushing for permanent Daylight Saving, on the basis that “I want to have a little light when I get off work!”
To that I ask, “Why? For what?”
Taking those times in the image above: my work shift starts at 7:30am and ends at 4:00pm. Now, I’m rarely actually out of work at 4pm; there’s usually a bit of wrap-up time, and quite a few days I have to stick around to do a bit of shopping. So, many days it’s close to 4:30pm by the time I actually depart work. At that point, by this time in the graphic above, there’s 1 hour, 12 minutes left of daylight.
My commute is about 15 minutes. Now, by the time I get home, there’s less than an hour of light. I have to bring in anything I’ve purchased, put it away, grab the mail, let the dogs out, greet The Wife if she’s working from home that day, and then change clothes and shower. By the time all of this is done, the available daylight is down to well under 30 minutes.
And there’s something else: note when all this is taking place.
January.
An extra hour, on the back end of my day when that hour is already taken up by post-work rituals, during the coldest time of the year. And I’m to believe this is a benefit? Give me a break.
:: As a matter of public policy, there is a lot to criticize about time in the United States. I’d say the biggest fish we could fry here wouldn’t even be fixing DST, but fixing time zones. A lot of New England should probably be on Atlantic time. Part of the problem with the discourse here is that we have a geographical situation where on January 1, someone in Portland, ME is watching the sun set at 4:15pm. Someone else in Kalamazoo, MI will watch the sun set at 5:21pm…and both cities, which are nearly a thousand miles apart, are in the same time zone. This is absurd.
:: No, I don’t know how we fix the time zone issue. Smaller time zones, separated by half an hour? Maybe. But I’ve always noticed that people I encounter online who really like Daylight Saving Time and who think keeping it year-round is a great idea are people who live in the eastern reaches of their particular time zone, making sunset earlier for them than most others. I get that concern, really.
:: The strange argument I keep hearing is along the lines of “Now you’d have more daylight to spend with your kids!” and “Now you’ll have an hour to enjoy your day!” Where did we get the idea that you can’t do any of those things if it’s not light out? Where did we get the idea that the only fun and enjoyment we can have in life can only take place in sunlight? Are we all coming home in utter darkness to sit, lonely and dejected, staring at a wall by the light of a single guttering tallow candle?
The one genuine, and kind of convincing, answer I’ve ever received to my eternal question of “What the hell do you all need all this LIGHT for at the end of the day, anyway?” came from a local friend who is also a sports coach for young people. In reply to a version of that question, he simply answered, “Playing baseball.” I really can’t argue that particular point. If the park you play in has no lights, and you want to play a lot of baseball, then yes, later summer light is clearly your friend.
But I keep coming back to my original thought: WHAT IS SO DAMNED AWFUL ABOUT NIGHT AND DARKNESS? Seriously, why do we venerate sunlight and hate the night so much in this country? I will never understand the American fixation on sunshine and light. Is the night not beautiful? Is it not wonderful to watch the world at Golden Hour become the world at Blue Hour and then see the night?
:: In the end, fixing the problems created by DST, and by changing the clocks twice a year, is likely more complex than this one simple bill will achieve, and it’s pretty clear to me that this bill will just make things worse. Sadly, we are not living in a time when American government is particularly oriented toward making nuanced policy changes. To the extent that we are able to address policy at all, our approach seems to often boil down to: “We have to do SOMETHING, and THIS is SOMETHING, so therefore we have to do THIS.”
Over the past few days I’ve seen a bunch of Congress people and Senators posting to social media: “Look what we did! We’re fixing an issue! Yay!” And look, I’m never one to get deep in the weeds of “Why are you thinking about X when Y is so much worse,” but…seriously, this was a priority, but fixing just about any other issue was not.
Anyway, I hope this bill dies and if it doesn’t and it becomes law, well, I reserve the right to point back at this post when a whole lot of the country concludes that this was, and is, a bad idea. Sadly, this being America, it won’t be the first time.
