Eugene Coyle wrote:
The Financial Times, I;m told (haven't been able to find it) reports
that Venezuela is going to the six hour day of work.
Can someone tell us about that?
Gene Coyle
For what it's worth:
NY Times, August 23, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Clock Plot
By GAIL COLLINS
This week, The Times reported that President Hugo Chávez is planning to
move Venezuela’s clocks ahead by half an hour. The story created one of
those wonderful moments of newspaper community, as readers around the
nation suddenly shared an identical thought:
Say what?
Chávez unveiled his plans on his regular Sunday television show, in what
several other news reports referred to as a “rambling” address. Reaction
was swift, with many people recalling the scene in Woody Allen’s
“Bananas” when a revolutionary hero becomes president of a Latin
American country and announces that from now on, “underwear will be worn
on the outside.”
The other popular comment was that Americans are in no position to make
fun of countries whose leaders make incoherent speeches.
Chávez has always been strong on the grand leftist gesture. (Remember
the day that he called George W. Bush “the devil” at the United
Nations?) But it’s hard to quite grasp the populist appeal of having to
use a calculator to figure out when the next plane arrives from Bogotá.
In his speech, Chávez connected the time change to his plan to reduce
the Venezuelan work day in 2008. His administration believes that:
1) Cutting everyone’s work day to six hours will increase national
productivity; and 2) That if you change 7 a.m. to 6:30, it will create a
“metabolic effect, where the human brain is conditioned by sunlight.”
Now I know all this sounds extremely silly, but in the name of fairness,
remember that:
1) You live in a country where the administration believes that cutting
taxes for the heirs to billion-dollar estates will lead to increased
prosperity for unemployed steel workers.
2) Every year, most Americans spring forward and fall back so that the
Sun God will send extra rays to we who honor him with the ceremony of
the changing of the clocks.
3) So far, Hugo Chávez hasn’t invaded anybody.
Inquiring minds still want to know about that half-hour. The Venezuelan
science minister says the government wants to return the country to the
system it used before 1965.
When it was changed. For convenience.
Perhaps President Chávez just isn’t a clock-watching kind of guy. His
weekly TV program is six hours of him talking, which is an extremely
long time to ramble on unless you’re Fidel Castro or an American sports
commentator.
But what if there’s a trend under way here? The list of countries who
use the half-hour system does not inspire much confidence. There’s
Burma. And Afghanistan. And then there’s Nepal. When the countries
around it are at 3 p.m., Nepal believes it to be 3:45. This may have
something to do with the altitude.
Newfoundland is on the half-hour system, defying the rest of Canada to
do anything about it. The reason, as Premier Danny Williams once
explained, is that Newfoundlanders “like to be different.” Their country
is mainly about cod — very important, historically speaking, but not
frequently in the headlines these days.
So people there like a little attention. They like having a Newfoundland
Time Zone. They like the fact that the national broadcasters always have
to say: “Stay tuned for the news on the hour. On the half-hour in
Newfoundland.”
We may be on to something here. How many countries do you think would
feel better about the world if they just got mentioned once in a while?
Probably won’t work for Afghanistan at this point, but we could try
getting the networks to say things like: “News is up next, and let’s
hope it’s a nice day in Surinam.”
Sooner or later, somebody in the White House will notice that the one
other country whose clocks are running to the tune of a different
drummer is Iran. Chávez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are
extremely cozy, always pinning medals on one another and sending
anti-Bush jokes back and forth. At this very minute, Vice President Dick
Cheney is somewhere in his basement, working up a new theory about the
Evil Axis of Half Hours.
Let’s just not go there. Riordan Roett, the director of the Western
Hemisphere studies program at Johns Hopkins University, says that the
fact that the president of Venezuela announces something does not
necessarily mean it’s a done deal. “See if Chávez repeats it,” he
advised. “If it’s just a one-time thing, the rational people who are
still in the government will just ignore it.”
If only we had a similar system in the United States, imagine all the
things we might have avoided over the last six years.
