A friend gave me a Seth Thomas clock (circa 1870s) otherwise destined for the dump. I couldn’t resist those intricate brass gears and levers and flywheels, that Roman Numeral clock face, the weights, the bronze pendulum, the Cathedral gong coil and hammer all neatly housed in a cozy mahogany cabinet with two-paned windows.

There was no question about it—the clock had run out on this clock.  The hands dangled listlessly from the center spindle. The gears were jammed, the floral design flaked off and chipped, the pendulum and weights detached.  I lifted and released the hammer onto the gong coil, expecting to hear a solemn, resonant chime. It sounded cartoonish. On the cabinet panel, the words “Warranted Good” and “Instructions for setting the clock running and keeping it in order” were just about rubbed out.  

In its day, this clock took time seriously.  Dependable, but it required attention. Every eight days, the owner was required to insert a key into two slots on the clock face (one to wind clockwise, the other counter-clockwise) to raise the weights and set in motion a Rube Goldberg set of gears and pins and levers carefully calibrated to set off a strike chime on the hour. If one lived alone and passed into the timeless beyond, this audible metronome of consistency would go silent, like a heartbroken pet without its caretaker.

I perched the clock cabinet on a chair and stared at it, daydreaming about the concept of taking care of time. Would it be impertinent to take it apart and make something else?  Fashion some retro jewelry from the gears and the pendulum? Remove everything and leave the shadow box?  It seemed a shame to let it go. Had I taken time for granted? It sat there for weeks, looking increasingly forlorn.

Then, while listening to Donald Trump’s latest vitriol and bigotry, I decided: if this clock could no longer measure time, it might serve a new purpose—to measure our times. 

After all, under Trump, the past has been frozen into a sanitized myth of weaponized nostalgia in place of historical reckoning or collective memory. Today, Trump has fetishized the fast food of crisis and paranoia. It’s the deep state. Darker-skinned people. Aliens. Barbarians at the gates. He has torn asunder time-honored mechanisms and institutions built to keep our democracy ticking and provide balance, rhythm, and restraint. He has smashed established norms, dismissed alliances formed over generations, and replaced continuity, deliberation, and accountability with loyalty and sycophancy. Dictators control time. Under Mussolini, it has been said, the trains ran on time. They didn’t. His regime just said they did. Trump lies in real time, all the time.

And the future under Trump? In Toni Morrison’s 1996 Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations she warned us what might happen were we to allow “resignation and testosteronic rationales [to] purloin the future and sentence us to the dead end that endorsed, glamorized, legitimated, commodified violence leads to.”

I got to work. Along the frame of the top window, I stamped George Orwell’s opening line from 1984: “It was a bright cold April day, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” I replaced Roman Numeral XII with XIII and painted the hands MAGA red. I attached a fountain-pen nib to the Cathedral gong coil, representing a spiral of nonsense, and another to a black wire, representing censorship, the rewriting of history, and redaction. 

A red “hot” wire replaces the pendulum rod. The pendulum itself is frozen to the right. I left the faded words on the cabinet panel alone, as if they were a worn-out Bill of Rights, over which I taped Orwell’s doublespeak: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength” as if from a redacted or censored document. There are worm holes in the panel. I left them; they look like bullet-holes. The clock is lit from below by sinister MAGA red lights.   Now it looks like a blend of alarm clock, cuckoo clock, and time bomb.

Sometimes art simply needs to be blunt, political, in your face. These days, I don’t have the patience to wait it out. This clock will not see the landfill anytime soon. It reminds me to pay attention, to take the time to care for our times.

I hope it’s not too late.
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