Five years ago, I wrote this post about my thoughts on reforming the Supreme Court. My thoughts were intended as an “intro” to the topic, and I got some interesting commentary response. I have been thinking about the topic again, because the Court is an even bigger problem now, to the point that addressing its problems is rapidly becoming essential, once–and if–saner voices take elective power in Washington. I present below the text of that original post of mine, a lot of which I still think might be a good way of approaching things; lifetime tenure needs to go away, but so does the “accidental” nature of which President gets to make a lot of appointments to the Court and which one does not. I also gave a lot of thought to the shenanigans of one Senator Mitch McConnell, who used the power of the Senate to simply deny a Democratic President a Supreme Court appointment. My attempt to address this got some interesting pushback, and I’m open to suggestion, but I still believe that fundamentally the Senate cannot be allowed to do nothing when an active Supreme Court nomination lies before it. Maybe in addition to requiring a vote, and forbidding the Senate to adjourn while a nomination lies before it, we also change the voting procedure so the vote is not one to confirm, but to deny, with a 3/5 majority required to decline a nomination. Also, re-reading my post, I see that I wrote against expanding the Court. I have changed my mind, and frankly, expanding it to 21 would be OK with me.
Before delving into my own thoughts, though, here’s a video on the topic of our corrupt Supreme Court by the always-brilliant Jamelle Bouie. It’s always worth remembering that our government was structured such that each branch’s power would be checked and balanced by the other two, and that the current state of affairs–in which Congress, run by Republicans, has completed abdicated its responsibility to check or balance anything–is a voluntary one, and also a political one. Nothing in the US Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as a de facto royal body that governs by decree, and in fact, there is a great deal of power that the Congress holds over the Court.
Here is my original post from five years ago:
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: how I would fix the Supreme Court. Obviously, I’m not an expert and am quite possibly wrong in many ways, but you have to start SOMEWHERE, right? Here’s my proposed Amendment which would fix the Court, with interspersed commentary.
WHEREAS it is sufficiently clear in 2021 that the current structure of the United States Supreme Court has proven too easily forced by concerted effort by various factions to extended periods of ideological extremity, I propose the following alterations in how the Court is structured.
While I’m sure American conservatives are all kinds of gleeful that they have finally, after years of focus and hard work, managed to create a Court majority that will favor their ideological goals for quite possibly decades to come, I hope most Americans will agree that this is not a desirable state of affairs.
1. The Supreme Court shall consist of 9 seats, with each Seat being held by one Justice.
Why 9? Why not engage in the current liberal wishlist of bumping it up to 13, thus allowing President Biden to name four liberals and immediately grab the balance of the Court back? Well, as much as I’d be on board with that concept in my angrier moments, I’m trying for a more nuanced approach right here. Currently the number of Justices is set by Congress, and there’s no reason to believe that even if the Democrats in Congress pulled this off right now that a future President Hawley (God help us all) and a Republican Congress to come wouldn’t just do the same thing right back, and somehow find a weaselly way to make it worse. Remember, they were quite content to engage in reverse Court-packing by holding the number of Justices at 8 until they could control the nominee. I’d hardwire the 9 into the Constitution at this point. Also, there’s math involved. And why am I referring to nine seats, instead of nine Justices? Read on! We’re getting to the meat of it now:
2. One Seat on the Supreme Court shall be vacated on July 5 of each year numbered Oddly, to be filled by an individual named by the sitting President of the United States, with the nominated Justice taking the vacant Seat upon confirmation by a simple Majority vote in the United States Senate.
3. The Senate shall bring any nomination of a Supreme Court Justice to its Floor for a full Confirmation vote within TWO WEEKS of the President’s official Nomination of said Justice, regardless of whether the Senate has concluded its Business in the course of Advising and Consenting. In the event that the Senate fails to confirm a nominated Justice or Judge on three consecutive Votes, the President shall name an APPOINTED JUSTICE to serve on that Seat until either the swearing-in of the Next Senate or the beginning of that Seat’s next term, whichever comes first. No Nominee for the Court, having been rejected by full vote of the Senate, shall be eligible for Renomination before the beginning of a new Senate.
