Yesterday (Saturday) my alarm woke me at 8:40 AM. I got out of bed and brushed my teeth (I learned a long time ago to proceed in that order). Then I hobbled to the kitchen to pour a glass of juice and summon a yogurt from the fridge. After that, I was all set to plop down onto my easy chair and fire up two iPads to watch simultaneously (or schizophrenically) two English Premier League games, Brentford vs. Sunderland and Fulham vs. Crystal Palace. Both screens came on with a still picture of the Emirates Stadium, the home of the champions, Arsenal, who wouldn’t be playing until Sunday. Then the screens began a series of commercials, as I anxiously noticed the clock ticking down to kick-off time. Wanting to know who the commentators (whom we call announcers) would be, I turned on my iPhone to click onto ICDB.TV, which gives such information. As the phone came to life, it announced that the time was 9:01. But the iPads were still issuing forth stupid ads. Where were the games? As ads followed ads (with a ribbon stating “Your event will start shortly” across the bottom of the screens), I frantically wondered if by some chance the league had switched the time to 30 minutes later. I rushed to turn on my MacBook to look up the fixture list (the games) on The Guardian, when I suddenly realized that the games were scheduled—as always on Saturdays—for 10AM Eastern Time.
I had awoken an hour too early on Saturday. The 9AM start is on Sundays.
So, come Sunday (today) I had the alarm clock still set for 8:40AM and was confident that I would be ready in my chair with juice and yogurt for the game between Everton and Manchester United (boo!). Figuring it was time to get up, I switched off the alarm before it could go off, put on my slippers, and grabbed a new watch to wear, which confused me when it read: 10:10. I scrutinized it; it must be an automatic that stopped when I hadn’t worn it. Oh well, I’d set it correctly after I settled down on my chair. But wait—it was a quartz watch, and it should still have been running the correct time if the battery hadn’t died. It was only at that point that I glanced at the electric clock on the night table that I saw with horror that the time wasn’t around 8:30, but indeed after 10. (I later discovered that the battery-powered alarm clock I generally use was wildly off by a couple of hours. I just checked and it’s working right now.) So, I hurried as best I could to turn on the computer to watch the game (it was about an hour gone) and cheered as Everton twice overcame a United lead and tied the game with a wonder goal (by a former Arsenal player) with practically the last kick of the game.
And then finally to be at the right place and right time for the 11:30 kickoff of Arsenal (yay!) vs. Chelsea. (2-1 Arsenal!)
*
Which brings me to the real point of this blog—how two articles in History Today magazine showed me how time now is like time then.
Here is an excerpt from an article on Britons in France during the revolution:
The October 1793 arrest decree targeted ‘all the subjects of the king of Great Britain generally’. Decisions about who to include under this label appear, in practice, to have been made based on place of birth. The result was a blanket official imposition of who could be classed as a ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ individual.Yet most would also object to the reductiveness of being described by reference to birthplace alone, claiming a plural sense of belonging and highlighting how their subsequent lives had become invested in France. . . .
In [some] cases, arrestees would appear to have had scant lasting connection to their purported homelands across the Channel. A young woman named Elisabeth Ezer (or Hezer), a former Paris fashion merchant, protested that she had no links to Britain beyond the happenstance of having been born there: her parents were from Brussels, and they had moved to Birmingham when her father gained work in a manufactory; the family then moved to Paris when she was three. In another case, Geneviève Bissy, who was the daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, also spurned being considered as British, claiming to be ‘so much a foreigner to that country as not to know a word of the English language’. Still others might have personal histories more invested in colonial spaces: Gabriel Pradines, a schoolboy aged 16, was arrested on account of having been born in Grenada at a period when the island was a British colony; but his family was of French extraction and their Grenada connections dated back to its period under French rule.*
And here’s an excerpt from an article entitled “I Went to School in America. I Started My Business in America. I Can’t Stay in America.” published this past week in The New York Times:
I was 17 when the University of Northwestern-St. Paul offered me a scholarship in 2010. When I was 21, Stanford’s M.B.A. program did the same. From there, I went on to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where I learned how financial technology could change millions of lives.
In the years after I finished my degrees, I started a financial-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., backed by American investors, that now serves more than 500,000 customers in the United States. But these days I’m running my American company from abroad: The same country that invested in me won’t let me, or thousands of others like me, return to the United States. With rare exceptions, Tanzanian nationals like myself are barred from entry.
The company I founded, NALA, helps immigrants and businesses in the United States, Britain and Europe send money across borders to build businesses and keep their families afloat. . . .
NALA pays U.S. taxes. Nearly every consequential decision about the company’s future, every board meeting, every fund-raising event, every bet on where we go next, is made on American soil.
That is why what is happening now is so hard to reconcile.
On Jan. 1, a presidential proclamation went into effect, adding Tanzania to a group of 24 countries facing new entry restrictions. The United States stopped issuing the business-visitor visa I relied on, as well as student and exchange visas and other visa types, to these countries. The visa allowed founders like me to fly in to the United States for meetings with investors, customers and partners, and to sit in the boardroom. After the proclamation, anyone with a valid visa could use it until it expired, but it cannot be renewed, and no new one will be issued. Mine ran out on July 10.**
*
Closer to us in time past, here is an excerpt from an article (again in History Today) which discusses Hitler’s plans for a new city called Germania, which was to be the crowning glory of the Third Reich:
As for Germania, Hitler’s obsession with buildings to outdo rival colonial powers was to be its hallmark. A triumphal arch would dwarf its Parisian counterpart and the main north-south and east-west roads were to have been more than 100 metres wide. A massive domed hall next to the Führer’s palace could have accommodated 180,000 people, while a neighbouring square was designed for events attended by a million. On seeing a model of the planned city, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels commented admiringly: ‘Incomparably monumental. The Führer is raising a memorial to himself in stone.’***
I don’t think I need to go any further. I’m sure you can make the appropriate analogy yourself.
*
Unlike Duke Senior in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, who found “[s]ermons in stones, and good in everything,” I think the sermon of the stones of our time will not find “good in everything.”
***
* https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/britons-caught-french-revolution
*** https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/trial-organisation-todt
