The movie is about a British soldier who gets captured during WWII and is held in a POW camp deep in a hellish jungle. The soldier, played by Alec Guinness, plays it all by the book, and gets tortured for it. After his torture, he is directed to build a bridge.
Here’s where he goes a bit nutty, probably in part because he had just spent weeks in isolation in a hot box.
He takes over commanding his men who are building the bridge, and finds that they are doing a rotten job. They tell him that of course they are doing a rotten job, they don’t want to build a great bridge for the enemy.
Guinness’ character says that what the men need for their morale and their stiff upper lips, etc., is to do a great job on the bridge… Build something they can really be proud of. He’s a charismatic guy, so the men do just that and build a great bridge. For the enemy.
Meanwhile an American soldier is trying to, you know, win the war, so he leads a group to blow up the bridge.
Right at the end of the movie, Guinness’ character discovers the wire leading to the bomb. He tries to stop the bomb, but then he sees the American soldier. That American gets shot and killed trying to make sure the bridge gets blown up.
And then, in one of the great moments of cinema history, something clicked for the British commander. You can see it in his face, and he says, simply, “What have I done?” It dawns on him that he has lost sight of the bigger objective, and became enraptured by the fever of the moment. He gets then gets hit with shrapnel, but somehow rises up, dusts off his hat (very British, to his final moments) and stumbles over and falls on the plunger, blowing up the bridge just as the train goes over it, plunging it into the river.
With that, democracy survives.
One of the most amazing things about the issue of Daylight Saving Time is that is totally nonpartisan. Perhaps the two highest profile politicians who want to get it done are Marco Rubio and Ed Markey. The state legislatures that have passed something include Washington and Oregon, and also Mississippi and Alabama. The Montana legislature is very conservative, and it passed a DST bill sponsored by a Democrat.
That makes it so unquestionably different from basically every other substantial issue.
You’ve probably noticed this, too, but issues that absolutely shouldn’t be political, suddenly are political.
And they all fall into buckets. If I know what you think about a football player taking a knee during a song, I also know what you think about the estate tax. If you think the pullout from Afghanistan was worse than the fact that we went to Afghanistan in the first place, I would predict that you also oppose school mask mandates. And vice versa.
Now, I’m not one to wax poetic about the old days, but one thing about a period really not that long ago was that your views on foreign policy were not really that great of an indicator of your views on local school board policies. There was just a lot more, well, freedom about what you believed.
Others have written about this a lot, but it’s something we all know almost reflexively these days. If you see someone with a MAGA hat on, you will either give that person a salute, or you will back away slowly not making any sudden movements and hoping that the person isn’t armed.
Now I ask you: Name one issue that the science is real crowd has in common with the Trump’s election was stolen crowd. Seriously.
Well, I’ve got one for you: Daylight Saving Time.
I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways of looking at this, but in general I think the Republican Party has three basic groups.
- Chamber of Commerce types, who just want a good business environment, the rule of law, free markets, etc.
- Libertarian types who want low taxes and less government. They’ve always been uneasy with the GOP’s stances on gay marriage, abortion and the like, but they figure the courts will sort all that out, and usually they do.
- Cultural warriors. Some of these are sincere anti-abortion believers, but most are just racists, gun fetishists, fabulists and/or people with serious unresolved daddy issues.
The whole Trump phenomenon was clearly driven by the third group, and was tolerated and cynically taken advantage of by the other two groups.
(This post is not for the third group, but I’m not really worried about them reading this anyway because they don’t really go for reading.)
It’s not hard to rile up that third group and motivate them to action. Give them a little fear — fear of dark skinned people, fear of globalists, fear of “socialism” and especially fear of the Democratic party — and they will buy your red hats, donate money, show up at rallies and wave flags. So many flags.
For it to work, you must also convince them not to believe what they see with their own eyes.
The thing that we’ve seen happen over the last five years or so is that elected Republicans, party leaders, and big money donors have been completely taken over by the circus barkers. We see little snippets of news every so often that they don’t really believe any of the democracy-destroying rhetoric, but they fear that if they say so out loud, the third group will turn on them. That is what happens, too, so it’s a rational idea. Some have said that’s fine and just left. I’m not sure how the ones who stay sleep at night.
What I keep hoping for, perhaps naïvely, is that at some point they will come face-to-face with what they’ve done. They will realize that they are the British Commander who has built a huge, solid, totally functional bridge, and the bridge they’ve built is for the enemies of democracy.
What have I done?
What will be the issue that could prompt this response?
I’m hoping it’s Daylight Saving Time.
After all, DST is an actual governmental issue. The government decides what the clocks say. Right now the clocks are actually killing people.
What I’m hoping is that somehow this issue will be the one that will make them snap out of their Trumpian coma. That they’ll look up and see that they don’t need to oppose Every Single Thing proposed by Democrats. They will see that Democrats are actually Americans who care about their country and want things here to be better.
They will see that Democrats are not actually the enemy.
The true enemies are common enemies. Changing the clock twice a year… that’s an enemy that we can defeat, working together.
Once they have said: What have I done? and fixed DST, then they can go on to face other common enemies.
COVID does not have to be a political issue. The disease, instead of Democrats, could be the enemy that must be defeated. Wearing a mask during the flu epidemic of 1919 was seen as patriotic, and getting the polio vaccine was something everyone did to unify the country.
Climate change? Republican Teddy Roosevelt started the National Parks and Republican Richard Nixon started the EPA. Conserving the environment is a conservative idea.
But we can’t use one of those big topics to be the catalyst. We need to start with something small. Tiny, in fact.
That’s just what Daylight Saving Time could be: The tiny issue that we drop into the test tube that changes everything.