4. Upon confirmation and installation, a Justice shall hold their Seat for a single term of EIGHTEEN years, at the conclusion of which their Seat shall become again vacant and the sitting President shall name their Successor.
OK. Let’s unpack. What am I getting at here?
First: No more lifetime tenure to the Court for judges. That shit is OVER. No more nominating young judges who will then sit for thirty or forty years or longer. Yes, I’m quite annoyed at the fact that I may well need to adjust my diet to include large amounts of broccoli at this point if I have any hope of seeing a liberal court in my lifetime. Moreover, I don’t think a President, any President, should be able to extend their legacy so far into the future, either through chicanery or by accident of timing or some combination thereof.
It is utterly absurd to me that our 45th President, in his one disastrous term, was able to name three Supreme Court Justice while Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama combined for four in their twenty combined years in office. That 45’s nominations came respectively via Mitch McConnell’s gaming of the rules, Anthony Kennedy’s oddly convenient decision to step down, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing (which gave McConnell a chance to demonstrate just how low his actual commitment was to his previous deeply held principle of not voting on Judicial nominees in election years) isn’t relevant, but we should make sure that this kind of gamesmanship is much harder to pull off, moving forward.
However, while I do favor eliminating lifetime tenure, I do think it’s important to remove the Court as much as we can from the normal cycles of political life in Washington. So I have Justices serving eighteen years: a good long term that gives them political independence that lasts well beyond the reahc of a single Presidential term. As of this writing, eighteen years has spanned four Presidents, two from each party.
Next: Well, since we already know the Mitch McConnells of the world will simply change rules any which way they need to in order to make sure that Republicans are the ones controlling the judiciary (and not just the Supreme Court–look at the ways they changed rules for Federal judicial appointments constantly starting in 1995 and then with each subsequent time they either had the Senate, the Presidency, or both), I suppose we need to hard-wire into the Constitution that the Senate will vote on Supreme Court nominees. As a writer whose work involves occasional villains, I have to admit that McConnell’s simple tactic of just not voting at all on Merrick Garland was some Class-A villainy in its ruthless cunning. So, that shot having been fired once, I’d like to take that one permanently out of circulation.
But! Here’s the thing: since 1981–the last forty years–only 22 of those years, barely more than half the time, has seen a President and the Majority of the United States Senate serving from the same party at the same time. It’s easy to see a Republican Senate saying to a Democratic President: “OK, we’re required to give your nominee an up or down vote, so we’re just gonna keep voting your nominees down and run out the clock that way.”
Well…no dice there, either. Three times in a row and the President gets to fill the seat on the Court temporarily, until either the Seat’s term ends (i.e., the 18 years ends) or a Congressional election happens and a new Senate is seated. Then the whole thing starts up again, and the President can nominate the person he or she chose in the first place. Also, note the required time frame: just two weeks, and the Senate is required to vote. If they can’t figure out if they’re on board with a Justice or not within two weeks, they shouldn’t be in that job, and obviously the possibility of any filibustering has to be neutered right in the Constitution. (But ixnay on the President just nominating the same person three times and then seating that person anyway. We still need to take the Senate’s “advise and consent” thing a little seriously.)
Oh, and I said up above that there’s math involved in picking nine judges? Well, assuming an 18-year-term, if you have more than nine judges, then eventually you get to a situation where multiple seats are opening up in odd years. This system guarantees that every President will make some mark on the Supreme Court, as every President will name at least two Justices. But I don’t want a President naming as many as eight. Of course, you could get around this by extending the term of a Justice’s service to twice the number of years as there are sitting Justices, but then terms start getting uncomfortably long again.
All right. We’ve got our Justices serving one eighteen year term on the Supreme Court. Also note that they’re ineligible to hold any other judicial position in the country after they leave! I’m not sure if that would be a big deal or not, but you wouldn’t get to have a Republican President give us a bitter pill like Brett Kavanaugh and then, if his term happens to end during another Republican presidency, just get re-nominated for another 18 years. Also, the eighteen-year-term refers to the seat on the Court, not the specific Justice holding it. In this respect it would be like the Presidency: the term is four years, but if the sitting President dies and the Vice President becomes President, they don’t get four new years: the Presidential term ends at noon on January 20 every four years, no matter what. Likewise, if a Justice dies fifteen years in, obviously you need a replacement–but you do not get to reset the clock with someone to your ideological liking. No getting around it: eighteen years. That’s it. So we would have this provision:
5. In the event that a Seat on the Supreme Court becomes vacant sooner than the conclusion of its Eighteen Year Term, the sitting President shall name a Justice to that seat, also pending Senate majority confirmation, to serve only the remaining time in that Seat’s term, at the end of which that Justice shall leave the Court.
Now, we well know that for all the “the Courts are apolitical!” talk we hear a lot, the fact is that the Courts and people on them are as much a part of the political life in this country as anyone else. But to help foster as much political independence as we possibly can, I’d add this:
6. No person, having held any portion of a Seat on the United States Supreme Court, shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position upon leaving said Seat, or for any Judicial position in the United States; also, no member of that Justice’s family shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position for a period beginning with their assumption of that Seat until five years after their departure from it.
In short, no “Hey Judge, I’ll make your kid or your wife Ambassador to the Bahamas”, and no “Hey Judge, if you’re looking to retire early, I might need a new Ambassador to Sweden”. Also, once you leave the Supreme Court, that’s it for your legal career. And really, there’s nowhere else to go after that but write your books and be on a corporate board or two, right? No, I’m not worried about what our Justices will do in their now-much-longer retirements. They’ll make out just fine, I suspect.
Of course, if you’re going to limit the terms, then you have to schedule the terms as well. If we just wait for the existing judges to die or retire and then start the eighteen year thing, then you’d have nominations clustering at eighteen year intervals from whenever those passings happen. So, one seat will open on the Supreme Court every two years, during the odd-numbered years to minimize the degree to which federal-level elections play a role in the politics.
7. The transition to this prescription for Supreme Court tenure shall begin on July 5 of the first odd-numbered year following Ratification of this Amendment, with pre-existing terms ending in reverse order of service on the Court.
You have to make your transition some way, right? For my purposes, if I could wave my magic wand and instantly ratify this amendment, then Clarence Thomas would get the boot on July 5, 2023.
As noted above, I’m sure I’ve missed something, and I’m sure there are ways this system would work badly, but…we’ve got to start somewhere, right? And while I yield to no one in my anger at the way Republicans have been gaming our democracy against us (and are still doing so, to what I expect may be our eternal regret, and sooner than we think), I do not want to just shift the gaming-of-the-system to the Democrats just because I’m currently on their side. If there’s one thing the post-2016 era has shown me, it’s that our Constitutional systems are nowhere near as robust as they need to be to withstand the threats confronting them now.
It seems to me that “Cops have the right to kill you if you inconvenience them in any way” is not any kind of fundamental principle for a healthy society. It is, however, an excellent fundamental principle for an authoritarian police state. An awful lot of Americans would do well to give some thought into what kind of country they really want to be living in.
I’ve observed the loudly negative reaction to a Puerto Rican rapper named Bad Bunny being named the performer at halftime of the upcoming Super Bowl with…not amusement, actually. More of a headshaking, “There they go again” kind of thing. The reaction of America’s right to anything cultural is obnoxious because it’s rooted in white supremacy, obviously…but it’s also tiresome and just plain boring.
I do note one specific “talking point” I’ve heard a lot about this: people demanding how can this guy be the halftime show at the Super Bowl?! They’ve never heard of him! Surely the NFL could pick an actual huge star! The fact that Bad Bunny actually is a huge star can’t be explained to these folks. They haven’t heard of him, and that’s all that matters.
That’s the part that actually does amuse me, because what you have here is people being genuinely rocked to their core to realize that popular culture has left them behind. And they do not like this.
Oh, my sweet summer children.
The reason this amuses me is that a lot of these people are my age and generation: It’s Gen Xers, suddenly being confronted with the same reality that our parents had to confront way back when. I remember my parents expressing consternation with some of the heavy metal music I used to listen to during the 1980s. (Music that you can now hear in the aisles of grocery stores, by the way…which is a major reason my general feeling on “the kids and their music these days” is simply, “the kids are alright”.) I doubt either of my parents had any idea who Nirvana was, and the first time either of them heard of Kurt Cobain was when he died.
And I’ll bet the same was true of their parents when they were listening to the Four Aces and Bill Haley and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.
This is one of those “the wheel turns” moments, isn’t it? “How can there be a gigantically huge star playing the Super Bowl and I haven’t heard of them?!”
Sweetie. Sit down. Let me hold your hand.
This is the way it’s going to be. Get used to it.
And you know, that’s fine, isn’t it? Our job can be to wave the flag of the stuff that went before, the stuff of ours that the kids still need to discover. Somebody’s got to be around to explain what hair bands were all about, and why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was so huge, and other stuff, too.
And besides, doesn’t the halftime show usually suck, anyway? That’s what I’m told, every year. I dunno, I never watch the Super Bowl anymore, and even when I did, see the title of this post. Jesus could have made his Second Coming entrance at the Super Bowl halftime show and I’d have missed it, because I was off relieving myself and getting another drink and putting more wing dip and chips on my plate.
(In terms of Bad Bunny himself, I don’t know anything at all about him. I had to confirm his name for this post. I was going to refer to him as Brown Bunny, and that’s not just wrong, it also refers to a notoriously bad movie.)
(This post is adapted from something I wrote on Facebook.)
As much as I like to hope that the United States has not actually entered its period of long decline, it seems like not a week goes by–and sometimes it’s not a day going by–when I’m not offered at least one data point in support of the idea that yes, we are indeed circling the drain and our time as the forefront nation in the world is almost up. Now, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but it’s the manner of our onward march into unseriousness that bothers me.
It seems, sadly, that we are becoming a stupider nation.
Today’s case study is a headline I saw on an article from Facebook, referring to a “controversy” that’s been going on for a few days now, and I have to admit that while I’m pretty thick-skinned when it comes to my ability to see what the MAGA crowd is upset about and just roll my eyes, this one has had some staying power.
Steak-n-Shake blasts Cracker Barrel for erasing its iconic past
Yeah.
If you’ve managed to not keep up with this one, the short version is: Cracker Barrel has changed its logo, simplifying it, making the font a little cleaner, and eliminating what has been a key graphic component: an old dude sitting next to a barrel.
MAGA has absolutely lost its collective SHIT over this.
It was amusing at first, it really was. I mean, what can you do besides laugh when some FOX News weirdo actually tweets out into the world his disappointment, noting that he “gave his life to Jesus in a Cracker Barrel parking lot”. I really don’t know what to do with that other than laugh. I mean, you can give your life to Jesus anywhere, I suppose, but are we really suggesting that the spot where you do it somehow must be preserved forever? Are we really suggesting that there was something about the logo on the sign on the nondescript brown building a stone’s throw from I-whatever that made you uniquely open to THE LORD!!! at that particular moment?
Had this just been another of those momentary-MAGA-freakout-of-the-day moments, it would have been fine. But for some reason, this one had legs, and it’s been in the news and dominating social media for several days now. I’ve noted this with increasing annoyance as more and more prominent MAGA “thinkers” (now there’s a term to deploy loosely) weigh in, almost invariably with some crap about how they’re never eating there again. It’s just typical MAGA crap, complete with wanton misuse of the word “woke”. But again, it’s stuck in the news, which brings me to the headline of the article linked above, where some other restaurant chain decided to enter the fray.
For one thing, let’s just state the obvious: the Steak-n-Shake people see an opportunity to maybe drive some sales by appealing to the MAGA crowd. That’s all that is. But it’s also interesting, in an infuriating way, to dig a little into that headline and what Steak-n-Shake is saying, because they’re accusing Cracker Barrel of betraying its past. Its ‘heritage’.
Let me say that again: They’re accusing Cracker Barrel of betraying its heritage.
That’s where I find myself wanting to press a pillow over my face and scream, because the very idea that Cracker Barrel has a heritage to uphold is ludicrous to the point of being literally insane.
Cracker Barrel was founded in 1969 as a chain of restaurants with a faux-Southern menu, and faux-Southern decor, and right from the get-go they focused exclusively on opening near Interstate exits. Cracker Barrel has never been real. It has never been authentic. It has always been fake. It’s a faked-out joint designed with almost clinical precision to sell the exact same menu in the exact same building on the exact same plates to the exact same clientele by the side of the exact same highway. The whole idea of Cracker Barrel, and places like it, is to serve the exact same dishes with the exact same flavors (which are always somehow simultaneously blandly seasoned and loaded with sodium) so you can drive 1200 miles over two days and eat the exact same food at every stop, without ever having to venture more than a thousand feet off the freeway. This is why all the buildings are identical, and why they are always built to face the freeway. Not the street it’s on, but the freeway at whose exit it sits.
I used to work for one of Cracker Barrel’s big competitors in the Great Lakes region, Bob Evans. Many is the exit where as soon as you reach the traffic light, there’s a Bob Evans on this side, and a Cracker Barrel on the other.
So there is exactly nothing about Cracker Barrel that is the least bit “authentic”. It is about as real as Main Street USA at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom: it’s someone’s carefully-designed and market-tested version of what a maximally inoffensive Southern-inspired restaurant would be like. This is what MAGA is flipping out about: a chain of cookie-cutter restaurants whose existence makes it possible for MAGA to eat white-coded food without ever having to actually enter a town where they might encounter those people. (Who are those people? Well, does it matter, these days?)
Cracker Barrel’s “heritage” is nothing more than a fantasy, and it’s never been anything but.
Cracker Barrel’s sales have been in decline for several years, probably for many reasons, but one thing that just about every company on Earth will do when enduring a lengthy period of sales decline is rebranding, to some degree. Some go overboard, some just tweak it around the edges. Cracker Barrel appears to have done a tweaking-around-the-edges, removing the pictorial element of their signage and updating their font a bit. But this is somehow a betrayal. Were these same weirdos freaked out when KFC ditched “Kentucky” from its name? Do they get upset every time Pepsi changes its cans? I hope not. Pepsi changes it cans more often than some people change their undergarments.
It’s beyond depressing that this kind of thing occupies our national attention in a time when we’re facing all manner of threatening issues, and I suppose I’m not helping by writing this. Right now I’m one more voice in the annoying fugue. I get it. But a larger issue here is that this whole business reveals again the degree to which MAGA’s preferred America is a pure fiction. For years people on my side of the fence have said that they want to turn back the clock, and to an extent they do, but really, they want to turn back the clock to another reality. MAGA pines for an America that never existed. They’ve cooked up this whole false America in their heads, convinced themselves that it was real, and they’ve unleashed upon the rest of us all the righteous anger they can muster because we won’t let them have the thing back that they never had in the first place. I don’t know how to solve that problem, and I fear greatly for the fate of a country where such a large portion of the population lives in utter devotion to a place that is as much a fantasy as the Star Trek future I prefer.
(Aside: As for Cracker Barrel itself? I’ve only eaten at one a few times, and it’s been quite a few years. I checked out a couple times when I was working for Bob Evans, out of curiosity and a need to know what “the competition” was doing. It was fine. The food isn’t terrible at all, it’s just…there. There is absolutely nothing memorable about it, but sometimes that’s fine, and there really is a place for a decent meal after a long day of driving when you decided to squeeze in another hundred miles and now it’s 8:30pm and you’re tired and hungry. What I actually remember most about my visits to Cracker Barrel were the check-back visits by my servers. Each time, when the server would come back to check on us after we had our main orders, they wouldn’t ask “How is everything?” or “Hey, are we doing OK?” or any of the usual questions. I assume they were trained to do this, because it’s so specific, but each time the server would ask, “Does it taste good?” I remember that because I’ve never heard that phrasing from a server, in that situation, in any restaurant.)
